All Creatures Great and Small confronts despair like only a comforting show can - Polygon

The show, adapted from the internationally bestselling series of memoirs by veterinary surgeon Alf Wight, who wrote under the pen name James Herriot, has thus far been situated squarely within the late 1930s in the sleepy English farming community of Darrowby, a fictionalized corner of the Yorkshire Dales where 21st-century viewers might burrow away for an hour a week and let their troubles be replaced by gentle tales of rural animal care.

“Surviving Siegfried” transports the viewer to Belgium in 1918, a schism in the series’ typical operations that underscores just how present the First World War remains in the consciousness of characters now facing down the Second.

There, a younger version of the typically jovially eccentric Siegfried — played in these segments by Andy Sellers, and now seen as a solemn captain in the Royal Armed Forces around the time of Armistice Day — is tasked with caring for his major’s wounded horse.

Jeeps pass the car as Siegfried shuttles between Darrowby and the outlying farms; the previous season closed with his housekeeper, Mrs. Hall (Anna Madeley) watching a spitfire strafe the sky.

The same could be said of the world into which the third season of All Creatures Great and Small has premiered, as we enter the fourth year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and amid a rising tide of global fascism that’s becoming normalized with shocking swiftness.

The series premiered in September 2020, less than a year into the pandemic, and while it might be a bit convenient to suggest James Herriot and his comic entourage emerge during these moments of widespread despair to guide us toward something like hope… Well, if the horseshoe fits.