
Northern Exposure: A Cultural History by Michael Samuel
There's much to like in Michael Samuel's Northern Exposure: A Cultural History, as there is in the delightful and historically significant US television series he highlights, and of which he admits to having been—during its original six-season run (1992–98) and remaining—a "huge fan" (194). The book is a straightforward production and reception history, and a short and breezy read with the main text consisting of a little over 100 pages with the bulk of the following 90-plus pages devoted to capsulized summaries of the CBS series' 110 episodes and a fan survey. The book's stated aim is "to provide a portrait of the cultural moment" (iii) that paved the way for "the prototype modern TV series" during "television's second golden age" (13).1
While I would prefer an indefinite article before "prototype" and a prefix of "post" before "modern," Northern Exposure unquestionably belongs among a group of highly innovative, self-reflexive programs that burst on the American TV scene from the early 1980s into the 1990s and beyond. Launched by Hill Street Blues (1981–1987) and the Northern Exposure creators' own St. Elsewhere (1982–1988), the spike in quality and complexity continued among other broadcast network shows such as Miami Vice (1984–1989), Moonlighting (1985–1989), thirtysomething (1987–1991), The Simpsons (1989–), Seinfeld (1989–1998), Twin Peaks (1990–1991), Picket Fences (1992–1996), and The X-Files (1993–2002), and the HBO cable series, The Larry Sanders Show (1992–1998). [End Page 306]
The book gets off to a great start with an entertaining and informative description of how the tiny Cascade Range town of Roslyn in Washington state was chosen as the setting for Northern Exposure's fictional Alaskan backwoods town of Cicely. Samuel illuminates how Roslyn's backstory was incorporated into that of its fictional twin, helping establish Cicely—named after its freethinking founder whose lesbian partner was named Roslyn—as a major character in the series. He also shows how Northern Exposure's faux town of Cicely has given back to its once impoverished, real-life progenitor by turning Roslyn into a tourist mecca during, and long after, the series' original run.
The reception section in the book's final chapter is another plus. There, super-fan Samuel, based on a fan survey he undertook (treated in-depth in Appendix B), is forced to admit that in "some ways" Northern Exposure has "aged badly" (98). The survey contributors' main complaints, with which Samuel sympathizes, bemoan how a TV show, extolled for its progressive treatment of race, gender, and sexual orientation in the 1990s, has, in retrospect, fallen woefully behind the curve, especially in regard to sexism and Native American stereotyping.
This openness to criticism about the series, however, makes a glaring blind spot in Samuel's overall analysis all the more curious. What Samuel inexplicably fails to address, indeed has opted to erase, is nothing less than Northern Exposure's very essence: its Jewishness. And that Samuel is not Jewish is no excuse.2 Let's start with the series' creators, Joshua Brand and John Falsey, for whom Samuel provides extensive and quite interesting background information. Yet in mentioning Brand's birth in New York in 1950 to Polish immigrant parents, he neglects to add that the parents were also Jewish—likely a crucial factor in their immigrating in the first place and in Brand's always viewing "the world from the perspective of an outsider" (19).
Samuel offers another nice tidbit in referencing the film, Local Hero (1983) as a major conscious influence on Northern Exposure. And indeed, their fish-outof-water plots are remarkably similar: the one featuring a young, oil company representative sent from Houston to a small Scottish town to purchase the town for the firm; the other centering on a New York City medical school graduate sent to a remote Alaskan burg to fulfill the terms of his college scholarship—with transformative repercussions for both protagonists. That Local Hero's lead actor, Peter Riegert, also bears strong resemblance to Northern Exposure's Rob Morrow, in both their accents and physical appearance, Samuel attributes solely to their joint New York City upbringing. Again, oddly missing from this [End Page 307] somewhat strained comparison is the more compelling fact that both Riegert and Morrow are New York Jews.
The fait accompli, however, is Morrow's character's name—Dr. Joel Fleischman—as recognizably Jewish as they come and combined with his New York City residence and doctor's occupation, Jewish overkill along the lines of the eponymous Jerry Seinfeld's New York Jewish comedian in Seinfeld. Adding kosher frosting to the Bundt cake, David Margulies and Joanna Merlin, the actors who play Joel's parents, were both (Talk about Method casting!) of the Jewish persuasion.
So, Jewishness is in Northern Exposure's DNA, no Ancestry.com sample needed. But how does ethno-religiosity play out in the series? While granting that Jewishness is by no means the end-all and be-all of this rich and multifaceted series, Joel is literally the series' reason to be—both behind the scenes and on screen. Though the network got more than it bargained for, it was Brand and Falsey's "city-doctor-goes-to-country-town" pitch that got CBS to greenlight the show; and Joel's grappling with, and learning from, his status as Cicely's only gefilte fish-out-of-water is the series' overarching character arc. Several episodes explicitly address Joel's Jewishness and related Jewish themes. These include Joel's visions in which the figure of Rabbi Schulman (played by the Jewish Jerry Adler), Joel's New York rabbi, appears; Joel's dream in which the biblical prophet Elijah teaches him a lesson about objective reality; and his understandable qualms about Christmas and whether to get a tree. None of these "Jewish moments" are discussed in the body of the book, however, or referred to in the capsulized episode summaries in Appendix A.3
Jewishness could not be excised completely, thanks to the indelible Jewish associations in a few of the episode titles listed in Appendix A. These include "Oy, Wilderness" (Season 3: Episode 3), a Yiddish twist on Eugene O'Neil's classic play Ah, Wilderness (1933); and most prominently, "Kaddish for Uncle Manny" (Season 4: Episode 22), in which Joel is frustrated in collecting a minyan (ten bar-mitzvahed males), required under traditional Jewish law to say Kaddish (the mourner's prayer) for his recently deceased uncle. Gentile friends in Cicely help Joel gather several qualified participants from other parts of Alaska, but he still falls short—until he breaks with tradition and allows members of the community, people he has grown to know and love—to make up the difference.
Samuel cites this award-winning episode in Chapter 4: "From Critically Acclaimed to Cancelled," in which he gives a brief overview of the series' six [End Page 308] seasons. But he does not describe the episode there, nor does he drop the J-word at any point in the body of the text (or the index). To see "Jew" or "Jewish" printed anywhere in the book, the ardent reader must comb through Appendix A to the "Kaddish for Uncle Manny" summary where they will find the first and only mention of Joel's "Jewish faith" (134).4
Neglecting Joel's Jewishness is a lapse by itself, but it also forestalls the placement of his ethno-religious identity in a broader televisual context. Dr. Joel Fleischman was far from the only Jewish main character to pop up in US television of the 1990s. As I was among the first to propose and examine in detail in 2003, the period from the late 1980s through the early 2000s "saw an unprecedented upsurge in American television … featuring explicitly Jewish protagonists."5 This trend was evident primarily in sitcoms: Seinfeld, Brooklyn Bridge (1991–93), The Larry Sanders Show, Mad About You (1992–99), The Nanny (1993–99), Friends (1994–2004), Dharma and Greg (1997–2002), Will and Grace (1998–2006), and Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–), among many others (over forty in all, compared to a mere seven in the previous forty years). Several other dramatic shows with Jewish leads joined Northern Exposure over this stretch as well: thirtysomething, Reasonable Doubts (1991–93), Picket Fences (1992–96), and Chicago Hope (1994–2000). Northern Exposure was therefore a prototype not only for postmodern television but also for postmodern "Jewish TV."
As for the book's theoretical underpinning in general, I wish Samuel had chosen a more stimulating concept than Joseph Campbell's shopworn "hero's journey" archetype for grounding his textual analysis. And while Matt Hills's notion of "hyperdiegesis" is promising, Samuel's employment of it in explaining Northern Exposure's cult-TV appeal remains underdeveloped (43).6 I also must take serious issue with Samuel's insistence—"supported" by Horace Newcomb's TV: The Most Popular Art, published in 1974—that what set 1980s/1990s TV apart from earlier eras is that it "began to exact its literary ambitions" through its "real relationship" not to the movies or radio, but to the novel (83).7 To the contrary, as John Caldwell has shown in Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authenticity in American Television, published in 1997. TV in the 1980s and 1990s Caldwell observes (the proof is in the programming) became increasingly cinematic in form and content, boosted by new technology, larger TV screens, and auteurs from within the TV industry such as Brand and Falsey, Steven Bochco, and John Wells, and A-list Hollywood directors lured by the medium's [End Page 309] new possibilities, such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Oliver Stone, and David Lynch.8
The book's Appendix C lists some of the many other books (as well as web sites and podcasts) devoted to this sparkling series. Several of the books appeared already during Northern Exposure's original run and others have surfaced as late as 2018 and 2020, indicating a "revival trend" in the series that Samuel's cultural history partakes of and carries forward. His book may not belong in the pantheon of this "kaleidoscope of work," but it deserves a slot in the library nonetheless (165).
Notes
1. The latter two quotes are from Phil Harrison, "The Essential TV Shows You Can't Find on Netflix, Amazon or Now TV," The Guardian, July 12, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/jul/12/the-essential-tv-shows-you-cant-find-on-netflix-amazon-or-now-tv?/CMP=Share_1OSApp_Other; and Robert J. Thompson, Television's Golden Age: From 'Hill Street Blues' to 'ER' (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996).
2. In an email to the journal's book reviews editor, Samuel stated he is not Jewish.
3. I'm indebted to Sorelle Weinstein's The Times of Israel blog titled, "What 'Northern Exposure' Got Wrong About Judaism," posted July 16, 2020, for recalling these "Jewish moments." https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/what-northern-exposure-got-wrong-about-judaism. The "Jewish moments" concept is from Jon Stratton, Coming Out Jewish (New York: Routledge, 2000).
4. One other Jewish-related incident appears in the Appendix A summary for "The Mystery of the Curio Shop" (Season 5: Episode 2), referring to Joel's discovering "signs of the Yiddish language in Tlingit" (136).
5. Vincent Brook, Something Ain't Kosher Here: The Rise of the "Jewish" Sitcom (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 1.
6. Matt Hills, Cult Television (New York: Routledge, 2002).
7. Horace Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art (Garden City, NJ: Anchor, 1974), 256.
8. John Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authenticity in American Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997).