The A.V. Club loves the holiday season, and we also love opening small doors in paintings of Santa Claus and pulling out stale chocolate the manufacturer couldn’t sell four years ago, then eating it and pretending we’re having a good time. We’ve found a way to combine those things with our love of television, and we’re hoping you’ll join us every day through December 25 to open one of our virtual doors and find out which holiday special or holiday-themed episode we’re covering that day. We’ve got the usual suspects, some of the worst specials, and some surprises for you, and we’re hoping you’ll join us every day to get in the holiday spirit.
“A long time ago, the raven looked down from the sky and saw that the people of the world were living in darkness. The ball of light was kept hidden by a selfish old chief. So the raven turned himself into a spruce needle and floated on the river where the chief’s daughter came for water. She drank the spruce needle. She became pregnant and gave birth to a boy, who was the raven in disguise. The boy cried and cried until the chief gave him the ball of light to play with. As soon as the raven had the light, the raven turned back into himself. The raven carried the light into the sky. From then on, we no longer lived in darkness.” —Native American creation myth, as synopsized in “Seoul Mates”, episode 25 of Northern Exposure
Northern Exposure first appeared as a summer replacement show in July 1990, three months after the première of Twin Peaks, and it would be a while before the show was allowed to stop playing Joe Frazier to Twin Peaks’ Muhammad Ali. A lot of people’s reactions to Northern Exposure seemed to be based on their reactions to the big son of a bitch in the room who was posing for magazine covers and eating up everybody else’s oxygen. The shows weren’t very much alike, except for being set in small towns that were off the beaten track and populated by offbeat characters with their own arcane interests and eccentric local customs. That was enough to persuade a number of viewers, many of whom worked as TV critics, that the differences between them were telling.
Critics who thought that Twin Peaks had turned the shape of American television completely around overnight tended to view Northern Exposure as a much softer show, if not a counter-revolutionary agent. Other critics, who thought that Peaks was flimsy and hyped, made a case for Exposure as being what Quality TV really ought to be: conventional, sure, but also literate, progressive-minded, and well-meaning, where a mixture of stage veterans, familiar character actors, up-and-comers, local pickups, and the smirky guy from the Dentyne commercial (“Time to walk the daw-awg!”) could come together and grapple with their problems in an amusingly neurotic but basically enlightened way.
I loved both these shows, and for me, the key difference between them came down to this: I found it a fascinating experience to watch Twin Peaks, even after it went off the rails, but I wanted to live in Northern Exposure. The show took a while to hit its full stride, and its death throes weren’t much less ugly than Twin Peaks’, but during its glory days in the early ’90s, it was as smart, funny, emotionally rich, and unpredictable as anything on the air that didn’t star a race of yellow-skinned cartoon people.
In many ways, the show and I might have been made for each other. I spent most of the first 17 years of my life in Walthall County, Mississippi, a place that other people in Mississippi regard as the sticks. The library was long on Harlequin romances and government pamphlets about how to best maintain a good relationship with your rototiller, and the only movie theater in town had closed down before we moved there and left the poster advertising its last attraction in the protective glass case on the exterior wall; I guess nobody bought the building, because for years afterward, I’d sit in the backseat of my mother’s car as we drove past, and I’d be amazed that M*A*S*H was still playing. I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there and get some cultural stimulation, and when I finally evaded the Rovers and swam out past the breakers and made it to shore on the other side, I was a pig in shit. But I’d never really feel at home any place that was very different from the quiet, isolated sort of place where I’d always feel bored and miserable.
Northern Exposure’s special charm for me was always that it seemed to offer the best of both worlds: a remote corner of the world that was full of tranquility and natural beauty, where people from all walks of life had come to pursue their interest in moviemaking, books, and old records, and shoot the shit about their odd philosophical and sociological beliefs and historical knowledge, all in a spirit that was laid-back, patient, accepting, and endlessly curious. Cicely, Alaska looked like heaven on Earth to me, and I doubt that I was unusual among the show’s diehard fans. CBS was quick to convince itself that the show’s audience kept coming back to chart the progress of the push-pull romance between Joel Fleischman, the fish-out-of-water Jewish doctor we were supposed to identify with, and Maggie O’Connell, the twangy-voiced supermodel who thought she was a bush pilot. But for many people, the star of the show was Cicely. (For the record, Joel’s chronic inability to appreciate the place was a lot less relatable and endearing than the show seemed to think.)
At its heart, Northern Exposure was a fantasy about a group of people who’d come to an implausible place to form a makeshift family. Maybe that’s why there was always a melancholy undertow to the show, as if even the people making it were a little sad that it wasn’t real. Watching it today, it feels more poignant than ever, because the moment when it was a necessary fantasy for some of us hungry small-towners has passed. When the show ended in 1995, the Internet was starting to stir, anticipating a world of online shopping for once hard-to-find items and making it possible to form friendships with people a million miles away who were trying to get their hands on the same cool shit, thus insuring that no small-town kid who had access to an Internet connection and mom’s credit card would ever be that lonely or hungry again.
This kind of fantasy plays to sappier hungers than those that respond to the level of craft and imagination that were once at play in Twin Peaks, but I’d argue that those hungers still deserve to be fed, and feeding them as well as Northern Exposure did is some kind of feat. And being a show about a community that had come to seem like a family you wanted to join, Northern Exposure had an edge on a show like Twin Peaks when it came to certain things, such as getting through December. In December 1990, all the stars of ABC’s big shows were required to appear in promos where they’d gather in a domestic-looking setting and, smiling into the camera, wish the folks at home a merry Christmas. For Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean, Sheryl Lee, Jack Nance, and the Man from Another Place to have clustered around a bowl of eggnog and yelled “Seasons Greetings!” would have amounted to a new low in self-parody—the spell that their show meant to weave simply couldn’t co-exist with that level of heartfelt corn—so the Twin Peaks team contributed a tiny animated short that was reminiscent of those strobe-lit eyeball torture devices in sci-fi movies that hypnotize people into becoming assassins. Northern Exposure was a better vehicle for a Christmas episode, because it was the kind of show where you really wanted to see what these people and their town got up to during the holidays.