Postcard from Cicely, Alaska

Our Town:
On the Pleasures of Northern Exposure

And you know the sun's settin' fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
'Cause your heart's bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can't you see the sun's settin' down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.

--Iris DeMent, “Our Town”
(sung in the final episode of Northern Exposure)

I first ran across the TV series Northern Exposure while flipping channels three or four years after they’d stopped making new episodes. It was an entirely prosaic little snippet of an episode, the tomboy bush pilot Maggie O’Connell getting her hair cut à la Peggy Fleming. It was probably the most ordinary scene in the whole six-year-run of the show, considering how far it delved into the byways of the collective unconscious, serving up everything from a poignant Yom Kippur episode based on A Christmas Carol to absurd and charming riffs on Jungian psychology, Italian lessons, small-town democracy and Vincent Price.

Up the street beside that red neon light,
That's where I met my baby on one hot summer night.
He was the tender and I ordered a beer,
It's been forty years and I'm still sitting here.

But you know the sun's settin' fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
'Cause your heart's bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can't you see the sun's settin' down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.

By that point, Northern Exposure gone into that curious realm of televisual Neverneverland, syndication on A&E. Back then, the daytime Arts and Entertainment Network was a curious dumping-ground for the justifiably obscure, faintly illiterate spy dramas involving bad synthesized eighties music and stock footage of either Hawaii or New York. Northern Exposure, NX for short, was something different. First I fell in love with feisty bush pilot Maggie O’Connell, and in short order I fell in love with the whole cast and the quirky little Alaskan town they called home.

Maggie (Janine Turner) wasn’t the main character of the series; she was the love-hate interest of the show’s main character, Joel Fleischmann (Rob Morrow), a transplanted New York Jew working off his med school scholarship debts to the state of Alaska by laboring in Cicely (pop. 800, give or take a few moose). The show’s course is driven by that contradiction, about Fleischman’s struggles to cope with the eccentric, cantankerous locals, and vice versa.

It's here I had my babies and I had my first kiss.
I've walked down Main Street in the cold morning mist.
Over there is where I bought my first car.
It turned over once but then it never went far.

And I can see the sun's settin' fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
'Cause your heart's bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can't you see the sun's settin' down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.

It was a tragicomic pilgrimage where the young doctor struggles to make sense of this brave new world where the town’s single restauranteur is an agnostic sexagenarian Quebecois who not only has the hormone cycles of a rutting caribou, but doesn’t even know what a bagel is. Not to mention that the local radio station is run by a megalomaniac millionaire astronaut, with the assistance of a free-spirited ex-con-turned-theosophist, Chris (John Corbett). (Not everyone was weird: some were just ditzy, and inspiredly so. When Chris started going on about Jung and the collective unconscious, a teenage waitress asked him if they had ever gone on tour or had just cut records.) This was a world where the unknown was to be embraced: a place where humanity’s limitations inculcated wonder rather than fear. It was an Alaskan dreamworld of enfleshed archetypes--real people with universal problems and universal loves.

It’s a deceptively simple set of premises, and this theme of collision, life-giving conflict, resonates throughout the whole six seasons of the show just as clear-cut reality and fantasy collided on a casually regular basis. However, the way the actors, characters and writers manifested that incredibly simple ida gave the show a life of its own. Fleischmann may have been the star, but he was also our passport to the show, our stranger in a strange land. This whiny urban comfort-loving intellectual made the magical-realist world of Cicely—never in-your-face fantasy, but subtle, is-it-or-isn’t-it make-believe that included mute flying men who don’t fly, shape-shifting bears who date girl pilots and an updated retelling of the legend of St. Euphrosyne—all the more believable.

Fleischmann was no Everyman—he was neurotic, opinionated, pushy, self-centered, though in his own odd way, a mensch. It was a brilliant stroke to make him the viewer’s point-man on his journey into the Alaskan wilderness, this cozily dark forest of the subconscious. He threw the town’s quirkiness into high relief, and threw a little whiny grit into the natural beauty. Otherwise, the strange fantasies that lurked beyond the town's borders--dysfunctional personal demons living in trailer parks, an Indian ghost with a fondness for French fries, jeweled lost cities, trickster deer and the frozen corpse of Napoleon's aide-de-camp--might have grown either too grotesquely fantastic or entirely too cute for their own good. His lack of grounding kept the show grounded. Northern Exposure, despite the occasional slips in the space-time continuum, misplaced dreams and haywire northern lights, is also a show about people and places, and all the petty disputes rivalries and sweet friendships that can go on in a little town.

I buried my Mama and I buried my Pa.
They sleep up the street beside that pretty brick wall.
I bring them flowers about every day,
but I just gotta cry when I think what they'd say.

If they could see how the sun's settin' fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
'Cause your heart's bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can't you see the sun's settin' down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.

Nobody was ever quite in the right or quite in the wrong. Maurice might be paranoid and vulgarly nouveau-riche, but he was good-hearted and disciplined. Mostly. Chris might be a nurturing, loving, genius, but he was a layabout skirt-chasing eccentric. Maggie might be strong and beautiful, but she was also flighty and oftentimes crushingly defensive. The viewer was placed in the delightful position of fellow-villager, never quite able to identify with one particular neighbor, never quite agreeing with any one of them but able to survey all the possible avenues of a rivalry or an argument among his neighbors and see a little bit of himself in each and every one of them. You could gossip about these people, love them for their flaws, and maybe think that you had a better way to iron out their problems, even if you didn’t. You were one of the cast.

You felt at home, free to wonder and criticize and be startled and incredulous by the extraordinary tales that they told that all eventually pointed back to the essential beauty of normal life, for all the elaborate flourishes of legend and unreality. Like the title of the song that ended the final episode of the series and left our beloved characters a little older, a little wiser, but moving onward with that mystical normalcy on as they always had, Cicely was truly our town.

But I can see the sun's settin' fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on, I gotta kiss you goodbye,
But I'll hold to my lover,
'Cause my heart's 'bout to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to my town, to my town.
I can see the sun has gone down on my town, on my town,
Goodnight.
Goodnight.

Goodnight Cicely, and may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.