CICELY MEET STROUD

Twin-Towns

If the North American television town of Cicely, Alaska from the hit television series 'Northern Exposure' were to be twinned with a non-televisual doppelganger then it might just be the Cotswolds town of Stroud in Gloucestershire, England.

The main difference between the two from what I've observed is that Cicely appears much cleaner, a little safer, and has benign-looking mooses roaming around the place as opposed to washed-out-looking crackheads which have become increasingly prevalent of late. Perhaps then, Stroud is more the bizarro version of Cicely as the fictional town in Alaska is run by the right-wing astronaut businessman Maurice Minnifield (Barry Corbin) whereas Stroud is now essentially run by the left-wing eco-entrepreneur Dale Vince. Both are undoubted capitalists but one leans more into the 'Das Kapital' of the 'ism side of things than the other.  

Back in the 90's when this highly original CBS show first aired Stroud was far more noticeably similar to Cicely and in many ways the comparison easier to make. Watching Stroud become less and less like Cicely over the decades has been a sort of increasing disappointment to those of us who held it to such high fictional standard.

The Show

Between the years 1990-1995 Wednesday nights between 10-11 become sacrosanct as myself and my friends Guy and Gorodish would watch each episode as devoutly as attending church. Considering the show has no overt dramatic conflict to help propel each episode and lasted roughly an hour I'm reminded of a quote by film director Peter Bogdanovich speaking about Lubitsch's screwball comedy 'Trouble In Paradise" (1932) lamenting "When was America that sophisticated? When was the world that sophisticated?” That's how most of us growing up in the 90s look back at 'Northern Exposure' now in the year 2023. Pre 9/11 and (sort of) pre-internet with no climate/pandemic/terrorist fascists to worry about we were lucky to enjoy such halcyon days and in many ways 'Northern Exposure' exemplified that serenity of the early to mid 90's when the Western world was yet to fully unravel.  

The premise of the show couldn't have been more simple. It was your classic 'fish out of water' scenario where Jewish doctor Joel Fleischmann (Rob Morrow) finds himself indentured to the State of Alaska for paying for his medical education at Columbia University and so has to serve as Cicely's community doctor against his will. The creators of the show have stated on record that they were inspired by the classic Bill Forsyth 1983 movie 'Local Hero' which deploys a similar scenario.

Plot-wise, Northern Exposure has always held less fascination for me. Where it scored big was in its wide cast of characters and their comic and philosophical interactions with one another like some kind of on-going passion play/community dialectic. Aside from Fleischmann, there was Chris Stevens (John Corbett) a sort of spiritual conscience for the town as well as a philosophical DJ for local radio station K-Bear owned by his despotic boss Maurice (as mentioned above) and Ed Chigliak the Native American orphan son of Cicely who is very much the beating heart of the town along with his fellow Tlingit, Marilyn (Elaine Miles) the sage receptionist to the highly strung Dr. Joel.

Compared to its more famous television peer at the time David Lynch's 'Twin Peaks' which very much gravitated towards darkness in its narrative momentum, 'Northern Exposure' gravitated towards the light exploring all the big themes of life in a format that felt as gentle as a classic Nat King Cole album on a mellow Autumn day and as wise as the Council of Elders that accept Fleischmann into their tribe in episode twelve 'Our Tribe' from season three.

In our love of that eclectic assortment of characters, we found reflections of ourselves in various guises. I certainly related to Fleischmann's neurosis and Chris(t) Stevens's spiritual seeking and existential questioning as well as Ed Chigliak's infectious passion for cinema and burning ambition to make films. Maurice's no-nonsense conservatism also held an appeal as did the beautiful and savvy tom-boyish pilot Maggie O'Connell (Janine Turner) who bedazzled us with her retorts and natural beauty. If Audrey Horne from 'Twin Peaks' had been my 'freshman' TV crush then Maggie was my 'Sophomore' love.

Endings Are Never Easy

Choosing an episode to recommend to those unfamiliar to the world of Cicely would be almost impossible to do as all six seasons in my memory of the show seem like one expansive stream of consciousness, a sort of scripted improvisation of ideas, themes, moods and spiritual epiphanies. We all learned from watching the show and felt refreshed and inspired by it much how I imagine one might feel attending some wholesome Quaker meeting. The community of Cicely, Alaska felt like an extension of our own weird and wacky Stroud where it wasn't unusual to find clashes between old Gloucestershire types unhappy with the hippy entrepreneurs from London re-imaging the town in their own utopian image similar to that of Maurice with the spiritual tourists and creative liberal types challenging his more conservative ideas of how his own town should be run and how it might function.

If I were assigned the task of designing a perfect community/town from scratch then I would definitely use Cicely as my template but alas I suspect like most beautiful things in fiction the example would be nigh impossible to recreate in reality so it's left to the effect it imparts on our heart and soul to measure its influence in the abstract and not the literal.

As the very last episode 'Tranquility Base' drew to a close and a final montage wrapped up the end of the Northern Exposure era to the sound of Iris DeMent's wistful 'Our Town' there was a sense between myself, Guy and Gorodish that we would have to apply Joel Fleischman's 'New York is a State of Mind' philosophical approach to moving forward with our lives now that our twin town of Cicely, Alaska was no longer there to fall back on every Wednesday night at 10. I can think of no other show where its absence from our screens left such a profound void in my life. There was a distinct sense that this guiding light of positive values, morals, humour, and wisdom was simply no more and the world would be diminished because of it. Now I think of its departure from the culture in even more stark terms as if it were somehow drawing the curtain on the West half a decade before the tragic events of 9/11 were to take place. Even the shows that came after Northern Exposure's brief reign seemed to force you to choose between post-modern nihilism ('The Sopranos') or overcooked romantic ideology ('The West Wing') leaving those of us in the middle with nowhere to call home.

Except, of course, home itself.