TV Review – Northern Exposure Season Six

Northern Exposure Season Six (1994-95)
Written by Diane Frolov, Andrew Schneider, Mitchell Burgess, Robin Green, Jeff Melvoin, Meredith Stiehm, and Sam Egan
Directed by Michael Fresco, Jim Charleston, James Hayman, Lorraine Senna, Oz Scott, Michael Vittes, Victor Lobl, Daniel Attias, Michael Lange, Janet Greek, Stephen Cragg, Scott Paulin, and Patrick McGee

Wow. That was…um, something. By the time season six of Northern Exposure ends, you will have been waiting for it to end for a while. David Chase didn’t do too much damage in season five, but by the time six rolled around, it became clear he was disinterested in the whole thing other than ways to shoehorn in his own interests. While watching these episodes, I thought about how weird it would be to watch the pilot and then jump to season six. It would feel like an almost totally different series.

Things start off badly. “Dinner at Seven-Thirty” is the premiere episode of season six. Joel (Rob Morrow) accidentally drinks a healing concoction made by Ed while doing his shaman thing. He imagines an entirely different life with the actors from the show cast in the roles of people in his life. Cynthia Geary plays Joel’s wife, while Janine Turner plays the couple’s au pair. I hated this episode, unlike any episode of the show. My reason was that fans were excited to see a new episode of Northern Exposure at the time after the summer break and tune in, only to watch an entirely different show. For me, this set the tone for the rest of this season.

The second episode threw another wrench into things. Ed, an aspiring filmmaker who opened up to becoming a shaman last season, has now pivoted into an entirely new career as a private investigator. He is an assistant to Reynaldo Pinetree, a PI introduced in the previous season. They are in the case of a suspected insurance scam by Hayden, one of the background characters who becomes more and more present throughout these episodes. So, does the Ed as a private investigator thing going anywhere? Nah, they drop it. So, will he develop as a filmmaker or shaman, then? Nope. Ed is there without anything interesting happening to him. He has a girlfriend for a couple episodes, but that ends.

Of all the characters who undergo a complete collapse in how they are portrayed is Chris (John Corbett). It feels as if the writers suddenly forgot how to write anything for this character. Corbett apparently would change his hairstyle and look without telling producers or the show’s stylists, which you can see throughout. He suddenly loses his philosophical ex-con angle and becomes a stupid dirtbag for many episodes. Then we get the old Chris we know again. Then, a different Chris. Then in the same episode, he’ll behave like he used to and then pivot into a complete dick because it’s plot convenient. 

Rob Morrow had become tired of the lack of growth for his character, becoming like Joel, contractually stuck in a place where he believed he couldn’t grow. Throughout seasons 4 and 5, Morrow and his team had been pushing for a new contract & provide the actor with something more substantial. This became visible on the show in season five with episodes like the wheelchair race, where Morrow is written to be out of town while writing in a guest star doctor. That all came to a head here eight episodes into the season.

Joel was given the spotlight in several episodes throughout season six, but they all felt reasonably repetitive of other situations and stories we’d seen him in. “Up River” begins with Maurice (Barry Corbin) raging about Joel running away. He’s gone upriver to a native village and refuses to return. Ed visits a very different, less anxious, more relaxed Joel, who is growing his hair out and a beard. Joel’s story annoyed me for one primary reason: They have to write Maggie like a different, idiotic character to get this plot to work. The episode ends, and Ed is rowing his canoe away. Joel waves from the shore. Wow, guess that’s the end. Goodbye, Joel.

But nope. Joel keeps showing up for seven more episodes. In the ninth episode of the season, “Sons of the Tundra,” we see the introduction of Dr. Phil Capra (Paul Provenza) and his wife Michelle (Teri Polo), a journalist. They go through the same fish out of water plot beats through the rest of the season that Joel went through, though I could tell their assimilation into Cicely was sped up considerably compared to the former doc. By the finale, they are invited to hang out with everyone at Maurice’s new summer lake house as if they are old friends. 

Joel continues finding reasons to return to Cicely for a visit, or the show has people going out to see him. There are some great moments from this, I’ll admit. I think it was good to have Joel go through a radical transformation. It didn’t make sense for him to still act like he did when he first arrived. Joel even invites Capra to meet him and shares information on the patients he believes his replacement will need to know. Maggie visits for a pretty good episode about all her fears of what will happen to Joel in the wilderness.

It all wraps up in “The Quest,” the season’s sixteenth of twenty-two episodes. Joel is convinced he’s found a map to the mythical Jeweled City of the North. He asks Maggie to fly him into the Arctic Circle, which does and accompanies him on this magical-realist odyssey. When they find the city (with help from a cameo by Adam [Adam Arkin]), Joel recognizes the skyline. Somehow, it’s New York City. He asks Maggie to come with him, and she realizes Cicely is her place. She and Joel part ways amicably. She even gets a postcard from him at the end. I liked the send-off, and it would have been even better if the show had ended here.

During Joel’s last arc, the show’s writers are scrambling to find a foundation that the series can grow out of now. They have the Capras, who are Italian-American, by the way, which is something I’m sure Chase asked for. We even learn that Cicely has a Little Italy neighborhood, which provides us with one of the season’s weaker episodes. Maggie wins the mayoral election for Cicely in the cold open of an episode, introducing the worst plot development in Northern Exposure. Chris realizes he’s falling in love with Maggie. And the show has her return these affections. It is one of the worst “romances” I’ve seen on TV, with extremely little chemistry between them. The actors play better as friends, not this.

In January 1995, Northern Exposure was moved from Monday nights to Wednesdays, and it was seen as a movie by CBS to kill the show. At the end of April, Northern Exposure was pulled from the line-up. In May, CBS announced their new schedule for the coming Fall 1995-96 season. Northern Exposure was not on it. The final three episodes of the show were aired unceremoniously in July. The final episode does have a last scene that could be read as saying goodbye, but the showrunners didn’t make it with that in mind. Just the conclusion of a season. That was the end of Northern Exposure.

I enjoyed this show for the most part, but this last season was incredibly difficult to get through. So many episodes were just duds, shifting our attention away from characters we liked or presenting them in ways contradictory to their personalities. Chris was probably the most significant fatality to this, ending up like three or four different people throughout the season. The romance with Maggie was unbearable. I definitely think there’s story potential for a mini-series return to see what the Cicelians are up to now, but I doubt that’s likely to happen. Seasons 3 and 4 were pretty damn good, though, and justify my recommendation to watch this show if you haven’t already.