Magical Realism: "Northern Exposure" 25 Years Later | TV/Streaming | Roger Ebert

“We used Alaska more for what it represents than what it is. It is disconnected both physically and mentally from the lower 48, and it has an attractive mystery.“—Joshua Brand, co-creator of “Northern Exposure”CHRIS: Soapy once told me that the thing he loved most about country music was its sense of myth. There’s heroes and villains, good and bad, right and wrong. The protagonist strolls into bar, which he sees as a microcosm of the big picture. He contemplates his existence and he asks himself, ‘who’s that babe in the red dress?’ All right. Well, you know the way I see it, if you’re here for four more years or four more weeks–you’re here right now. You know, and I think when you’re somewhere you ought to be there, and because it’s not about how long you stay in a place. It’s about what you do while you’re there. And when you go, is that place any better for you having been there? Am I answering your question?.JOEL: Uh, no, not really.—”Soapy Sanderson” (“Northern Exposure,” Episode 1.3)JOEL FLEISCHMANThe secret to Dr. Fleischman was in his eyes.In the pilot alone, they could be darting, distrustfully analytical (as when he arrives in the remote outback of Cicely, Alaska, having been lied to about his presumed term of medical service in Anchorage, and immediately scopes out the one-street downtown with its worn-out shop fronts and wandering moose); they expressed puzzlement (as in his first encounters with Marilyn, the taciturn Native American who turned up at his office reception desk for work, despite never actually being hired); they expressed great fear (as town patriarch Maurice pulled a shotgun on him in a fishing boat); and they could be playful and sarcastic (as when he meets his new land-lady, the bush pilot Maggie, and immediately kicks off a screwball relationship that would make Donald Ogden Stewart reach for his pen). The eyes were everything, and it’s through them that we first got a glimpse of television’s future.

Debuting as an eight-episode CBS summer series on July 12, 1990, “Northern Exposure” immediately dropped viewers into a space that felt both alien and warmly inviting. “Exposure” could be called “The Sentimental Education of Joel Fleischman”: a young doctor from New York (Rob Morrow) goes to Alaska to fulfill his medical school loan obligations (the state paid for his training), but instead of being based in Anchorage as promised, he is shipped to the small, quirky town of Cicely, one of 845 residents living in the middle of nowhere. There, he encounters townspeople who include Chris Stevens (John Corbett), an ex-con philosopher who is the sole DJ at KBHR, the town’s sole radio station (centerpiece-by-default of the grandly-named “Minnifield Communications Network”); radio station owner Maurice Minnifield (Barry Corbin), a wealthy, pompous, bigoted astronaut hero with dreams of turning Cicely into the Riviera of the northwest; Holling Vincoeur (John Cullum), a kindly 63-year old bar owner, and Shelly Tambo (Cynthia Geary), his wide-eyed, 20-year old ex-beauty queen paramour; Marilyn Whirlwind (Elaine Miles), whose own subtly expressive face acts as a kind of silent Greek chorus on Fleischman’s many missteps; and Ruth-Anne Miller (Peg Phillips), the 70-something shop owner who has seen everything, yet somehow remains one of the program’s least-cynical characters. Most importantly, he meets two residents around whom his spiritual journey will be based: Ed Chigliak (Darren E. Burrows), a young Native American filmmaker and budding cinephile, and Maggie O’Connell (Janine Turner), the Grosse Pointe refugee whose relationship with Fleischman will form the backbone of the series. It is this triangle of interactions I want to use as a metaphor in what follows, because I think Joel, Ed, and Maggie each offer overlapping windows on “Northern Exposure”‘s role in a broader TV landscape, and why the program still resonates.

Joel looks out at his seemingly barren new home and initially fails to notice its rich, playful magic. Similarly, the notion of a summer replacement series as being anything but a burn-off of a failed pilot, or episodes of an already-cancelled show, was relatively new in 1990, and no one really expected “Northern Exposure” to be different. “I don’t know whose idea it was to launch in the summer,” Rob Morrow would recall to Entertainment Weekly 20 years later. “I don’t think anyone had any idea what they had on their hands.” Despite solid ratings and strong reviews, it didn’t continue into the fall season, disappearing for six months while its creators, John Falsey and Joshua Brand, and production studio Universal negotiated with the network for a larger budget. Somehow, its reputation only grew in its absence; in a 1991 piece for “Entertainment Weekly” (archived at the invaluable fan site Moosechick Notes), writers Mark Harris and Kelli Pryor quote Falsey’s recounting of a screening of an episode at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: “It gave us a real jolt. For the first time, we heard 400 people responding. It was incredibly refreshing.”  Not everyone loved it. Richard Zoglin of Time would almost completely miss the point, complaining, “‘Northern Exposure’ is less a realistic picture of Alaskan life than a big-city yuppie’s romantic small-town fantasy.” But that was a distinctly minority view. When the show came back, it was a top 20 hit, eventually rising to number 11 in the ratings. The program’s success would help to make the summer debut—and its corollary, an established show airing new episodes—a growing TV model for everything from teen programs like “Beverly Hills 90210” (which only found its audience by airing new episodes in the summer of ’91) and “The OC,” to light-hearted/light-headed USA dramas like “Covert Affairs,” to “Golden Age of TV” prestige bait like “True Detective.”

Joel’s fish-out-of-water status made him the show’s creative emblem: for all his brusque insistence on his “New York” identity and his initial dislike of his new home, he’s also drawn to its residents, its oddities, and its insatiable desire to flip its own script. The epigraph from Brand above captures the program’s (and Joel’s) need to transmogrify itself every week: as a “Jew doctor from New York” (to quote Maurice’s description of him), Joel is “an attractive mystery,” as fascinatingly strange to the townies as they are to him, and “Northern Exposure” would use every stylistic and narrative trick it could as as a way of expressing the need to bridge those cultural gaps.The show was an early example of a dramedy without a laugh track, juggling moods and respecting its audience’s ability to get the joke in a way that would help create space for future comedy/drama hybrids like “The West Wing,” “Parks and Recreation,” “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” and “Gilmore Girls” (whose small-town quirk, screwball-meets-melodrama tone, and character archetypes owe almost everything to “Exposure”). It was also a show that respected its audience’s intelligence, wisely ignoring “high/low”divisions of culture and assuming viewers would appreciate references to both Voltaire and “Aliens,” Walt Whitman and the Home Shopping Network (in that sense, the program’s recurring fascination with show-tunes is not just another entry point for Joel’s Manhattan-centric worldview, or a playful way to explore and tweak the homophobia of Broadway super-fan Maurice, but also a tip of the hat to an earlier art form’s ability to encompass the whole eight-eighths of American popular life).

Joel’s eyes were also a creative window: He might have been resistant to the town’s quirkiness (in one episode, he frantically mourns his growing assimilation by renting “The Godfather” and “Dog Day Afternoon,” as if they will act as New York booster shots), but he was also its pulsating center, and so many of the program’s “dream episodes” or pastiches start from Joel’s perspective literally shifting. In one episode, a bump to the head sends him into a dreamscape where he is “Jules,” his own ne’er do well twin; in another, a bout of insomnia causes Joel’s view of the town to dramatically improve, in a subtle parody of “Charly” (1968) that also sees him enthusiastically coaching the Cicely basketball team; in still another, Joel’s accidental ingestion of a Native American herbal remedy transports him to a version of New York where his dreams of big-city life intermingle with wildly different versions of the program’s regulars.“Northern Exposure” took the stylistic playfulness pioneered by “thirtysomething,” “Moonlighting” and other ’80s shows, and made it more organic to the program’s usual mise-en-scene. Falsey and Brand’s imagery was no less surreal or playful, but was more fully integrated into the program’s ongoing camera and color schemes, so the line between fantasy and reality wasn’t as clear or self-conscious; this confusion of space only intensified the show’s richness (it’s probably no coincidence that “Exposure” debuted the same year as “Twin Peaks,” which it references in one first-season episode, or that “Exposure”‘s show-runner in its final two seasons was David Chase, who would use a similarly dream/reality template to great effect on “The Sopranos”).

Its dense intertextuality and fearlessness in building its narratives around Orson Welles, Ralph Waldo Emerson and—most spectacularly—Gabriel Garcia Marquez (in an episode-long homage to the magical realism of “One Hundred Years of Solitude”) helped expand what kinds of stories could be done on a network show, breaking ground that would be followed by the daring of cable and “netlet” shows in the ensuing 20 years. Its open-ended narratives, ensemble casts, often melancholy and wistful tone—all of this speaks to a TV of the future as much as the TV of “Exposure”‘s actual airdates. The show was a great success, won several Emmys and Peabodys, and launched many of its stars into great futures. And then it all came crashing down.MAGGIE O’CONNELLLike Maggie—the Detroit debutante who escapes into a new life in the Alaskan wilds—”Northern Exposure” and its creators didn’t come out of nowhere. John Falsey and Joshua Brand had been successfully working in TV for nearly two decades: As writers on “The White Shadow”; as writers and producers on Steven Spielberg’s “Amazing Stories”; and most impressively, as the co-creators of three critically acclaimed shows in the ’80s and early ’90s—”St. Elsewhere,” “A Year In The Life,” and “I’ll Fly Away”.As Harris and Pryor noted in their EW piece, Falsey and Brand wanted to use the “displaced doctor” idea they’d pitched to CBS to get at something richer:“From ‘St. Elsewhere,’ we were kind of doctored out,” says Brand. “Both John and I could hang up a shingle at this point.” The producers instead looked to European films for inspiration, and saw, in Bill Forsyth’s “Local Hero” and Lasse Hallstrom’s “My Life as a Dog,” in Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso” and Federico Fellini’s “Amarcord,” shades of the series they wanted. “America,” says Brand, “tends not to make those gentle, warm, offbeat character comedies.