We're watching the new season of "All Creatures Great and Small," on Masterpiece Theater/PBS. It's a veterinarian drama, and gets sentimental and melodramatic, but is well acted, superbly scripted and edited, and far better than I expected. I'd been passing it up for years, but they have me now. Other PBS offerings, not so much. Don't like the new "Around the World in Eighty Days," compared to the old classic film with David Niven, or the Vienna crime series featuring a psychiatrist protagonist, or the Australian flying doctors, all heavy handed and two dimensional, to my taste. We're fans of the British comedy "As Time Goes By," about a couple who caught up with each other in maturity, since that's our situation. On the veterinarian drama, my wife, who grew up on a cattle farm, noted that they are always treating recumbent cows giving birth in a barn, whereas, on her farm, mostly the cattle gave birth in pasture, on their own, only to be tracked down and discovered when the calves were on hoof just behind mama. Which is why her cousin has a stuffed bobcat in his living room -- picked off to protect the calves.
