The Vet Will See You Now: Old Dog, New Tricks

Before I get into whatever it is I'm going to write about today I ought to give an update on the YouTube situation. It's fixed!

I've been using another account while the main one wasn't working but I'd been checking the old one every day to see if anything had changed, which so far it hadn't. Then yesterday evening I clicked "Play on YouTube" on a link somewhere, without thinking about it and the video played as normal. 

It was a few moments before I noticed it was apparently playing through my account. I'd never really thought about how that works before. I shut the video down and logged into my channel directly and everything was back to normal. Still is today.

Given the similar experiences of contributors to the reddit thread I mentioned, I'm going to assume that was a direct result of reporting the issue to YouTube through the Feedback function, which I did on Saturday. A two-day fix over the weekend seems like pretty good service, if so. I'm not complaining, anyway. Let's just hope it sticks.

Being able to use my regular channel will certainly make it easier to put this year's Advent Calendar together. I've already collected more than enough tunes to fill all twenty-five days. Almost twice as many as I'll need, in fact. I might double up and post two each day because, unlike last year, when I collected over a hundred and then found I didn't like half of them all that much, this year there are hardly any I'd want to skip.

But that's a discussion for another day. Let's get on with today's topic, which is... 

Hmm. What is it? Have I thought of one yet? 

Oh, yes, I know! I watched a TV show. All the way through. Let's talk about that!

For once, it's something I'm betting not everyone reading this has seen already. I have a habit of getting to things months or even years after everyone else. Even when I'm there from the moment a show first airs, my preference for watching an episode a day tends to leave me at the back of the line when it comes to reviewing.

In this case, though, it's a brand new show that I'm guessing hasn't been on many people's radar so there's a chance I might be introducing it to a new audience. Or maybe I'm just kidding myself and everyone already knows about it. Whatever.

Oh, you want to know what it is? I guess that would be an idea...

Old Dog, New Tricks is the name it's going by in English, although the original title in Spanish is the super-minimal Animal. It's a show made by Madrid-based Alea Media in conjunction with Netflix, which is where I found it purely by chance just over a week ago. 

It came up on one of their many, many suggestion banners, something I do find quite helpful, particularly compared to Prime Video's chaotic, confusing sprawl. In this supposed Dark Age of The Internet, I'd have to say that Netflix has maintained its standards fairly convincingly. Amazon, on the other hand, is showing major signs of deterioration across all fronts, especially in the areas where it used to shine.

While I often browse through the suggestions Netflix gives me, the most I usually do is add the odd thing to my Watchlist, where it will most likely sit, unwatched, for years. It's very rare for me to start watching something I've never heard of immediately but that's what happened with Old Dog, New Tricks.

Mostly it was because I was in the market, as I frequently am, for a new, half-hour sitcom. I get through them really quickly and there aren't as many good ones as you might think. 

It's not the 1960s. Or the '70s. Or the '80s or the '90s. Sitcoms aren't quite the driving force they were in the glory days of the Networks, although they still seem to get plenty of attention when they have a big star name above the title, like Kristen Bell in Nobody Wants This or Ted Danson in Man On The Inside, which is just about to drop a second season.

ODNT doesn't have a big star name. Or maybe it does if you're Spanish. The two leads are Luis Zahera and Lucia Caraballo. Googling them both, though, neither seems to be particularly famous in their own country. They look like the kind of supporting actors you recognize and find yourself wondering what it was you might have seen them in before.

And they're both excellent in this. It's a well-written show with an unusual setting even, I'm guessing, for a Spanish audience, and a familiar set-up that's been given a quirky and effective twist. But it's the two leads who really make the whole thing work. 

As with pretty much every 21st Century sitcom I can think of - indeed damn near every TV show since the 90s - there's a big cast. No-one really makes two or three handers any more, do they? It's not what you'd call an ensemble piece, though. Very much more two main characters and a large supporting cast.

The setting is a small town in Galicia.  I know Spain very well. I've been going there since I was a small child. I've visited just about every large city in Spain and most of the small ones, too, not to mention countless towns and villages. I've explored every region of the country with one exception: I've never set foot in Galicia.

Galicia, along with Asturias, which I have visited, is often referred to as "Green Spain". It looks absolutely nothing like the popular image of the nation. It's on the Atlantic coast and it rains a lot. Most of it seems to be farmland and it looks a lot like wet farmland anywhere. Or it does in this show, anyway.

It could be in Normandy. It could be about a mile from my house, frankly, except Galicia looks flatter. And as setting, I imagine it's about as unfamiliar to most Spanish viewers as it was to me. I did notice the regional manager, who flew in from Barcelona, couldn't even pronounce the store manager's Galician name.

The set-up is that Antón, a sixty-year old country vet, is struggling. The farmers whose animals he treats dodge his bills, preferring to pay him in kind with milk and eggs. Meanwhile, the biggest farming operation in the area is after him to sign off on something illegal to do with a scam involving EU subsidies. They need his signature on some paperwork for the slaughterhouse and he doesn't want to give it to them.

Antón's niece, Uxía, is the manager of a large pet store in the nearest town. It's part of an international chain called Kawanda. To try and keep his head above water and to avoid the somewhat threatening attentions of the local crime family, Antón grudgingly accepts Uxía's offer of a job as the in-store veterinarian at Kawanda. 

Hilarity ensues.

Well, okay, not exactly. More like wry smiles and occasional chuckles. I did laugh out loud maybe three or four times in the nine episode season. It's not really a laugh out loud kind of show and that's not a problem. 

I watched the English dub, which is excellent. I'm not even sure the Spanish version is on Netflix UK. It defaults to the dub and I just accepted it without thinking. In retrospect, I would quite have liked to watch it in the original Spanish with subtitles, not so much for aesthetic reasons as because it would have been good practice for my slim and increasingly rusty Spanish. In practice, though, I didn't even think of it until halfway through the season. 

The two leads are voiced in the English dub by Jeff LeBeau and Veronica Powers, information I was only able to discover by reading the credits. Here's a clip from Veronica Powers' TikTok, which I've uploaded to my YouTube channel so I can embed it here. If you're not happy with that, Veronica, just let me know and I'll remove it. You did a great job, by the way!

It has a pretty solid plot that goes all the way through the nine episodes. I wouldn't say it was a comedy-drama as such - it's definitely a sitcom - but it does provide a full and complete linear storyline over the course of the season. If it ended there, it would feel like a mini series but of course, because it would work as a standalone, a second season has already been commissioned. Sod's law.

In a way it's a bit like there are two separate situations in the comedy. There are the funny country folk, most of them getting on a bit, with their quirky, old-fashioned country ways and then there's the gleaming clean, super-modern pet boutique with all the trendy youngsters and townies. It's as if someone grafted the back end of Newhart onto the front end of Superstore. 

One of the interesting things about the coupling is the way Antón and Uxía slowly drift towards the middle from their extreme outlying starting positions. The accommodations they make, the way circumstances force them to compromise, the assimilation that happens almost unnoticed, none of it is ever foregrounded in the writing, the direction or the acting. It just occurs, organically.

Perhaps the most surprising thing in the entire series (This is a spoiler...) comes right at the very end, when Uxía leaves her job at Kawanda and Antón carries on working there. That represents a complete reversal of their respective positions and expectations at the start of the season and yet it feels entirely convincing.

Slightly more convincing, perhaps, (Another spoiler coming...) than crooked landowner Vicente's decision not only to take the full rap for the scam he's been running and do jail time for it, but also to lie about Antón's involvement, thereby exonerating him completely. For most of the season, that would have felt like a plot twist too far but all the groundwork for the change of heart is expertly laid in the penultimate episode and when the moment came, even though it was unexpected, it worked.

Speaking of that eighth episode, it's a tough one. There's always a risk with shows about vets that at some point the lead character is going to put his arm all the way up a cow and that does indeed happen. What I wasn't ready for was the scene where Antón has to siphon the entire contents of a cow's gut through a plastic tube by sucking on it. 

Other than that, the show is cheerfully free of animal-related unpleasantness. Most of the patients that come to the clinic at Kawanda are suffering from stress or alienation issues or lack of joi-de-vivre. And that's the animals, not the humans. 

There is one sad episode with a dog that has to be put to sleep but it's handled very deftly. It also points up the one area where I did struggle to suspend disbelief, which is that even when an animal is supposed to be extremely ill, they always look really fit and healthy. The cow that isn't meant to last the night looks as ready for another day as all the other cows. The dog that's supposed to have a limp doesn't have any limp I could see.

But that's fine. Actually, a lot better than having animals that look ill and unsettled. That way you'd always be worrying if they were being mistreated in the filming process. In this show, every animal either looks like it's having a great time or is completely oblivious to what's going on around it, which is very reassuring.

I really enjoyed the show. I liked the characters, not only the leads but many of the supporting cast. Angela the ever-smiling receptionist was always amusing and Vicente's doltish grandson got funnier and funnier as the episodes rolled by. Antón's girlfriend Sabella brought a certain degree of gravitas to some of her scenes but I also found her very funny at times.

I'm very curious to see what the writers do with all of the characters for the second season. As I said, the first season has a really tight central storyline. It will be interesting to see if they try to repeat that structure or lean more into the traditional episodic sitcom approach.

Either way, I'll be very happy to revisit Galicia next year or whenever we get Season Two. If I can't go there in person, at least I can follow Antón and Uxía as they drive through the beautiful scenery surrounding the rural backwater of Topomorto, the fictional village where they somewhat reluctantly share a home. 

There are plenty of worse places to be, both in real life and in front of a screen.