TV Review – Northern Exposure Season One

Northern Exposure Season One (CBS)
Written by Joshua Brand, John Falsey, Stuart Stevens, Karen Hall, Jerry Stahl, Sean Clark, David Assael, Steve Wasserman, Jessica Klein, and Charles Rosin
Directed by Joshua Brand, Peter O’Fallon, Steve Cragg, Dan Lerner, David Carson, Sandy Smolan, Max Tash

I was a weird kid, if you haven’t picked up on it. I read TV Guide every week when I had access to it. It was through reading that magazine that I came to learn about the show Northern Exposure and the comparisons to Twin Peaks. I watched that program as a kid, and on rare occasions, I caught an episode of Northern Exposure. What I liked about Twin Peaks was the horror of it, and this show about a small town in Alaska didn’t have any of it. Many decades later, I still hear very positive things about Northern Exposure and decided I should sit down and watch it with more mature eyes.

Northern Exposure begins with its focus on Joel Fleishman (Rob Morrow), a recent New York med school graduate made to fulfill his part of a deal that saw the Alaska state government pay his tuition. For the next four years, he must work as a doctor in the state. Well, Anchorage doesn’t sound so bad. Upon arriving, Joel discovers he won’t be working in the city. Instead, he is sent by bus to Cicely, a town with a population of just over 200. Thus, the show fully embraces the fish-out-of-water trope, often featuring Joel clashing with the quirks of the locals and the land. That isn’t where Northern Ex spends all its time, but it is the foundation of the show. 

Most of the show features Rob Morrow as Joel, so having a strong, charismatic actor is essential. While he may be the focus at the start, I could already feel the show straining against being a star vehicle for Morrow and more of an ensemble piece. I believe that was the smart way to go. Morrow is certainly not a bad actor, but Joel’s character is very annoying, at least to me. His character is mainly an element of conflict with the people of Cicely, so after a bit, it’s not enough to sustain a whole show. Dale Cooper was a weirdo who fit in perfectly with the odd townsfolk of Twin Peaks. While Joel is his own sort of weirdo, he is just on a different wavelength than his new neighbors.

Most of Joel’s interactions happen with Maggie (Jeanine Turner), a bush pilot. She is very much at home in Cicely and gets increasingly annoyed with Joel’s incessant complaints. There’s also the fact that she is a far more virtuous person than Joel. In “Soapy Sanderson,” the titular character dies and leaves his property to Maggie & Joel. Joel is approached by wealthy indigenous people who want to buy the land as a tax shelter. To carry on Soapy’s philosophy, Maggie wants to turn the land into a nature preserve. 

We’re expected to side with Maggie and see Joel as wrong, which is correct. I do think it is interesting that Joel is working with native people who aren’t portrayed as having an interest in preserving the land. The show doesn’t go nearly deep enough in pointing out how capitalism has ruined a lot of Native peoples’ view of their ancestral land. Maybe that will come later. However, I found a lot of themes in this first season to be quite conservative.

Cicely’s ongoing growth is all due to Maurice (Barry Corbin), a former astronaut turned multi-millionaire. After retiring in the 1970s, he bought 15,000 acres and built a newspaper and radio station. He dreams of turning this quiet place in the wilderness into the “Alaskan Riviera.” Maurice is a slightly palatable version of Joel in that he wants to bring more consumption to Cicely, but he has been around long enough that no one pushes back on him that hard. 

Everyone ultimately understands Maurice’s plans are doomed or that he isn’t going to enact the dramatic transformation he envisions. He’s the one who roped Joel into coming here because he sees a town doctor as the next step in Cicely’s development. Maurice is also the most conservative viewpoint in the town, which often leads to him clashing with others.

Holling & Shelly (John Cullum & Cynthia Geary) are the co-owners of The Brick, the most popular bar in town. Their story is the one that has aged the worst out of all the elements in the show. Holling is in his sixties, while Shelly is barely out of her teenage years. The story we’re given is that she won Miss Northwest Passage, was brought to town by Maurice, who thought he would marry her (he’s also an old man), and met & fell in love with Holling instead. 

Throughout the first season, every storyline between these two felt extremely weird. Their age gap is a glaring problem at every turn, and the show doesn’t think it’s that big of a deal. This is a relationship in which, so far, I do not feel any chemistry between the characters. It feels wildly inappropriate and gross. I get that it’s supposed to be quirky & unexpected, like so many of the other things in this town, but I’m not charmed by it. Both actors are excellent, and the writing is not bad. It’s just a premise that simply does not work.

One of the quirkiest people in Cicely is Chris (John Corbett), the DJ at the radio station. I suspect Chris may have been an afterthought post-pilot. I noticed that he popped in a scene in the first episode that didn’t have any other main actors in it and had no dialogue. His official introduction is in episode two, but Joel acts as though he’s met him previously. The showrunners already realize what a draw John Corbett could be in the first season, more than Rob Morrow. He’s a stoner, laidback philosophical dude who is much more fun to spend time with than a Woody Allen pastiche. 

Through Chris, we get some of the more interesting storylines of the first season. The one that stuck out to me most was in “Aurora Borealis: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups,” the season finale. He meets a stranger passing through town, Bernard, experiencing the same phenomenon as everyone else. The Northern Lights are causing everyone to have wild dreams. Chris & Bernard end up crossing paths in a shared dream, a fascinating, well-shot piece of television. At this moment, I started to envision where Northern Exposure will likely go. It’s a sprinkle of Moonlighting and Twin Peaks, but it also predicted other shows to come, like Gilmore Girls. 

Ed (Darren E. Burrows) is clearly the showrunners’ stand-in character. He’s a young Native man obsessed with movies and music. He gets a few fantasy sequences in the first season that follow his media fascination. One of the episodes even has Ed writing a screenplay about his life in Cicely. He doesn’t have any stand-out storylines yet, but I suspect that as the show slowly shifts away from always being about Joel, Ed will become an even more prominent character. He’s one of those TV characters that there’s no way you can’t like. A couple other characters don’t have a prominent role in this season, so I’ll talk more about them in later reviews.

Overall, Northern Exposure Season One was a good start. I’ve done a little reading, and seasons three and four are where the show garnered most of its acclaim. It’s not too rough to get there, as seasons one and two were mid-season and only have eight and seven episodes, respectively. The following seasons are your typical U.S. lengths, so 22+ episodes. I hope they are good; otherwise, it will be rough going.