Dec 21, 2009
Northern Exposure
Joel Fleishman of Flushing, admitted to Columbia’s medical school sans funding, applies for scores of scholarships and receives one: the State of Alaska will pay his tuition provided he serve as a physician in Anchorage for four years immediately after graduation. He’s sent instead to Cicely, Alaska, “the jewel of the ‘Alaskan Riviera’”—the existence of which is purely speculative, residing in the imagination of capitalist baron Maurice Minnifield, whose push to develop the backwater is the cause of Joel’s arrival: secluded hamlets soon to be sprawling centers of civilization need doctors. So begins Joshua Brand and John Falsey’s masterpiece Northern Exposure, whose six seasons chronicle Joel’s transformation from arrogant, lovable prick into human being. New York is ever present as potent imagined counterpoint to Joel’s “indentured servitude” to Cicely’s “primitives“: Minnifield, a former astronaut; mayor and tavern owner Holling Vincoeur and his “main squeeze” Shelly Tambo; orphan auteur Ed Chigliak; ex-con DJ, clergyman and avante-garde artist Chris Stevens; firebrand shopkeeper Ruth-Anne Miller; Grosse Pointe belle turned bush pilot Maggie O’Connell, Joel’s “mutually desirous incompatible“; and the incomparable Marilyn Whirlwind. The series coheres because fantasying of New York is complemented by fantastic plot elements that are both beyond belief and essential to hold the show—and characters, Joel very much included—together. Fantasy does not exist in opposition to reality, but actively constitutes it. In other words, Northern Exposure is far more like lived life than TV. – Kevin Hilke