All Creatures Great and Small; Frasier

“All Creatures Great and Small is back, comforting as a hot buttered crumpet. It’s a show that kills all cynicism. Two minutes in and I was cooing over Helen’s baby.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“Now on series five, these period tales of Yorkshire vets should have something more going for them than simply comforting anaesthesia. And I think they do. It is a handsomely mounted and well-acted series, but its unabashed sentiment, period setting (which has now reached 1941) and medical storylines remind me of Call the Midwife – with pets and farm animals instead of babies.”
Gerard Gilbert, The i

“The Channel 5 version of this much-loved show returned yesterday for a fifth series, and it’s now clear to me that Samuel West is a better Siegfried than the great Robert Hardy. Hardy’s Siegfried was a force of nature. But with his hurricane-strength personality, it was hard to see why anyone would want to work with him. He was a tuba in an orchestra of piccolos. West’s Siegfried is still the alpha male of Skeldale House, impulsive and sometimes impossible, but the character is more rounded. His kindly side is allowed to peep through more often.”
Roland White, Daily Mail

“In the 20 years since the original ended, shows soundtracked by audience laughter have pretty much died out – as has the artifice of the art form’s tempo and tone. It’s rather disorientating to witness such old-fashioned TV mechanics playing out in the present day in the new Frasier, which now returns for a second season. In fact, it’s enough to give you temporal vertigo: so this is what it would’ve been like if they’d had smartphones in the 90s! What’s even weirder, though, is that the Frasier revival has turned out to be fine. Faint praise, but praise nonetheless.”
Rachel Aroesti, The Guardian

“Series two begins in much the same vein with a sprinkling of good but by no means vintage comedy, with our man coming across as slightly more pompous and snobby than he did in the first series. Which is just as we like him; one sensed that last time the writers – Frasier superfans Joe Cristalli and Chris Harris – wanted us to like this new, older Frasier too much.”
Ben Dowell, The Times