Exposing Myself

I finished Northern Exposure yesterday.

It began to seep into my awareness in late summer, I think. I must have stumbled across photos from 2013, when Cameron and I drove up to Roslyn, in the Cascades. That’s the small town that filled in for the fictional Alaskan village of Cicely, and it looks pretty much the same as it did in the show, 30 years ago.

Then, rummaging through the hall closet, I found my copies of the first two seasons of the show. I’m pretty sure I bought them at the gift shop in Roslyn. Once I slipped in the first disk, I knew where this was headed.

I long ago discovered that compulsive behavior was the thing I had to watch, because it’s a real thing. I’ve been this way as long as I can remember, a tendency to perseverate, to keep doing what I’m doing even if it doesn’t seem like a great idea.

So I’m careful and I observe, because it can take me places I don’t want to revisit. Sometimes I just observe, too.

This is what I mean. There are certain compulsive behaviors that will burn themselves out quickly (e.g., getting a craving for a particular food, and eating a lot of that kind of food on a daily basis). There are the dangerous ones, which are at the south end of a slippery slope I stay away from (smoking a cigarette or having a drink, just to name two).

And then there are those I just defer to. I submit, surrender, pick your term. There are 110 episodes of Northern Exposure, and if I watched them all in a row, which I suspected was going to happen, then I’d eventually be done and it’s not like they’re making more or I’m going to start over. I’d finish.

I consider this a benign compulsion, then. I’m used to these, and you know what? Northern Exposure was a very good show. I don’t need to elaborate in order to be understood; we all know about TV.

And as with all art, but perhaps specifically visual media, television is inextricably tied to the calendar. We speak of things as being timeless, but that strikes me as only aspiration, something to pretend. We can wallow in the what but we can’t escape the when.

So as I made my way through those 110 episodes, I was aware of its anchor to a different time. The young actors in the show (e.g., Rob Morrow and Janine Turner) are about my age, then and now. My son, now the same age himself, was 6 months old when the show premiered. Lots and lots of anchors.

I delved into the show a couple of years after it went off the air, when it was in syndication on a local station and showed up for a while around lunchtime, every day. I was apparently looking for sustenance of a spiritual nature, as weird as it sounds when we’re talking about a TV show. Northern Exposure was an uniquely spiritual show, and not only because it found fodder in the native (Tlingit) culture, and in the anomaly of Judaism on the tundra (the main character, Joel Fleischman, is a Jewish doctor from New York). There was stuff going on all the time in this show, serious stuff.

But I’m not trying to persuade anyone, and now is not the time. It almost feels aberrant, watching a 30-year-old show when I’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s available, and new, right now.

And watching episodes one after another, sometimes several in a day, is a deliberate (if easy) choice to experience this in a way unintended by the creators. I don’t think it’s the wrong way; Shakespeare churned out 39 plays over 25 years, and I read a bunch of them over the course of one college semester, just for one example. Our consumption changes the art, as it’s supposed to.

I think this was locking behavior. Kurt Vonnegut suggested that we need two additional seasons in the year, locking and unlocking, as we prepare for winter and then recover from it. It feels like locking season to me, as I turn on the porch light at 4pm and keep the space heater glowing, and I may have needed the warmth.

I took it, then, and it was plenty warm. I don’t have the first clue about what this says about me, or about us and the way we hear stories. I just spent a couple of months, around 80 hours, living in a universe as fictional as Narnia or Oz, a universe I can’t share.

I basked in the glow of familiar faces from a long time ago, disappearing for 45 minutes at a time into someone else’s story. You have yours, this is mine, and I feel better now, really. I’ll leave the porch light on for a bit, I think.