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All Creatures Great and Small: The Beauty of Ordinary Things

All Creatures Great and Small: The Beauty of Ordinary Things

Last updated on: January 14, 2025 at 10:10 am by Kate O'Hare

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All Creatures Great and Small: The Beauty of Ordinary Things 2025-01-14T10:10:27-08:00 Kate O'Hare

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On Sunday, Jan. 12, on PBS’ Masterpiece launched season five of All Creatures Great and Small, focusing on a veterinary practice amid among the farms of the Yorkshire Dales of northern England in the 1930s and 1940s.

Based on a book series of the same name, the British drama is set in an often-harsh part of the world. It deals with farming, an inherently tough and unrelenting occupation; and, for the icing on the trouble cake, is currently set during the early years of World War II.

If this sounds like a grim, dystopian saga, it’s so not. But neither is it a whitewash of the realities of life. Nobody’s rich or powerful (except for Mrs. Pumphrey, owner of the spoiled Pekinese Tricki Woo, but she’s all right). Nobody is famous or super-elegant or sophisticated.

They’re just ordinary folks in a small town the rest of England doesn’t care much about, trying to get through to tomorrow, even when the larger world is falling apart around them.

It’s one of those rare shows that manages to be sweet without being saccharine, and to be honest about humanity without hating on it. There’s even a bit of faith sprinkled in here and there (season five includes a lovely baptism scene).

Drama Doesn’t Have to Be Ugly

If All Creatures Great and Small resembles any American shows, I’d say it would be Little House on the Prairie or The Waltons. People remember them as heartwarming family sagas, but if you actually go back and look, terrible things happened in the course of both shows.

Characters faced loss, grief, fear, anger, the full gamut of human emotions. But yet, fans still remember them in a kind of rosy glow. How can this be?

I’m reminded of something producer and studio executive Lindsay Doran once said, at a lecture I attended back in 2014:

I was talking to people at a small production company. and I asked them for their examples of 100% positive emotion movies, movies that made them feel great from start to finish. And somebody said, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I said, “But ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ is about a man who becomes so convinced that his life is without value that he’s driven to the verge of suicide.” And the guy went, “Oh, yeah. All I remember is how I felt at the end.”

Really, go back and watch It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s a dark movie, but folks often have to strain to remember that.

So, what sets these stories apart from ones that didn’t leave you feeling good? It’s the same reason why All Creatures Great and Small leaves people with a warm feeling.

The people are generally kind, mostly actually like each other, and they’re capable of having a conversation to resolve problems.

This is the exact reverse of much of what passes for modern entertainment, where characters often start at being misanthropic and power straight into outright hostility and often violence. They speak in short bursts, and seldom, if ever, address the problem at hand.

Much of the drama relies on misunderstandings, lies, and general bad behavior.

The goal of this kind of storytelling is to stoke conflict, which is said to be the soul of drama. I don’t necessarily disagree, but that conflict doesn’t always have to be interpersonal.

Not All Drama Must Come Out of Hurting Others

The inhabitants of Darrowby in All Creatures Great and Small face financial hardship, weather, war, family strains, all the sorrows of life. The difference is that they are inherently good people who aren’t wishing misfortune on others.

The characters’ motivations lack malice. There is not a “Big Bad,” a definitive adversary — other than what life dishes out to us all.

In that way, it reminds me also of the reality-competition show The Great British Baking Show, in which amateur bakers gather in a tent on the grounds of a British estate to vie for a coveted cake plate.

Technically, they’re competing against each other, but it never comes through like that. They’re endlessly supportive and helpful to their fellow bakers. The true adversaries are time, the elements, the recipes, and the limits of the bakers’ own talents and knowledge.

It can be tense and dramatic, but all without interpersonal conflict — quite unlike American reality shows, where contestants seem to be encouraged to fight with each other.

This show, and All Creatures Great and Small, remind viewers of what it means to be a good friend, neighbor or family member, and what can be accomplished if people work with each other.

Don’t Get Me Wrong …

There are times for direct conflict, for going head-on against evildoers — and that can also make for great drama. I’m a big fan of action films, crime drama and all that gritty stuff.

But a steady diet of dystopian, misanthropic stories, in which every character is set against every other character, can make us can forget that, in life, not everything is a fight, and not everyone is your enemy.

Also, even though characters may go through ups and downs in a story, there doesn’t have to be a downer ending. Neither do stories with uplifting themes have to be Hallmark films, in which every high and low is sanded down to a narrow and mushy middle.

All Creatures Great and Small‘s Darrowby may seem like a cozy, fantasy place, but there are communities like it all over the world, in which ordinary people help each other survive the hardships of life. Its just that, these days, we don’t make enough TV shows and movie about them.

Image: L-R, James Herriot (Nicholas Ralph) and Helen Herriot (Rachel Shenton) in All Creatures Great and Small. Photographer: Helen Williams. Courtesy of Playground Entertainment and MASTERPIECE.

Don’t miss a thing: Subscribe to all that I write at Authory.com/KateOHare

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About Kate O'Hare

Based in Los Angeles, Kate O'Hare is a veteran entertainment journalist, Social Media Manager for Family Theater Productions and a rookie screenwriter. You can read more about the author here.

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