The Charm of Northern Exposure, Summed Up in 10 Episodes

Plucking out individual best episodes of Northern Exposure is like ranking individual cups pulled from the same expertly spiked punch. 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.

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. Quirk can turn twee with just a single wrong step. From the start, the series, created by St. 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. That degree of difficulty, which only increased in each of the series’s six seasons, meant taking big creative swings.

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.

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.

Roaring over the town was Barry Corbin’s barrel-chested Maurice Minnifield, a former Oklahoma astronaut, millionaire, and bona fide American man’s man drawn to the untamed tundra as blank slate for his singular vision of an “Alaskan Riviera” hewn in his own stubborn image. Greeting the irascible Joel were everyone from a legendary sexagenarian animal trapper turned (mostly) pacifist barkeep, Holling Vincoeur (John Cullum) and his spacey but worldly 18-year-old former beauty pageant girlfriend Shelley (Cynthia Geary); aged and resolutely sensible town shopkeep, postmistress, and all-purpose town official Ruth-Anne (Peg Phillips); philosophizing ex-con turned all-day radio DJ Chris (John Corbett); and perpetually amiable half-Indian teen and aspiring filmmaker Ed Chigliak (Darren E. Burrows).

As the series progressed, Joel’s predicament persisted (he’d essentially been dragooned into Cicely by Maurice over his expected post in an Anchorage hospital) but sank back into ensemble status, with each character in turn bobbing up to take the show’s delightfully unpredictable center stage. (Whether due to his diminished role or contract disputes, Morrow chafed in his first series lead, eventually leaving partway through the sixth and final season.)

New oddballs emerged to fill out Cicely’s ranks: Adam Arkin’s mysteriously obnoxious master chef/mountain man Adam and his heiress hypochondriac wife Eve (Valerie Mahaffey), Anthony Edward’s bubble-bound lawyer Mike Monroe, fled to Alaska ahead of encroaching environmental allergies, Graham Greene’s Native medicine man and artist Leonard, Richard Cummings’ Bernard, revealed as Chris’ long lost Black half brother, and sharing the pair’s preternatural psychic bond.

Throughout it all, Falsey and Brand steered Northern Exposure according to their own set of wide-open, anything goes constellations. Dream sequences, strange local traditions and superstitions (Maggie’s old lovers have all died in unusual circumstances), singular personal obsessions and quests — anything could happen in Cicely. And, with astounding reliability, the results were as warm, weird, and welcoming as the people of Cicely themselves.

With the series at long last available to stream (all six seasons are on Prime Video), we’ve put together a list of 10 favorite episodes drawn from Northern Exposure’s heady brew of comedy, drama, and enduring whimsy, in broadcast order. Drink up.

"Aurora Borealis: A Fairy Tale for Big People" (Season 1, Episode 8)

By the time this first season finale aired, it was already crystal clear that Cicely didn’t need any outside help in the strangeness department. That doesn’t stop a massive full moon and the appearance of the shimmering-with-portent northern lights from putting a double-whammy on the town’s inhabitants. Some can’t sleep, others are drawn on mysterious walkabouts, and a confused, citified accountant from Portland shows up on a brand new Harley and immediately latches onto Chris’ barroom talk of the collective unconscious, with the mismatched pair gradually realizing that they share the same absent father.Northern Exposure tosses a lot into each episode’s hearty stew, and this was one of the first episodes to find the perfect balance of soulfulness, incident, and knockabout comedy.

"The Big Kiss" (Season 2, Episode 2)

Darren E. Burrows (son of perennial B-movie bad guy Billy Drago) is Cicely’s most endearing figure as Ed Chigliak, a patiently unassuming and guileless presence whose clouded backstory as a half-Native, half-white foundling the would-be Scorsese accepts from his tribal elders with typical resignation. At least until a 256-year-old Native spirit guide named One Who Waits (legendary character actor Floyd Red Crow Westerman) appears to no one but him and tells Ed he might just have a bead on the identities of Ed’s parents.

It’s to Northern Exposure’s credit that we can accept the reality of the delightfully deadpan One Who Waits, or not. But Ed’s ultimately fruitless journey is as resonant either way, his rapport with the old ghost registering in Burrows’ performance with aching sincerity and sweetness. One Who Waits would return in Season 4, and Westerman is always a gift, but that episode’s more concrete conclusion to Ed’s story pales next to the lovely ambiguity of his roadside encounter with a friendly older Native man in “The Big Kiss.”

"War and Peace" (Season 2, Episode 6)

While Northern Exposure would stretch its woozy reality in all manner of ways throughout its run, it never did so as straightforwardly or delightfully than in this tale of a famed Russian singer Nikolai Ivanovich Appollanov (Elya Baskin) whose intermittent appearances in Cicely are greeted with delight by everyone — except the Cold War patriotic Maurice. Challenged to renew their one-sided chess rivalry, perennial loser Maurice accuses the gentlemanly Russian of cheating, leading to a duel where the series’s typical spell of whimsical benevolence seems headed for inevitable, bloody disaster. Meanwhile, Ed’s first love with a randy preacher’s daughter sees the heartstruck teen turning to ladies man Chris for some Cyrano-style flowery prose, with similarly doomed results.

That both stories turn out unexpectedly more or less okay is a relief, although Ed’s heartbroken confrontation with the contrite and more worldly Chris is about as emotionally rough as Ed gets. The series decided not to spoil things, a decision that was as cheeky as it was refreshingly necessary to a viewing public mired in coverage of another needless overseas war.

"A-Hunting We Will Go" (Season 3, Episode 8)

Northern Exposure’s ostensible lead was one the series’ least successful elements, oddly. Joel’s incessant complaining about his plight might have been understandable, but Morrow struggled with the show’s often inconsistent treatment of the New Yorker’s wavering integration into Cicely’s mix. (The number of times Joel’s episode-ending epiphanies plop him right back into crabapple first position for the next are too numerous to list.) Still, when the show gets the ultra-rational Joel right, it really gets him right, as in this outing where the city boy feels duty-bound to test out his visceral revulsion against the locals’ offhand love of hunting.

Joel goes on the offensive about the “barbaric” bloodsport, only to accept Maggie’s challenge that, without experiencing the phenomenon himself, he’s just blowing hot air. Joining veteran hunters Holling and Chris on a grouse hunt brings Joel unexpected (and long-winded) elation—and then a huge comedown when he comes across the wounded bird he’d only managed to wing. Themes permeate the best Northern Exposure episodes in the slyest of ways. As Joel desperately tries to heal his victim, Ed becomes similarly protective of Ruth-Anne upon learning of her recent 75th birthday. IN the end, both men resign themselves to death’s looming and necessary presence in their own way, with Joel confiding to Maggie how death and killing are two very different things and Ed’s surprise gift to Ruth-Anne seeing the two literally dancing on her grave.

"Burning Down the House" (Season 3, Episode 14)

Opposing forces meet more often than Cicely’s benign exterior suggests, with this third-season installment proving that a community packed with dreamers will occasionally spit out some darker fancies.

When Chris builds a catapult in order to “fling” a live cow in order to create what he terms a “perfect moment,” only Joel objects, the rest of Cicely regarding the stunt with idle curiosity. (After all, as Marilyn states, they’re going to eat the cow.) Throughout the series, this undercurrent of eccentricity edging into rustic anarchy runs through Cicely—it’s like they’re one rough winter away from stuffing Joel into a wicker man. Here, the unfortunate cow is only saved via an artistic quandary, not a moral one, as Ed accidentally reveals how the whole cow-flinging concept has been done in one particular movie. Chris adjusts to a less-lethal concept, with the resulting fling filling the assembled townsfolk (and viewers) with suitably collective awe.

“Three Amigos” (Season 3, Episode 16)

The bond between former astronaut and American hero Maurice Minnifield and legendary game hunter Holling Vincoeur gets the rough and tumble outdoor adventure tale it deserves in this episode where the two old friends and romantic rivals strike out into the wilderness to fulfill the last wish of an old friend. Pros Barry Corbin and John Cullum had career-best roles on Northern Exposure, and they’re never better than here, as the two aging tough guys brave impossible weather and their own aging bodies to bury wild Bill Haney, their longtime drinking, hunting, and brawling buddy at the legendarily treacherous No-Name Point.

Portrayed often as two distinct but similar examples of a dying breed of masculinity, both men ultimately have to concede that dying for your word might not be all it's cracked up to be, especially for two old men with warm beds and, in Holling’s case, Shelly to return to. Willie Nelson on the soundtrack singing “Hands on the Wheel” over scenes the boys’ game attempts to honor an old promise signals an elegiac farewell to an old way of life.

"Cicely" (Season 3, Episode 23)

With its season order expanded after two short first go-rounds, Season 3 gave Northern Exposure even more territory to explore stylistically. A flashback episode might not sound groundbreaking, but this tale of the founding of Cicely reframes everything we thought we knew about Alaska’s most eccentric town, all while lending unexpected insight into its denizens, all of whom pop up in different roles in the reminiscences of a 108-year-old man (veteran actor Roberts Blossom) who Joel accidentally hits with his pickup.

Brought to Joel’s cabin for treatment, the old man spins a yarn about the town’s eventual founders, a pair of lesbian free-thinkers named Jo and Cicely (Jo Anderson and Yvonne Suhor) who fled polite Montana society to create a matriarchal utopia right in the dangerously lawless heart of untamed Alaska. The story of the rough-and-tumble Jo and the delicate Cicely plays out with the tragic heroism of two such forward-thinking (gay, female) dreamers. The town is turned around and only a stray bullet (and some “kill your gays” TV tradition) prevents a completely happy ending. Still, as Joel drops the old man at the graveyard where he’s come to honor Cicely’s 100th birthday, Cicely, Alaska comes that much further into focus.

"Thanksgiving" (Season 4, Episode 8)

The Native population of Northern Exposure is an integral part of the show’s melting pot of oddballs, but this eventful episode adds a needed dose of spice surrounding the outwardly ordinary Indian citizens’ existence in a colonized America. Walking to work, Joel is ambushed with a tomato hurled by the friendly Ed, introducing the yearly tradition by which Cicely’s native population takes out centuries of otherwise sublimated anger and resentment in a symbolically messy assault on the town’s white people.

While the rest of Cicely’s white folks uncomplainingly accept this once a year pelting, Joel complains to Marilyn that his status as a perpetually oppressed Jew should exempt him from the Native’s wrath. It’s when he sinks into an even more miserable than usual depression upon being informed that his intended four-year sentence as Cicely’s general practitioner has been (thanks to inflation) upped another year that Marilyn finally recognizes Joel’s kinship with the town’s Natives.

Listening to the bereft and unshaven doctor’s fetal position lament about his complete and utter lack of hope, Marilyn tells Joel he can now march in the Native’s day of the dead parade. “You’re not white anymore,” coming from the no-bullshit Marilyn, lands with unexpected force on Joel, and us. The people of Cicely, in their insularity, are free to process generations of racial and personal trauma in their own unique manner, and as the whole town, Indian and white, gathers at The Brick for a sumptuous post-parade Thanksgiving feast, Joel is free to complain to the face-painted Ed about his own misfortune in strangely liberating kinship.

"Mister Sandman" (Season 5, Episode 12)

The northern lights are back and everyone’s having each other’s dreams. What sounds like a high-concept lark turns typically thought-provoking and stubbornly resonant, as Maggie jumps into Holling’s revelatory dreams about his horrible, abusive father, Joel sleepwalks into Ruth-Anne’s store with a little boy’s thwarted dreams about bottomless candy, and Maurice becomes incensed when one of a pair of gay B&B proprietors (Doug Ballard’s Ron) discovers Maurice’s secret dreams involving women’s shoes.

There’s plenty to unpack, as with most dreams, and there are laughs aplenty around the margins. But it’s in the townsfolk’s variously grudging willingness to accept that their unpredictable home has yet another metaphysical trick up its sleeve that “Mister Sandman” achieves surprising depth. Holling has long decried his French-Canadian lineage’s legacy of awful behavior, here evincing a revulsion to food tied both to Shelly’s pregnancy and his repressed memories of his mother and father. And Maurice, whose bluff, all-purpose bigotry is never quite offset by his old school macho act, gets into a truly ugly poker table confrontation with Ron and his partner Erick (Don R. McManus) stemming from what he considers these “deviants’” insight into his private thoughts.It’s up to the sage Ruth-Anne to have some frank talk with Maurice about his bigotry, and Joel to overcome his usual skepticism when he sees that Maggie’s recounting of her dream actually assists in treating the despondent Holling.

"The Quest" (Season 6, Episode 15)

Rob Morrow’s desire to leave Northern Exposure (he’d already filmed Robert Redford’s Quiz Show during Season 5) is given a typically strange payoff in his final season fantasy/dream/who-knows final outing. After Joel and Maggie’s on-and-off romance sputtered one too many times, the perpetually disgruntled Joel had left Cicely some episodes earlier, going AWOL on his debts and setting himself up as the GP of an even more upriver Native village. Unexpectedly arriving in the middle of the night at Maggie’s house, the shaggy and wild-eyed doctor unfurls an ancient trapper’s map, claiming to have uncovered the location of the mythical lost city of Kiwa’ani and asking for Maggie to fly him the first leg of his trip to find this magical “jeweled city.”

As far as goodbyes to disgruntled stars go, “The Quest” is a confoundingly thorny metaphysical flight of fancy. With the skeptical Maggie in tow, the obsessed Joel first encounters one of those elderly Japanese soldiers still fighting WWII (and is repaid for his ensuing medical treatment with a bounty of sushi), almost gets sidetracked in an impossible, dreamlike spa in the middle of the Alaskan nowhere, and finally coming across an incongruously locked chain-link bridge fence and the abusive gatekeeper (who looks suspiciously identical to Adam) demanding the answer to an impossible riddle. Joel answers and spies the glittering skyline of his beloved Manhattan in the mists—and he walks into it, and out of Northern Exposure forever.

Is the episode something of a make-the-best-of-it exercise? Maybe. But it’s a great one, perfectly in keeping with the series’ spirit. As Marilyn sense Joel’s departure with a signature, unreadable “Good bye” back in Cicely and Maggie receives a days-later postcard of the Staten Island ferry from Joel reading “New York is a state of mind,” “The Quest” stretches Northern Exposure’s woozy reality to its breaking point while still slotting comfortably—and touchingly — into the show’s world in as satisfying a way as could be hoped.

Dennis Perkins is a freelance entertainment writer with bylines at The A.V. Club, Paste, Ultimate Classic Rock, The Portland Press Herald, and elsewhere.