Northern Exposure
It’s been painfully obvious over the past several weeks on the blog, but just in case you hadn’t noticed my shameful, repeated absences – I’ve been doing some stuff. Namely, stuff that has involved lots of cross-country travel, late-night trips to Home Depot, a surprising amount of ribbon tying, several frenzied IKEA trips, brochure gathering, a UHaul rental, a fabulous meal at Momofuku Ko, frantically skimming that Dickens classic Sketches by Boz, dodging through crowds of people dressed as sci fi characters trying to get a photo of William Shatner, illicitly disposing of massive amounts of cardboard in campus recycling bins, etc. etc. etc. It’s been a strange, awesome six weeks.
You may note that TV viewing did not make it into the list of prominent activities, and although that is accurate in comparison to my normally TV-saturated schedule, I did manage to strategize one aspect of the craziness to coordinate with some television watching. We have been painting our new apartment, which means that while my husband is at work, I am at home doing all of the edges and trim so he can do all of the rolling. And while I sit, painstakingly working my way around doorframes and windows (I accidentally wrote “paintstakingly” har har), I’ve been watching Northern Exposure.
It’s a show I remember seeing occasionally on daytime reruns when I was about ten, and have since rediscovered as an appealing, funny, comforting, gently surreal portrait of a tiny town in Alaska that reminds me as much of Twin Peaks as it does The Gilmore Girls. Cicely, Alaska was founded by two lesbian patronesses as a highbrow artist’s retreat and salon, and in the mid-nineties of the show, is now home to a parade of wacky personalities. There’s a retired astronaut, a recently imported Jewish doctor, a radio DJ who reads Whitman and Dostoyevsky, a laconic Inuit office manager, a cheerleader and her seventy-year-old lover, and a host of other bizarre characters.
John Corbett as Cicely's radio host
What I discovered in my paint-fume laced Northern Exposure marathon sessions is that I had inadvertently chosen the ideal show for a divided attention, because it somehow manages to be funny and engrossing while also having almost no plot. There are no long arc mysteries, there’s a tiny hint of sexual tension between two characters that hardly counts as a developing story much less a soap opera, and the single-episode plotlines are so relaxed and mundane that they’re more like single-episode premises. A Russian classical musician, who has been to Cicely before and whom everyone likes, returns for an episode. Ed, the town’s resident filmmaker, has an idea about filming a guy who makes wooden whistles. In one episode, everyone gets the flu. It’s like watching a show where every script is copped from a small town newspaper, and the biggest stories of the day are not necessarily the fact that there’s an annual blood drive, but who’s running the blood drive, and whether they need more volunteers to bake cookies, and how much money they need to put up a new stop sign, and the fact that it’s been above 70 degrees twice this week even though it’s only May!
Darren Burrows as Ed Chigliak
The series is often meta-fictionalized through Ed Chigliak’s amateur filmmaking efforts, and it’s telling that his preferred form is the portrait – his films are almost always brief portrayals of inspiring people around town, he rarely works with a script or even a fictional concept, and his favorite subject matter is everyday life.
I love plot. So much of my pleasure in narrative comes out of anticipating what’s going to happen next, and watching all of the pieces fall together. But Northern Exposure is a lesson in the possibilities of a long story where the story is the least important aspect of narrative, and all of that energy and forward-drive gets displaced onto singular characters and a setting that is both unusual and familiar.