Canadian producer Sydney Newman, recently made Head of Drama at the BBC, was tasked with creating the show, with heavy contributions from Donald Wilson and C. E. Webber.

At Coal Hill School, teachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright have concerns about pupil Susan Foreman, who has an alien outlook on England.

Kal takes the Doctor back to the tribe and threatens to kill him if he does not make fire; Ian, Barbara and Susan intervene, but the group is imprisoned in a large cave.

[5] Bridget was renamed Suzan/Suzanne Foreman, later changed to Susan, and writer Anthony Coburn made her the Doctor's granddaughter to avoid any possibility of sexual impropriety implicit in having a young girl travelling with an older man; Newman was reluctant about the idea, as he wanted the character to have human naivety.

[16] Tucker held auditions for the roles of Susan and Barbara on 25 June 1963; actresses Christa Bergmann, Anne Castaldini, Maureen Crombie, Heather Fleming, Camilla Hasse, Waveney Lee, Anna Palk and Anneke Wills were all considered for the role of Susan, while Sally Home, Phyllida Law and Penelope Lee were considered for Barbara.

[32] Some of the pre-filmed inserts for the serial, shot at Ealing Studios in September and October 1963,[33] were directed by Hussein's production assistant Douglas Camfield.

[41] Scholar Mark Bould discusses how the serial establishes Doctor Who's socio-political stances in his 2008 essay "Science Fiction Television in the United Kingdom".

He writes, "The story represents the separation/reunion, capture/escape, pursuit/evasion that will dominate the next twenty-six years, as well as the programme's consistent advocacy of the BBC's political and social liberalism."

He cites Ian and Barbara's attempt to teach a cavewoman kindness, friendship and democracy, writing "a tyrant is not as strong as the whole tribe acting collectively".

[43] Malcolm Peltu of New Scientist noted, in 1982, that the serial was set in the Stone Age because the show's original intention was "to bring to life the Earth's history".

They also argue that, contrary to the tendency to treat the story as a one-episode introduction to the series followed by "three episodes of running around and escaping" that the piece should be considered as a single, dramatic whole that is "about making four people who barely know one another learn to trust each other".

[35] Mark Bould suggests that a disappointing audience reaction and high production costs prompted the BBC's chief of programmes to cancel the series until the Daleks, introduced in the second serial in December 1963, were immediately popular with viewers.

Michael Gower of the Daily Mail wrote a short favourable review of the first episode, claiming that the ending "must have delighted the hearts of the Telegoons who followed".

[49] Variety felt that the script "suffered from a glibness of characterisations which didn't carry the burden of belief", but praised the "effective camerawork", noting that the show "will impress if it decides to establish a firm base in realism".

[1] Referring to the serial while discussing the early years of Doctor Who in 1982, New Scientist's Peltu praised the script, acting and direction, but criticised the dated scenery.

[1] In A Critical History of Doctor Who (1999), John Kenneth Muir called the serial "an unqualified success as drama", applauding the writing, cinematic style, and production techniques.

[52] In 2008, Radio Times reviewer Patrick Mulkern praised the casting of Hartnell, the "moody" direction and the "thrilling" race back to the TARDIS.

[2] In a 2006 review, DVD Talk's John Sinnott called the first episode "excellent", but felt the "story goes down hill a bit" with the introduction of the prehistoric time period.

Historian James Chapman highlights this as a reason that, in an age before home video, many people believed the Dalek serial to be the first Doctor Who story because the novelisations published by Target Books were the "closest that fans had to the original programmes".

[55][g] Terrance Dicks wrote the Target novelisation of this story, initially published as Doctor Who and an Unearthly Child on 15 October 1981 with a cover by Andrew Skilleter.

[h] A verbatim transcript of the transmitted version of this serial, edited by John McElroy and titled The Tribe of Gum, was published by Titan Books in January 1988.

[60] In October 2023, the BBC announced that An Unearthly Child would not be available on its iPlayer service the following month alongside other Doctor Who episodes as it did not hold the entire copyright.

[63] He had since lambasted the programme's direction, claiming in 2023 that his father would be "outrage[d] at what generations of progressively more corrupted BBC filth have done", in response to the casting of actors Ncuti Gatwa and Jinkx Monsoon.