The Psychological Realism of Northern Exposure

in the 'Alaskan Riviera', the fictional town of Cicely becomes a microcosm of human nature.

I first came across the TV show Northern Exposure thanks to my parents, who had the box set on DVD. (Remember those?) They lived in the United States for part of the 90s, before I was born, and caught some of the show as it was airing. Northern Exposure received a number of accolades in the US during its run, but as far as I’m aware didn’t have as much popularity in the UK, though it retains a cult following on both sides of the Atlantic. It was the summer before I left home for university and I had nothing to do, so I watched the whole series over the course of a few months. I was immediately charmed by the quirky characters and the warm feeling of the show, and it has remained one of my favourites.

For those who haven’t seen the show, here’s the premise: Joel Fleischman, a newly qualified doctor from New York City, is sent to Alaska to fulfil the conditions of his medical school scholarship. He ends up as the doctor for the fictional town of Cicely, where he quickly becomes acquainted with the off-beat way of life there, as well as the town’s inhabitants. His tenure is for four years, and Fleischman immediately resents the town as he wanted to be stationed in Anchorage instead. It’s a classic fish-out-of-water scenario.

Once there, Joel is introduced to Maggie O’Connell, a pilot who runs the air delivery service; Maurice Minnifield, a former astronaut and rich patron of the town, living in nostalgia for his glory days; Chris Stevens, the town DJ at Radio KBHR (pronounced “K-Bear”); Shelly Tambo and Holling Vincoeur, the couple who run the bar; and Ed Chigliak, an aspiring filmmaker. Other characters include Marilyn Whirlwind, Joel’s receptionist and a woman of few words, and Ruth-Anne Miller, the shopkeeper.

It’s a real ragtag bunch of characters, most of whom have come to Cicely from outside the state or even the country - Maggie from Michigan, Maurice from Oklahoma, Shelly from Saskatchewan, Holling from the Yukon, Chris from West Virginia - and each of them have distinct personalities and their own funny quirks. Most of them seem to have come to Cicely in order to escape something - their upbringing, their boring work life, or the trappings of urban civilisation. The show focuses on Joel’s story at first, but over time widens to become equally about all of them.

Joel is extremely at odds with the other townsfolk at the beginning - he is a hardened New Yorker, hyper-rational yet incredibly neurotic, as opposed to the Cicelians, who are used to hunting moose and camping in the wild. But over the course of the show’s six seasons, he gradually loses his city slicker ways and becomes a fully-fledged Alaskan. In one episode, he realises this and has a huge identity crisis, taking to ordering bagels to be flown in from New York, in an attempt to keep hold of the person he used to be. But as Joel loses his old identity, we also see him relax, slow down, and enjoy life more. In the end, being stuck in a small town in the middle of nowhere does him quite a lot of good. 

However, Fleischman does leave Cicely in the final season, wandering off into the Alaskan bush in an effort to find the ‘Jeweled City of the North’, which is implied to be New York - but this only happened due to Rob Morrow’s (the actor who plays Joel) departure from the show after a long-running dispute over pay. The writers had to somehow get Joel out of the picture, and that’s what they came up with. But I don’t like to talk about season six in general.

So, to bring in the main point of this essay: What do I mean by ‘psychological realism’? And what does that have to do with Northern Exposure? What I’m saying is that the show does an excellent job of portraying how people really are, which is complex, nuanced, and morally ambiguous.

It’s not a sitcom in the traditional sense. There’s no laughter track, no live studio audience. It doesn’t rely on stereotypes or offensive remarks for humour or intrigue. Northern Exposure can be more accurately described as a comedy-drama, though the dramatic element of the show is also quite understated. As a result, nothing is played up for laughs, and the conflicts which drive much of the plot are also not amped up for the sake of drama but feel more realistic. The conflicts between characters are not merely interpersonal as they appear on the surface, but the show goes deeper into the psychological motivations behind each character’s actions, which is how things get properly solved.

The characters feel like real people you could actually know, even people you may have met already. They make mistakes, they have different political views, they delude themselves, they have to deal with the consequences of their actions in a very quotidian and undramatic way. People have mysterious health issues which clear up after an issue is addressed in their personal lives. They make drastic decisions on a whim, and once they realise that it might not be the best path for them to take, they go back mostly to normal, though having learned something. This is how our real lives go. One can see how Northern Exposure might have prefigured later slice-of-life mockumentary style sitcoms such as The Office and Modern Family.

And yet there is this other element to the show, one which is not realistic at all in the literal sense, but which deals with the mysterious, the numinous, and the otherworldly. Spirituality is a big part of the show. For instance, Native American culture features heavily, and with that comes beliefs about spirits, the divine powers of nature, and connection with the land. A good representation of this is the character One Who Waits, who appears in various episodes as a spirit guide to Ed. No-one else apart from Marilyn and the other Indigenous characters can see him. 

This element of the show crosses over into what we would call ‘magical realism’. While it’s not terribly common for people to actually see spirits, it’s well attested that people have these experiences of the supernatural, something beyond earthly existence, or what western folks might call ‘ghosts’. (Other such moments include when Joel’s former Rabbi climbs onto his boat from a lake while he is trying to catch a big fish, which then swallows them both, and when Maggie falls ill while camping and hallucinates a meeting with her former boyfriends, all of which are dead.)

Indigenous traditions such as powwows - and, apparently, a day when they throw tomatoes at white people as payback - coexist with other religious traditions, such as in the cases of Joel organising a Jewish funeral for his uncle and Shelly marrying Holling. This cultural exchange is surprisingly harmonious and respectful, even utopian in nature.

Dreams also play a big role in the show, often being what impels a character towards a certain course of action or towards addressing a conflict. This is, of course, what dreams do. Dreams exist in the realm of the unconscious psyche, and they convey important information to us through symbols and archetypes about internal conflicts and life situations, even if they appear at first glance to be seemingly random and unrelated assortments of images.

In an episode of season four titled “Revelations”, Chris travels to a Catholic monastery to stay for a week as a monk. He develops an interest in one of the other monks called Brother Simon, who does not speak or show his face. Chris is a psychoanalytically minded individual and also very talkative, being Cicely’s radio host, and the other characters often come to him for advice since there is no therapist in town. He quotes Jung and Thoreau, he is spiritually omnivorous, interested in various traditions and philosophies, and will often wax lyrical with ramblings about whatever existential quandaries may be on his mind while on the air. Brother Simon’s silence and mystery, by contrast, is deeply intriguing to him. 

Chris has a dream about working at the monastery’s beehives with Brother Simon. They are talking - or Chris is talking - and he grabs the monk and kisses him, waking up in a cold sweat. Thereafter, he has a brief but intense crush on Brother Simon, becoming obsessed by the desire to see his face. 

Eventually it is revealed that Brother Simon is a woman masquerading as a male monk - she has always longed for a life of monasticism, but couldn’t bear to be without the company of men. This was somewhat disappointing for me as a gay viewer, especially since the crisis Chris goes through in this episode is resolved by the reassurance that he is in fact still heterosexual. Nonetheless, this ‘revelation’ is intended to break the spell of Chris’ infatuation. The woman also reveals her real name: Chris.

The dream Chris has in this episode can be interpreted to symbolise the desire to get to know your own unconscious, as Brother Simon, cloaked in dark robes, face concealed, silent, could be seen as an image of the psychological shadow. Kissing your shadow self in a dream can be an image of merging the conscious and unconscious sides of the self, and therefore as a symbol of individuation. Chris sees Brother Simon as a mirror of his own unconscious, and once he sees the real person underneath, his obsession evaporates.

Another way the show realistically portrays human nature is through the tension of opposites within a character. A good example of this is Maurice, who is politically conservative, owns a lot of land, and generally lords his authority over others. In particular, the show’s handling of his dislike of gay people is interesting, because despite this fact, Maurice ends up forming a fruitful business relationship with a gay couple called Ron and Eric, who purchase a hotel near Cicely from him. Although Maurice says that he doesn’t approve of their ‘lifestyle’, he comes to tolerate them and they eventually become friends.

In Season 5 Episode 21, “I Feel the Earth Move”, when Ron and Eric are planning their wedding - the first scripted gay wedding to appear on American television - Maurice initially disapproves of the event once he learns of it, but when the couple have a fight and Eric asks for money from him to leave town, he talks him out of the decision and encourages him to patch things up. Maurice even attends the wedding in the end.

The show’s handling of The Gay Issue is sympathetic towards Ron and Eric, but also towards Maurice, allowing his anti-gay views their own airtime, though they don’t go unchallenged. This does not detract from the ultimate message of acceptance which is conveyed. The tension of opposites within Maurice, where his disdain for homosexuality is in conflict with his positive feelings for Ron and Eric, is crucial for his character development, and is also accurate in that it is how people actually are: as Walt Whitman (someone beloved and oft-quoted by Chris) wrote, we contain multitudes. Facing up to his inner conflict is a maturing experience for Maurice. 

Also consider the fact that Maurice has a soft spot for show tunes and enjoys gourmet cooking, such that Ron and Eric assume he is also gay when they meet him. It is even suggested that Maurice has some repressed homosexual tendencies himself. Though we as viewers know about his affairs with women, it goes to show that these contradictions can exist within a person - they can be disgusted by homosexuality while also enjoying thoroughly gay pastimes. The topic of bisexuality is never brought up, however.

One of the major plotlines of the entire show is the extremely slow-burning romance between Joel and Maggie. Slow-burning doesn’t quite describe it - it’s more like a sloth’s-pace burn. When Joel and Maggie first meet, they take an instant dislike to each other. Maggie finds him pedantic and annoying; Joel thinks she’s a man-hating strident feminist. But at the same time, the sexual tension between them is immediately apparent. It’s the quintessential enemies to friends to lovers storyline.

Again we come to the problem of opposites. Psychoanalytic theory states that when we fall in love with someone, a nodal point of hatred is also established in the unconscious as an opposite force, and since the tension of opposites is the mechanism by which the psyche moves and evolves, the hatred is as crucial as the love for driving the relationship forward. It makes sense, therefore, that when we declare someone our enemy, a nodal point of love is also established in the psyche which drives the development of the relationship. We know that the line between love and hate is thin, and that both provoke similar reactions. It’s that old saying: Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

Maggie and Joel hate each other so passionately in the beginning that it borders on obsession. In this way, the bedrock for their romance is laid down from the start, but they have to overcome their issues first. They continue to argue and hurl insults at each other throughout the first few seasons of the show, while everyone else in the town suspects their secret attraction to one another.

As the show progresses, they have a number of sexual encounters, but both of them brush these incidents off as moments of insanity, the simple loss of control, and they refuse to acknowledge that there could be any possibility of a romantic relationship between them. In one episode, hilariously, Maggie represses the memory of one of their clandestine exploits in a barn to the point where she forgets it entirely. When Joel reminds her of it, she is extremely shocked and upset. 

Now why would this happen? Because her positive feelings for Joel are intolerable to her, and the same goes for him. Any acknowledgement of anything close to love between them threatens both of their identities and their convictions that the other person is the enemy. At the same time, Maggie gets Joel to pretend to be her boyfriend for the folks back home, and he goes along with it.

What I love about this storyline is that both characters have to do the difficult inner work of overcoming their own obstacles which are blocking their positive feelings for each other. Again, this is often how it goes in people’s real lives - real, honest love takes time to grow and requires personal responsibility. Before Joel and Maggie can become a romantic couple, they have to become friends first, and this happens gradually.

Over time their conflicts become less destructive, their tenderness for each other emerges, and they eventually get together for real. But even then, their romance is so not the focus on-screen that you almost wonder if they are together at all. The show is more focused on other aspects of their characters, though there are some lovely moments between them. And then season six goes and fucks it all up completely, but we’ll just ignore that.

So, to conclude - the reason Northern Exposure stands the test of time, aside from its great writing and brilliant acting, is the uniqueness in how it realistically portrays the ways that real people behave. That is to say, people are a mixture of rational and irrational, they are inconsistent and contradictory, and they are also capable of change. The characters grapple with the timeless and fundamental problems of life, and strangely enough, this realism is incredibly comforting to watch.