All Creatures Great and Small on PBS Masterpiece Is Just What the Doctor Ordered
Photo Courtesy of PBS
As has been written about many times in this space, book-to-television adaptations can be a tricky beast to wrangle. But I can joyously report that the same warmth, humor, and gentle stories that fill my own well-worn copies (and much-played audiobooks) of James Herriot’s autobiographical novels comes through beautifully in this new television version of All Creatures Great and Small.
Herriot is in fact a pen name for the late Yorkshire veterinarian Alf Wright, who wrote lovingly about his early years in practice in the English countryside during the 1930s and 1940s. The names and some of the places have been changed to protect the innocent, so to speak, but a gentle innocence is at the heart of these wonderful tales because they focus, of course, on animals and those who care for them.
Channel 5’s new series is not the first time All Creatures Great and Small has come to television (the books were also published under different names in the U.K., though for our purposes we’ll stick to calling by its U.S. anthology title). But writer Ben Vanstone and director Brian Percival’s winning vision hits all the right marks by not seeking to update a classic so much as bring new life to beloved material.
Throughout the six episodes (and a Christmas Special), airing in the U.S. on PBS Masterpiece, we follow the daily life at Skeldale House, a veterinary practice that young James (Nicholas Ralph) joins as he graduates from school. Run by a good-hearted but difficult-to-please taskmaster, Siegfried Farnon (Samuel West)—who has fired every other assistant he has ever had—James must prove himself not only to his new boss, but also to the local farmers suspicious of newcomers and more modern methods of treatment.
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