The Case of the Series Northern Exposure - Text 7
Along with the exploration of parallel worlds (see episode one of season six, entitled “Dinner at Seven-Thirty”), this dream-like dimension is central throughout the series, taking up an innovation which Twin Peaks had already introduced (Dale Cooper using information obtained in a dream to solve an investigation). Later television series would also take up this theme, including The Sopranos, Lost and, more generally, current production as a whole.
The world of Cicely seems out of step because it does not lend itself to a reading using the usual norms. Original and perplexing, with multi-faceted characters, it eludes simple definitions. We might add that, on the level of its representation of characters, it is innovative in its depictions of women, such as Maggie, who have a more liberated personality and behaviour than women in other television serials (on this topic, see episode twenty-three of series three, entitled “Cicely,” in which we discover that the town had been founded by two lesbians). The series also broke new ground with episode twenty-one of season five in 1994, entitled “I Feel the Earth Move,” which features one of the first gay marriages in television history.
The comic dimension of the series lies in its dialogue, full of jokes in keeping with the ideal model of the situation comedy, but in this case the jokes are less frequent, with a slower rhythm, in an almost melancholy way, enabling the viewer to focus on their profundity. The characters’ interactions are very human above all else, and demand attention to detail (concerning their relationships and the locations, but also having to do with interpreting the world through spirituality), engaging viewers in a multi-layered experience and tending towards constant openness. The intertextuality typical of postmodernism appears when the series’ episodes quote other series or films, as in episode five of series one, in which Twin Peaks is parodied, and when philosophy is employed by the characters to find explanations for their experiences, for example Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle or Hegel’s theory of the dialectic. In fact a mix of high culture and popular culture is always present: the character Ed, a filmmaker, acts as a conduit to quotations of Woody Allen and diegetically justifies the presence of stars such as Peter Bogdanovich, who becomes a character in the series. In some episodes, we see the Cirque du Soleil or the Mummenschanz dance troupe land in Cicely, or, by means of flashbacks, historical figures such as Freud, Jung, Kafka, Princess Anastasia and Lenin.
The series, aimed at viewers ready for reflexivity and discovery, calls on our memory and would be unthinkable outside a cultural landscape in which formal innovation goes well with spectatorial experiences based on control, facilitated by technological devices such as the videotape recorder and the remote control.
