As I’ve kept painting (almost done so much trim gahh) and continued to watch Northern Exposure, I’ve reached a place where the show begins to change. Many shows – probably all shows – cope with production challenges that limit or change something about the show’s fiction, particularly related to cast members. Without enough money or an ideal location, you could probably still tell the same story, but it would be less impressive or have a different overall effect. But when you’re lacking a cast member who plays a previously introduced character, there’s not much you can do to overwrite that absence.

In its beginning premise, Northern Exposure is about a Jewish doctor who owes the debt for his medical education to the state of Alaska, and instead of letting him pay it off with a check, the state forces him to spend several years working out in the Alaskan wilderness. He arrives angry and frustrated by his unwilling servitude, and much of the first season is spent watching Dr. Fleischman learn to appreciate Alaska in spite of himself. It’s a charming, familiar, predictable story, and after it completes most of Joel’s Alaskan education, Northern Exposure is free to explore other characters and ideas.

Unfortunately, the actor who plays Dr. Fleischman began to have contract disputes as Northern Exposure’s popularity grew, and by season four, Rob Morrow was occasionally threatening to leave the show unless he received a better contract. It’s certainly not a new or surprising story, but what I love so much about the Northern Exposure version is the way the show responds to this changing pressure from Morrow. Other characters are introduced to take the focus away from Dr. Fleischman, his role in the town becomes much less pronounced, and there are all sorts of subtle moves away from Joel as the show’s protagonist. Even better, though, Northern Exposure then goes out of its way to make Joel Fleischman a tortured, unpleasant, uncomfortable pill. In one episode, he discovers that the state of Alaska is forcing him to extend his promised four years of service to five years, and he spends the entire episode railing against the town full of now-beloved characters for being hicks and uneducated slobs. The show continues to capitalize on Joel’s Yankee snobbishness throughout the first three seasons, but it always does so with generosity and an opportunity for character development. When Joel’s contract with Alaska is extended and he goes off the deep end, I kept expecting a cheesy “awww” moment when he looks around at all the people he’s been friends with for three years and admits that it won’t be so bad to hang around for awhile longer. The moment never comes, and we’re left with a protagonist who despises his own fiction.

Not every episode is quite so explicit, but Joel’s priggishness never returns to its mellow, odd-man-out quality of the previous seasons. He complains bitterly about mosquitoes. He’s whiny to the point of childishness when a lack of patients leads to boredom. I haven’t seen past season four yet, but I know that eventually he gets entirely replaced by other doctors, and I’m just fascinated by the vicious fictional revenge Northern Exposure inflicts on Dr. Fleischman for the crimes of his actor.

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.