Torchwood is a television show spin-off from Doctor Who. To date there have been 3 series of the show. The first series was shown on BBC3, the second on BBC2 and the most recent series ran an episode per day for a week on BBC1. The show also runs in the US on BBC America and runs on television and is released on DVD in other countries. The fan base very often overlaps with Doctor Who fans as both shows inhabit the same “Who-niverse” with characters that make appearances in both shows and some plotlines crossing both series.
My first engagement with #Torchwood on Twitter was during the airing of the third season of Torchwood. Because this series had been designed to run as a very tense thriller both my partner and I were very involved in the “event TV” nature of the week – we planned the whole week around seeing each episode in order. To give a sense of the show I've included one of the trailers for Season Three below.
When, near the end of the week, it appeared that probably our favourite character had been killed off we were shocked and my first thought was to tweet something to share my distress. As I tweeted (as subtly I was so as not to give away the spoiler for those awaiting an iPlayer catch up) I noticed that #Torchwood was trending on Twitter and clicked through to see what was being said and found the #Torchwood twitter community... Or at least a lot of chatter around Torchwood taking place as a mixture of both one-off statements of shock and distress, as well as discussion between Tweeters posting regularly to the hashtag.