A Jewish MD finds a warm home on TV's "Northern Exposure" In one episode last season of the CBS-TV series "Northern Exposure," the good folk of Cicely, Alaska gather on a dreamy evening in the town bar to dance the hora, blow soulfully on a shofar and wave Israeli flags. In another, 62-year-old bar-owner Holling Vincoeur seeks to please the whims of his dizzy 19-year-old girlfriend Shelley by getting a circumcision replacing his "turtleneck," she observes, with a "crewcut."
"Northern Exposure" is a whimsical weekly serio-comedy series which after one season has won critical acclaim and a dedicated cult following. It was called "TV's most enchanting show" by Entertainment Weekly, and in summer reruns has made the top 10 in the Nielsen ratings. Reports out of CBS say spouses of network executives make them bring home the scripts as soon as they're turned in by the writers. On August 25, at the television industry's Emmy awards ceremony, "Northern Exposure" will be up against the likes of "thirtysomething" and "L.A. Law" for the coveted best series of the year award.
The brainchild of Joshua Brand and John Halsey, creators of the "St. Elsewhere" medical drama, "Northern Exposure" far surpasses the usual bland network fare. It is also defiantly unabashed about having as its protagonist a cranky, often irritating New York Jew with an incessant hankering for kosher salamis and hot bagels. Dr. Joel Fleischman (played by Rob Morrow), from a blue-collar Jewish family in Flushing, New York, attended Columbia medical school on an Alaskan-state sponsored scholarship the only one that was available, he tells his seatmate on an Alaskan Airlines flight, to aspiring Jewish doctors "not exactly an endangered species." In return, Fleischman was led to believe, he would be called upon after graduation to practice in Anchorage for four years. But upon arrival he learned that the state capital has all the doctors it needs. The hapless M.D. is subsequently dragged, kicking and screaming, to a small one-moose town in the Alaskan bush, dubbed by a bemused bureaucrat the "Alaskan Riviera," and is told that he faces 18 years in prison if he leaves. Fleischman discovers rather quickly, however, that Cicely is more than a yokel-filled hick town. The local tycoon Maurice Minnifield, an ex-astronaut with a PhD in engineering announces his glee at securing the services of a "Jew doctor." The disk jockey at the local radio station, Chris "In the Morning" Stevens, is an ordained minister and ex-con whose early-morning show sometimes includes readings from the works of Walt Whitman and erudite discussion of the poet's homoeroticism. Fleischman's in-house nudnik is an omnipresent 17-year-old American Indian cineaste with an IQ of 180 and a special fondness for Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman. His would-be love interest, Maggie O'Connell, is an erstwhile Grosse Pointe, Michigan princess turned bush pilot, whose boyfriends (five so far) demonstrate a nasty habit of expiring in her company. The list of quirky inhabitants goes on.
Series creator Joshua Brand is himself a Jewish New Yorker transplanted to the ostensibly more benign West Coast. He and Halsey originally conceived "Northern Exposure" as a serious medical drama, but reconsidered after feeling they had overdosed on straight medicine with the five-year run of "St. Elsewhere." ("We could easily have hung out our own shingle," says Brand). They decided to go for something a little more off-the-wall; Brand cites as inspirations for "Northern Exposure" such films as "Local Hero," about a Texas oil executive who finds himself swayed by the charms of Scottish rural life, and "Never Cry Wolf," based on the true-life arctic adventures of Canadian writer-biologist Farley Mowatt. He also acknowledges the influence of Woody Allen's humor and of Frederico Fellini's surreal portrait of an Italian small town in "Amarcord."
Brand admits that he remains surprised at the show's success, but is sanguine at the lack of fuss made by viewers over the kvetchy Dr. Fleischman's obvious Jewishness. ("I'm not some shmuck just off the caribou trail," Fleischman indignantly declares in the first episode.)
"The only ones who've complained that Joel strikes them as a bit of a whiner are other Jews," says Brand. "If anything, Joel is clearly not a stereotypical, nebbishy Jew. Rob (Morrow) is handsome, not a nerd, not a Woody Allen, and that was important. He's the quintessential urban dweller thrown into the middle of nowhere. His reaction is I want to get out of here.'"
As a new season of "Northern Exposure" gears up, however, it's obvious that Cicely, Alaska, despite its lack of hot pastrami, is growing on Dr. Joel Fleischman as it has on the millions of viewers who tune in regularly.