.
.
Fifteen years after Cicely’s moose bid farewell and strode into the night, “Northern Exposure” remains one of the most original shows ever to grace the small screen. From 1990 to 1995, quirky characters in a remote Alaskan town wrestled with profound questions about identity, community and love.
NX featured no cheap laughs and almost no sex, but sharp scripts packed with literary and historical allusions leavened with wry wit made for compelling entertainment. The chasm between that show and the majority of prime-time fare today struck me forcefully when my wife and I watched the entire series on Netflix over the last couple of years.
Most of network television today – formulaic reality shows and violent crime series – is a wading pool for the mind, a wading pool used by many children without diapers. Every week a bachelor or bachelorette makes the hardest decision they’ve ever had to make, faced with a bunch of spouse candidates who are all “amazing.” D-list stars promise to really give it their all each and every week on “Dancing with the Stars.”
NX was Victoria Lake for the brain. For example, in one classic episode, “Burning Down the House,” the resident deejay/artist/philosopher Chris Stevens (John Corbett) launches a piano from a kind of catapult he has built.
“It’s not the thing you fling; it’s the fling itself,” Stevens declares before the wondrous event. “It’s not the vision at all. It’s the groping. It’s the groping, it’s the yearning, it’s the moving forward. I think Kierkegaard said it oh so well, ‘The self is only that which is in the process of becoming.‘ Art? Same thing.” Don’t expect anyone on “Survivor” or “CSI: Miami’ to ever have a thought like that – or to have a thought at all really.
In “Seoul Mates,” which garnered an Emmy, bigoted Maurice Minniefield (Barry Corbin) must reconsider what “the other” is when he finds out about a son he fathered during a stint in the Korean War. In my favorite episode – “Shofar, So Good” – Joel (Rob Morrow) becomes a nicer person when a Yom Kippur eve turns into a spoof of “A Christmas Carol,” with a rabbi of the past, the present and the future making visits.
Essentially, NX was about a New York doctor’s hard adjustment to life in a one-caribou town in the tundra. The then relatively unknown Morrow was gifted enough to make the peripatetic protagonist sympathetic and annoying by turns. Janine Turner, a dark-eyed beauty, played Fleishman’s quarrelsome love interest, bush pilot Maggie O’Connell.
A crack team of writers that included Diane Frolov, John Falsey, Joshua Brand, David Chase and Andrew Schneider gave the show its off-beat snap. Chase, who later helped create “The Sopranos,” reportedly was irked by NX’s routine of ending each episode on a high note. “It was ramming home every week the message that life is nothing but great…”
That’s one big reason I and I think many others love Northern Exposure. For one thing, I think the message is that life can be great, not that it automatically is. And a related idea is that life can be great because we all have the capacity, despite a natural inclination to be selfish and self-absorbed, to learn and be compassionate. The message could have been sappy if it wasn’t delivered with so many funny nods to our frailties. Like a good Chekhov story, NX episodes can make us laugh through our tears.
Compare that to the message underpinning most of the reality shows – that people are generally petty, conniving, jealous and stupid. The idea behind the crime shows is not much cheerier: dangerous psychopaths lurk around every corner, poised to rape and torture.
Like “Happy Days,” Northern Exposure petered out after the “normal” character who represented us viewers departed. Jefferson High School was never as compelling to me after Richie Cunningham (Ron Howard) left Happy Days. Neither was Cicely, Alaska after Morrow’s Joel Fleishman left, and CBS dropped the series after just a few more episodes.
Fortunately, with reruns and Netflix, Northern Exposure is still with us. In fact, my wife and I found it a richer viewing experience without the distraction of advertisements. Lucky for me … and you, the moose never stops wandering through Cicely.
– Claude Iosso
.
.
.
.
.
