Whether it’s the dizzying effects of the Marvel universe, or the high-stakes family affairs of Succession, American TV has never shied away from drama.

So the news that the gentle All Creatures Great and Small reboot is a ratings juggernaut in America has been met with some bewilderment back in the UK. Around 10 million Americans have watched the new adaptation, depicting the wholesome village life of vet James Herriot in 1930s Yorkshire, with the PBS network currently broadcasting the show’s second series to popular and critical acclaim.

Yet under closer examination, this success in the States shouldn’t come as a surprise. Because this most British of franchises was, to some extent, made in America.

Alf Wight, the real-life Yorkshire Dales vet who wrote under the Herriot pen name, had released two books in Britain, If Only They Could Talk in 1970 and It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet in 1972, which had sold only a few thousand copies before the two books were combined into one, named All Creatures Great and Small, and released in America in November 1972.

“My dad always said the Americans were the ones that turbocharged his sales,” the late author’s son, Jim Wight, recalls. “Within three months of the book’s release in the US, it was sitting on top of the New York Times bestsellers, where it stayed throughout 1973. Then, of course, the publishers in this country saw his success over the pond, and realized he was one of us, so it started a forest fire in the UK as well. Dad would say, ‘I like the Americans, because the Americans like us, and I like people who like me!’”