![]() ![]() Installed in a crumbling storefront office with a largely monosyllabic Native receptionist named Marilyn Whirlwind (stealth series MVP Elaine Miles), the constantly kvetching Joel immediately began sparring with Maggie O’Connell (Janine Turner), the equally combative bush pilot (and Joel’s unimpressed landlord) in the sort of will-they/won’t-they relationship that, like Joel’s predicament, gradually receded in favor of fleshing out the series’s roster of singular figures. The town of Cicely was quickly established as a haven for eccentrics of all stripes, from frostbitten locals with colorful backwoods backstories to transplants in various stages of flight from old lives too fraught or too comfortably suburban for their liking, to the region’s Native population, whose culture and individuality were allowed far more complexity than on any American TV show at the time. ![]() That degree of difficulty, which only increased in each of the series’s six seasons, meant taking big creative swings. Elsewhere vets Joshua Brand and John Falsey (with executive production help by future Sopranos don David Chase) presented unsuspecting CBS viewers with a much headier and more ambitious formula than its fish-out-of-water premise suggested. From the start, the series, created by St. Quirk can turn twee with just a single wrong step. Of course, Northern Exposure, the tale of petulant young New York Jewish doctor Joel Fleischman (Rob Morrow) sent against his will to the beyond-tiny town of Cicely, Alaska as payment for his med school debts, has its odd sour draught or two during its six-seasons. It’s not impossible to do, it just feels not in the spirit of the gift you’ve been given or the eccentrically twinkling host who’s presented it to you. Plucking out individual best episodes of Northern Exposure is like ranking individual cups pulled from the same expertly spiked punch.
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