Responsibility in All Creatures Great and Small and Its Reception

Abstract

Since the first season of All Creatures Great and Small aired in 2020, the series has garnered significant attention and received favourable reviews on mainstream Chinese film and television review platforms. Existing domestic research on this series has largely focused on its cultural essence, subtitle translation and its relationship with anti-globalisation, whilst there has been relatively little exploration of its reception mechanisms within the Chinese context. Consequently, this paper takes the gentleman culture portrayed in the film as its point of departure and employs textual analysis to identify scenes that reflect the concept of responsibility—one of the core values of this culture. It then utilises the theory of the aesthetics of expectation to analyse how these depictions of responsibility align with the audience’s horizon of expectation. The protagonist’s professional responsibilities and the spirit of solidarity and mutual aid within the Darrowby community align with the concept of responsibility advocated by Chinese Confucian culture and the view of responsibility promoted by Xi Jinping. They meet the expectations of Chinese audiences. The core objective of this paper is to explore the reasons behind the series’s positive reception in China, using the concept of responsibility depicted in the series as a starting point.