The year 1990 was a transformative year for television: a group of fresh faced heartthrobs were being turned into overnight sensations with a little show called 90210, the game-changing police drama Law & Order was in its very first season, and a strange murder mystery about the death of a young woman named Laura Palmer was blurring the lines between television and film in Twin Peaks. Yet while all these cultural touchstones would capture the zeitgeist in their own unique way, there is one Emmy-winning hit that few critics still talk about with the same sort of reverence.
Northern Exposure, with a cast of relative unknowns and seemingly little fanfare in the lead-up to release, would become one of mainstream television’s more unlikely breakthrough successes. Featuring a familiar “patient of the week” style approach to its storytelling, paired with a surreal quality that was uncommon for shows of its ilk, the unique comedy-drama would soon charm its way into the hearts and minds of audiences at a time when network television was still playing it relatively safe.
It’s a classic fish-out-of-water premise: brash young New York Doctor, Joel Fleischman, finds himself headed north of the border for a four-year medical placement to pay off his tuition fees, only to find himself plonked in the middle of the rural backwater town of Cicely, the so-called “Alaskan Riviera".
Played by Numbers star Rob Morrow, Dr. Fleischman fills the reluctant role of the town's sole general practitioner, with the kind of neurotic New York energy that Woody Allen first made famous, and George Costanza then turned into an art form. And joining the pantheon of fictional small screen locations like Stars Hollow, Schitt’s Creek and the aforementioned Twin Peaks, the town of Cicely serves up a colourful assortment of mild-mannered folk who are the perfect foil for our uptight protagonist.
There’s the wide-eyed movie buff and aspiring film director Ed (Darren E. Burrows), with whom Fleischman strikes up an immediate friendship, newspaper store owner and local entrepreneur Maurice (Barry Corbin), and the enigmatic bush pilot Maggie (Janine Turner), with whom Dr. Fleischman shares an early fling and who soon becomes the focus of a long-running “will they-won’t-they"-style romance over the course of the series.
Joining them are local disc jockey Chris (played by Sex and the City’s John Corbett), the wise barkeep and un-elected town mayor Holling (John Cullum), and the general store owner Ruth-Anne (Peg Phillips), who is the closest thing to a rational centre in the otherwise eccentric, chaotic community of Cicely.
It’s a formula we’ve seen repeated with great success in shows like Gilmore Girls, where this colourful collage of side characters becomes woven into the fabric of the story, as we the audience begin to warm to their initial flaws. It’s not long before their personal struggles are entwined with that of Dr. Fleischman, proving that there is just as much narrative heft in their journeys as that of our lead character.
The show’s location can also be seen as a character itself, with the Pacific Northwest standing in as the filming location for remote Alaska, which is notable for the fact that the series was shot in roughly the same corner of Washington state as Twin Peaks, David Lynch’s game-changing series, which aired mere months before Northern Exposure first premiered.
The breathtaking lakes and vistas lend Northern Exposure the kind of escapist quality that all of the best fictional towns represent, an approach that modern shows like Hart of Dixie and Virgin River still repeat to this day - whisking viewers away from big city life and into the kind of quaint rural communities we can only glimpse on our screens or in travel brochures.
But Northern Exposure’s most unique quality remains its surrealism, which manifests itself in ever more surprising ways over the course of the show's six seasons. Dream sequences, fourth wall breaking moments and narrative diversions recall everything from Fleabag to Atlanta. Whether it’s the character of Chris experiencing visions of long-dead friends performing musical numbers, or Ed recreating scenes from well-known Hollywood films in his head, it’s no surprise that actor Simon Pegg has cited the show’s unique flights of fancy as a key influence when creating the British cult comedy Spaced.
And despite being made at a time when representation on the small screen was far from reflective of American society, the show's portrayal of its Native American characters is remarkably sensitive, being made as it was many decades before the emergence of true indigenous storytellers who have led to the current crop of acclaimed series like Reservation Dogs and Dark Winds.
Above all else, the true joy of watching Northern Exposure is that it reminds us not only of what episodic television used to represent, but also what debt the current streaming landscape owes to these early '90s pioneers. Although it may not hold the same place in the cultural lexicon as some of its noisier contemporaries, watching it some 35 years later, what surprises the most is how remarkably fresh the show still feels.
Northern Exposure remains the very definition of televisual comfort food, a perfect antidote to the ever-present algorithm and an escape from the fast-paced world in which we live - where much like Dr. Fleischman, we’re forced to slow down, let go of our preconceptions, and witness what true Alaskan hospitality looks like.
Northern Exposure is now streaming at SBS On Demand.
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Northern Exposure
