Northern Exposure: The Complete Series

Posted by Maggie Van Ostrand (maggie@filmschoolrejects.com) on December 2, 2007

How do I love it? Let me count the ways. “Northern Exposure” (1990-1995) is surely one of the finest series ever to have been produced on network television, home of media mediocrity. Produced by the brilliant duo of Joshua Brand and John Falsey, NX has been aptly dubbed a “surreal satire.”

Manhattan Yuppie, Joel Fleischman (Rob Morrow), 28, is obliged to begin his practice of medicine in Alaska since that state paid his tuition through med school. Fleischman goes to Anchorage only to find the hospitals have done just what airlines do: they overbooked. They don’t need him. Fleischman assumes he’s met his commitment by just showing up in Alaska, and can now return to his long-time fiancée in Manhattan. Instead, he is dispatched forthwith to a remote Alaskan hamlet called Cicely to complete his contractual obligation of four years or, as he calls it “indentured servitude.” Cicely is so far north, it’s considered “the end of nowhere.”

Cicely (”Mayberry meets Twin Peaks”) is a mystical colony of Existentialists in mucklucks who opine, “Magic is the same as life, if we take a moment to listen to the music.” The town of about 600 is populated by quirky denizens who quote everything from adagial Latin (Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas - Vanity of vanities, all is vanity) to Woody Allen’s “mother.” (Details on the latter later).

In describing NX, offbeat would be an underword. The vagaries of human nature are reflected upon with Existential angst by some of the most anomalous characters ever created. Debates include topics we’re still talking about today: global warming, penises and PMS, fear of intimacy, chemically enhanced produce, shortcomings of Western medicine, Sapphic love, depletion of ozone, and the suggestion of cloning the ecosystem by collecting genetic samples of plants. There’s a good deal more but I don’t want to give everything away except to say sex and death are frequent subjects.

Regulars include former NASA astronaut/town patriarch, Maurice Minnifield (Barry Corbin); neurotic bush pilot, Maggie O’Connell (Janine Turner); DJ/clergyman (who got his minister’s license from an ad in the back of Rolling Stone) Chris Stevens (John Corbett); 62-year-old owner of Cicely’s restaurant-saloon, Holling Vincoeur (John Cullum); Holling’s 18-year-old squeeze, (”Holly owns the keys to my pants”) Shelly Tambo (Cynthia Geary); an ingenuous half-Indian (28) who wants to be a film director, Ed Chigliak (Darren E. Burrows); 75-year-old manager of the general store, Ruth-Anne (Peg Phillips); and overweight Inuit secretary to Joel, Marilyn Whirlwind (Elaine Miles).

In addition to this stellar repertory of fine actors, I find it necessary to single out some recurring characters: Adam (Adam Arkin), a near-maniacal and totally hostile Vietnam vet and gourmet cook hiding in a shack in the woods with his violently hypochondriacal girlfriend, Eve (Valerie Mahaffey); Elaine Shulman (Jessica Lundy), Fleischman’s long-suffering fiancee; Mike Monroe (Anthony Edwards), a man allergic to everything manmade who lives in a geodesic bubble in the forest; and weight-lifting Officer Barbara Semanski (Diane Delano) whose strength and unequivocal devotion to the law sexually stimulates Maurice into a state of ecstatic distraction.

Once a felon and still a wanted man for breaking parole in his hometown of Wheeling West Virginia, Chris doesn’t just say thank you for a favor on his morning radio show, he says “Thank you for playing Apollo to my Dionysus in art’s Cartesian dialectic.” Fleischman doesn’t feel he’s disliked, he’s in a “Galactic vortex of disapproval.” Ed doesn’t just discuss movies, he has conversations in the movie house with Woody Allen’s “mother,” called “Grandma Woody” to wit:

Grandma Woody sits with him watching Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, which they intellectually interpret and favorably dissect. In discussing Ed’s own documentary on Cicely, Grandma Woody gives Ed the same advice she gave her son, “Write what you know. Write about people. They’re only monkeys with car keys.”

A pep talk between Fleischman and Ed concerning Ed’s frustration in completing his documentary encourages Ed and stuns Fleischman:

ED: Marty says he likes things a little unfocused. When he started Mean Streets all he had was the East Village and a hat he found.

FLEISCHMAN: Wait a minute. You’re talking about Marty Scorsese the director of Mean Streets and Goodfellas?

ED: Yeah

FLEISCHMAN (unconvinced): You know Martin Scorsese the director??

ED: Not really but we’re pen pals.

FLEISCHMAN: You and Martin Scorsese the director are pen pals?????

ED: Yup (holds up letter)

FLEISCHMAN reads letter: “Dear Ed, Good luck with your movie. Marty”

ED (holding up another letter): This one’s from Woody. When Annie Hall was threatened with the lobster he wanted me to see how much he rewrites on the set. (ED then holds up a baseball cap) I got this hat from Universal Studios. Steven said it brought him luck so now I can’t give up.

One ep of Season Three finds Fleischman attempting to explain to a clueless Shelly how love is different for each individual: “Six blind men try to identify an elephant by touch. One thought the trunk was a rope, another thought the tusk was a bone.”
Shelly: “So what animal was the elephant anyway?”

In another ep, the actors decide that “our audience is so sophisticated, they’ll never go for that,” so they have their characters proceed to discuss how the scene should be ended.

The internet lacks space enough to go into the life of Maggie O’Connell who truly believes it’s her fault that every one of her six consecutive boyfriends has died (frozen on a mountain, smashed in the head by a falling satellite, and other grizzly fates), whose visiting “perfect” mom burns her cabin down but feels no guilt because her Ferragamo shoes survived the blaze. When Maggie suffers emotional uncertainties at turning 30, Fleishman tells her it’s not aging, it’s “just a chronologic imperative.” Or that of Maurice Minnifield, who likens everything from hunting to sex with the massive thrust of his former space capsule, and who’s about the only person in Cicely who doesn’t quote from movies but quotes Shepard, Aldrin and Glenn instead. Or bachelor Holling who has a surprise daughter turn up (Valerie Perrine) and Shelly whose visiting mom pretends to be her sister so she can sleep with younger men. Or shopkeeper Ruth-Ann whose patience, tolerance and wisdom should be studied by certain current presidents. There’s not even enough time to tell you about the innate talent of Elaine Miles as receptionist Marilyn Whirlwind, who brings new dimensions to the art of underacting. These things you must see for yourself.

Interspersed throughout the series are appropriately chosen scenes from films like The Graduate, Boys Town, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. There are talks about neorealisic film directors like Louis Malle, amateur script development (”What’s wrong with it besides the idea, the script and the execution?”), and “Steven Spielberg” appears in the audience when Ed wins an award in a fantasy sequence. There are dreams, nightmares, and fantasies, all well-executed and temporarily almost plausible.

Bernard Stevens (Richard Cummings, Jr.) a black motorcycling numbers cruncher who doesn’t know why he’s visiting Cicely and whose movements and speech are simultaneous with Chris’s, turns out to be the brother white Chris never knew he had.

An example of NX politically correct satire is ventriloquist Chris on air talking with his dummy. “I don’t like that word,” says the dummy, “Call me a wooden American.”

NX is one of the best-written and fanciful series ever telecast, with too many fine writers and directors consistently forging fresh and original episodes to single out.

There have been many complaints from afficionados about the original music having been replaced on this DVD set, but it still features great stuff from Billie Holiday to the Adagio from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. If you never saw NX before, you won’t notice the substitutions.

Unfortunately, this DVD release fails to include two eps of the Sixth Season (”Up River” and “Sons of the Tundra”) though they are listed on the box. The actual disc 2 DVD has only deleted scenes from each ep, despite that “Sons of the Tundra” introduces Joel’s replacement in Cicely. This careless omission results in an FSR downgrade from a well-earned A+ to a reluctant A-.

As Ed Chigliak says in quoting iconic screenwriter William Goldman, “Nobody in Hollywood knows anything.”

Grade: A-

Release Date: November 13, 2007 Rated: Not Rated Running Time: 5091 minutes Number of Discs: 26 Cast: Various Studio: Universal Studios

Read more articles by Maggie Van Ostrand