"Pilot"
Written by Joshua Brand and John Falsey, directed by Joshua Brand. Starring Rob Morrow, Barry Corbin, Janine Turner, John Cullum, Darren E. Burrows, John Corbett, Cynthia Geary, Elaine Miles and Peg Phillips.
The main reason I'm doing this is practice. Practice writing reviews, practice making them interesting.
Why a TV show thirty years off the air?
Because I loved it, when it was on the air, and I love it still. The only time I've been up to Seattle- to visit my brother- I dragged his family off to the small town fictionalized in the series as Cicely, Alaska. I visited the locations that served as the main character's office, the village grocery, the Brick tavern, and ate at the restaurant behind the sign featured in the title. I peered into the window at the KBHR set. All decades too late- things were more memory of location than location- but I did it.
Which isn't the sort of thing I do. I don't really need to see filming locations, I've seen plenty of sets before, and frankly? They usually aren't all that damned interesting.
But Cicely, Alaska? Somehow, in watching the series all those years ago, Cicely became very real to me. Not real in the sense that I thought- or think- that I could go there. Real in the sense that it felt real. Fully imagined, and oddly familiar. And it is a show that I tend to revisit, when I feel at odds with myself.
I've said, more than once, that nostalgia is a trap, that memories of our halycon days are flawed- as our memories make things all seem better and grander than they actually were. But for me- Northern Exposure presents a very homey and familiar place. Someplace that feels to me as if I might have been there. As if, had I turned one way, rather than the other, I'd have turned up at The Brick, rather than the Dundee Dell.
So.
Pilots are not like regular episodes of an intended series. They're meant to prove to the financers who are meant to pay for everything and the network or studio meant to show it that it can actually be made. That the production team can build sets, cast the right actors, hire the right writers and tell a decent story. One that will interest viewers and the advertisers who want to sell to those viewers.
And, in addition to telling that story, they have to introduce the characters and set up the ongoing series.
Some pilots never air- made more to sell the show than actually function as an episode. Others are scrapped- the process of production having revealed a need for changes.
Northern Exposure's pilot aired- and it does a fabulous job setting up the leads, the town and the general character of the show.
The premise is... After finishing his residency, M.D. Joel Fleischman lands in Anchorage, Alaska, where he is meant to practice for several years- in exchange for the state paying off his medical school debt.
Anchorage doesn't need him, so he's bundled off to Cicely. A small town out in the back of beyond. One of these places surrounded by wilderness, with one of everything- church, bar, restaurant, rich bully trying to run everything, etc.
Joel hates it. The residents who aren't strange seem ignorant and hostile. The town handyman seems to have siezed upon him as an entertainment, his landlord as a frustration, and the food is inedible.
Of course, none of that is true, exactly. The residents aren't strange so much as they are strange to him. Cicely is better appointed than it appears, and a sizeable number of the locals are Native Americans, who's cultural norms make more sense the more he's around them.
The pleasure comes from watching Joel acclimate- largely against his will- and watching the other characters bloom from sketches into paintings. Between the writing, directing and acting, they turn into very real seeming people, with personality, strengths and weaknesses, flaws and delights.
Maurice, the rich bully- is nursing a broken heart and feuding with his best friend, who stole away the woman Maurice intended to marry. Holling, the best friend, is a from a long line of awful, awful people and intended never to marry- to let the family line die off. And now he's in love, in his late sixties- with a woman barely into her twenties. Joel's landlord, who's as frustrating as he is, is an unintentional black widow. Her boyfriends don't break up with her so much as drop dead. All accidents, all strange accidents, but she's built a miniature graveyard/shrine to them in her living room.
And so on and so forth. No one stays a cipher, native beliefs are respected, modern US beliefs are disrespected, and it all grows into an ensemble show about an accidental family.
The plot? Joel arrives, gets shuttled off to Cicely, hates it, and spends the entire episode learning that he has no legal way to break his contract. In the process meeting and mingling with the other characters who'll pop up regularly.
That's kinda nothing. Just a bunch of vignettes, really. But it all holds together. The writing and acting, it's all set up, but it's setting up a pleasant place, with interesting people, who it might be nice to drop in on for an hour every week.
Errata.
None of the characters, in the pilot, are quite who they become. They are very close, but not quite there- sort of playing things larger. Rob Morrow plays Fleischman at such a level of strident hectoring that it's a wonder no one just cocks him one in the nose. Janine Turner plays Maggie- obvious eventual love interest- as if she wants to bite someone. But. John Cullum as Holling and Barry Corbin - while, again, not quite where they get with their characters, later on, are a lot of fun to watch in these rougher versions. Corbin has a lot of fun with Maurice's emotional volatility- flinty one moment, sad and teary eyed literally the next. Cullum displays a mastery of the reaction take.
The actual town- Roslyn, Washington- is a lot larger than fictional Cicely. Cicely is basically one street to one side of Roslyn. The series production team does a pretty good job making it look isolated and small- a main street, with some side streets and a few blocks of housing. But it's not perfect here- it never is, really. And you start to get a sense that a town as small as Cicely is meant to be, and as isolated, could not actually survive. Where's the service station for the trucks and cars? The garage? How does Holling get his beer and food? How does Ruth Ann get her store resupplied? Where the hell do all these people in Cicely work?
Having set foot in the location set for Dr. Fleischman's office- the studio set is laid out exactly the same way, but it's about five times larger. Which was weird at the time. It's a clothing and mercandise shop now, and- over by those tables is where Marilyn sat, past that door is Joel's private office, etc. But rather than being several feet apart, it is all right to hand. Made me appreciate the wizardry of cinematography. Joel arges with Maggie in his office, she storms out, he follows her, stomping through his little hall, past Marilyn, and catches her by the door. You can see people moving around outside, the real streets of Roslyn, so that shot is at the location, but you cannot tell that it is so much smaller.
7 of 10. See you next episode.
