Here we are…Cicely, Alaska. You are familiar with Cicely, right?
Cicely was a community, in the truest, if not zaniest, sense of the word. Week after week, for six years, it captured - with mesmerizing ability, indeed - the complexity and comedic content of the human spirit. And what a quirky group of Alaskan eccentrics it was filled with: a philanthropic former astronaut obsessed with making the town a premier tourist destination, a tomboyish bush pilot, a sexagenarian tavern owner, an existentialist, ex-con disc jockey, who quoted Kierkegaard, Whitman and Tolstoy, and a Native American shaman-in-training, with an unlimited capacity for the love of filmmaking.
Each of these characters seemed to be placed there to annoy, pester, and try the patience of Dr. Joel Fleischman, a neurotic Jewish transplant from New York City, stuck as Cicely's physician for five years, forced to work off his medical student loan debt to the state of Alaska.
To Northern Exposure fans, the fictitious name of Cicely needs no introduction. The setting for the television show (1990-1995), however, wasn't a charmingly remote town on the edge of the massive and empty Alaskan wilderness but a charmingly remote town about 100 miles east of Seattle.
When Northern Exposure bowed out, the whole gang was at Maurice Minnifield's Tranquility Base, a trig summer lodge dedicated to America's astronauts, with rooms named after noteworthy spacemen, including Buzz Aldrin, Chuck Yeager, and Alan Shepard. Maurice's brutish girlfriend - tough talking, primitively androgynous, state trooper Barbara Semanski - had just accepted his marriage proposal.
Maggie O'Connell, the delirious debutante, blew off a trip to Greenland to see “Bubbleman” Mike Monroe, electing to instigate a new romantic interest with fellow Cicelian Chris Stevens. Holling Van Couer, the rugged trapper turned tavern owner, was in annual rut, having picked up the sexual biorhythms of the caribou bull, and spent the entire vacation in the bedroom with his decades younger wife, Shelley.
In the final scene we see a poignant parting montage of all the characters, back home to Cicely, while Iris Dement's beautiful “Our Town” serenades the sensibilities: Maurice and Barbara; Ruth-Anne and Walt at Ruth-Anne's general store, Michelle and Phil at their house; Maggie and Chris dancing together in her living room; and Marilyn closing the shades. The final establishing shot of Cicely culminated one of the wittiest and most brilliant television shows ever written.
It's hard for me to accept the fact that I actually enjoyed a television show. And it's even more difficult to find myself waxing on about it's virtues in an article. But, heck, Northern Exposure was a different kind of show: intellectual, sardonic, a coherent version of the counter-narrative, the circumventing anti-show. It was thin on plot, but thick on purpose.
When a friend (thanks, Brian) loaned my girlfriend, Terri, and I, a copy of the pilot episode last October, we were both amused. We initially thought the show would, at the very best, provide us with a few mindless hours of frivoulous entertainment. Less than nine months later, however, we had watched the entire six seasons. Strangely, the show added dimensions of joy and vitality to our lives that gave us a fuller sense of a small town America well worth remembering: of community picnics and kooky events; wacky parades and carnivals; rife with the unexpected grace exemplifying the full range of human needs; the resolve of men and women seeking the spiritual salve of mountainous myths.
In the Cicelian community of seers and seekers, everyone wanted to live the romantic vision of experience, and the town was a seemingly boundless world; people walked the streets with their heads in the clouds; and everyone seemed to know everyone else, for better or worse. Meddlesome and tight-knit, rebellious and spunky, individualistic and community-bound, Cicelians always persevered.
Northern Exposure tied humanity's finite place to the larger infinite environment, a significant thematic thread echoed throughout the six seasons. Cyclical and seasonal forces such as seasonal winds, midnight sun, Northern Lights, and ice melting away in springtime, often impact the joy, glory and passions of Cicelians (Holling's rut in the final episode is one example). Nature is a blessing not to be taken for granted, and no swaggering machismo or affluence or materialism or intellect can surpass - or even match - its impeccable wisdom, honed independence, or unforgiving diplomacy.
If there's one character from the show I feel a particular attachment to, it's Chris Stevens. It's hard for me to forget the episode when he's traumatized by the realization that if he takes pills to control his high blood pressure, that they will keep him from dying before he reaches the age of forty. (Early male death is a Stevens' family tradition.)
