“There's a dark side to each and every human soul. We wish we were Obi-Wan Kenobi, and for the most part we are, but there's a little Darth Vader in all of us. Thing is, this ain't no either-or proposition. We're talking about dialectics, the good and the bad merging into us. You can run but you can't hide. My experience? Face the darkness. Stare it down. Own it. As brother Nietzsche said, being human is a complicated gig. So, give that ol' dark night of the soul a hug. Howl the eternal yes!” (Chris in the Morning, KBHR radio)
The episodic comedy-drama series Northern Exposure (NE) ran on CBS across five years (1990-1995) for a total of 110 episodes. Critically acclaimed, the show was nominated for 89 awards, winning 27 times, including the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series (1992) and two Golden Globes for Best Television Drama Series (1992, 1993).
Although show quality diminished in later seasons (due mainly to actor Rob Morrow's reduced role following a contract dispute), the writing was consistently intelligent, engagingly allusive, and creatively forward-looking (at times, to its own detriment).
But fans who embraced the challenge, the gamesmanship, and the intelligence of the show were rewarded in abundance. As John J. O’Connor noted in his 1991 review for The New York Times, the show was “irresistibly original, offbeat and disarming, at times suggesting a sort of ‘Twin Peaks’ without the condescending perversity.” Today, NE is more or less forgotten by a generation of viewers, creatives, and educators.
By way of summary, the first four seasons of NE focus on the ongoing trials of New York native Joel Fleischman, a newly minted physician who finds himself in the remote Alaskan outpost of Cicely as part of a (misunderstood) agreement with the state for underwriting his medical training. Beginning as a classic fish-out-of-water story, NE quickly evolves into a master class on being human, living together, and muddling through struggles (real and imagined) with dignity and grace.
Where NE set itself apart was in its willingness to explore "big" ideas and arguably universal questions rather than focusing squarely on the culture wars and politics of the day. And as Shakespeare and others remind us often, universal questions never go away; they reappear in the next generation, packaged in new rhetoric, and fueled by new politics. Teaching these big ideas never goes out of style.
For example, lessons abound in the final episode of Season 1. Titled "Aurora Borealis: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups," the episode begins with the famed Northern Lights causing residents to experience intense vivid dreams that overlap and intertwine profoundly with their real lives. In this surreal environment, Joel encounters the myth of the Bigfoot-like character Adam, who is not only real but (as future episodes reveal) an aggressively arrogant autodidact and spectacular chef.
Local DJ Chris Stevens (John Corbett before Sex and the City) is inspired to create industrial art while at the same time discovering that he has an African-American half-brother, Bernard, who shares his dreams, paternal DNA, and birthday. Not surprisingly, Sigmund Freud figures prominently in the brother’s common dreamscape. Bernard reappears in a later episode (3.7), triggering a discussion of race and racial identity that resonates more today than ever.
There are episodic tributes to the poetry of Walt Whitman (1.2), Twin Peaks (1.5), and Cyrano de Bergerac (2.6). History and historiography weave throughout the series, but never more powerfully than in “What I Did for Love” (2.4) when Stevens discovers that the town was founded by a lesbian couple, Roslyn and Cicely, who had fled the narrow-mindedness of the southern states in the early 1900s. This origin story is revisited in greater detail in "Cicely" (3.23), which also sees Franz Kafka visiting Alaska to rid himself of writer's block.
Freud (and Jung) make frequent guest appearances (1.8, 3.5), quantum physics and the nature of reality are forefronts in “Get Real” (3.9), and ecological philosophy and environmental studies drive several episodes, including “Dateline: Cicely” (3.11), “Blowing Bubbles” (4.5), and “Survival of the Species” (4.11).
For educators focused on film studies, the foundling character Ed Chigliak (Darren E. Burrows) invokes film history in almost every episode while taking the center stage himself in "Sex, Lies and Ed’s Tapes" (1. 6) and “Animals R Us” (3.4).
And as the epigraph to this article shows, Stevens’s daily musings on KBHR (K-Bear) radio are epic freefalls through philosophy, literary and art history, theoretical physics, and popular culture.
As an English professor with over twenty years of lecture hall experience, I have used NE often, and with great success, to illuminate an eclectic mix of literary, humanist, metaphysical, sociopolitical, and even quantum concepts. As former students never hesitate to remind me: the details of my lectures fade quickly, but the "lessons" learned from the regular viewings and discussions of what happens in Cicely, Alaska, remain firmly set.