UK Peas: All Creatures Great & Small

I love the show so much, and it's all down to the characters, because while I certainly like animals, I'm not one who normally looks to watch animal related TV shows.

And I'd be perfectly happy to see Mrs. Hall & Siegfried together, as well.

The new series has altered the characters' ages & timeline so this one is a bit of a whole new ballgame. 

The character of Mrs. Hall is the same age or even perhaps slightly younger than Siegfried.  And she is a major character with just as much screen time as James, Tristan, Siegfried, & Helen.

She has a whole complex back story in this series as well. They've basically treated her as a blank slate, which she basically was. There never even was a "Mrs. Hall" in reality, so she's an easier character for the writers to manipulate, I imagine.

In some ways, this series plays things closer to reality--Siegfried, just like his real life counterpart, had a wife named Evelyn who passed away, for instance--but in making that true to life, they made it different from the books, as that's something Alf Wight fictionalized. 

And they fiddle around with the animal/farmer stories, sometimes giving one story to a recurring character that already exists in the show as opposed to introducing yet another farmer.  One big difference was that in the books, MRS. Hammond brings her dog Rock in after he gets his paw stuck in a trap, but in this series it was a MR. Hammond instead, which turned into a very important distinction.  But other times I do still recognize dialogue as coming straight out of the books. 

But the spoiler that you're referring to was dabbled with already, and did not end up as it did in the earlier materials. 

The new series is airing now in the UK. Yay!

Then in January it'll be on PBS, with a few tiny extra bits here and there, as the run time for PBS is longer than needed for Ch. 5.

And I heard season one is on Netflix, now, but I don't know if it's Netflix just in the UK or in the US, too, because I'm on a Netflix break right now. I'll be turning it back on in October, along with a few other services I have on break as well. I just don't need as many TV choices in the summer months.