CBS Goes With the Floe : Offbeat Alaska Show Finds Niche

Joshua Brand and John Falsey, best known for creating the bleak first season of “St. Elsewhere” and the emotionally wrenching “A Year in the Life,” have at least temporarily ditched death, divorce and dysfunctions for magic, whimsy and silly grins. Their CBS series “Northern Exposure” is Woody Allen meets woodsy Alaska.

“We think we’re funny guys,” said Brand, when asked if he and Falsey deliberately decided to try their hands at comedy in an effort to finally land a hit. “But once you are known for something, that’s what they want to hire you to do again and again. I think CBS originally would have prefered that we do a serious drama, but we just stumbled upon this idea and wanted to pursue it.”

The idea was to take the quintessential urban dweller--a young Jewish doctor from New York City--and stick him in the wilderness: a one-street town of about 800 people in Alaska. The doctor, played by Rob Morrow, is trapped there for at least four years because the state of Alaska put him through medical school, in return for his medical services.

Desperate for something to stem audience erosion, especially in the summer when the networks rely mostly on reruns, CBS bought the first eight episodes to run last summer. Falsey said that the network expected a medical show, a sort-of “St. Elsewhere” in the tundra, but the duo instead focused on the eccentric characters and relationships that peopled their imagined Alaskan hamlet.

“We caught CBS off guard,” Falsey said. “They looked at it and said, ‘What is it? A drama? A comedy? If it’s a comedy, where are the big yuks?’ But it hit them (last spring) right when they were worried about their fall schedule, so they just said, ‘OK. Let’s see what happens. We have bigger fish to fry.’ ”

The hourlong series did well enough that CBS ordered eight more episodes for this season, and it returned to the prime-time lineup last month on Mondays at 10 p.m., where it won the time period for three weeks running until NBC threw “Switched at Birth” against it.

The show presents some laugh-out-loud moments. In one recent episode, for example, 28-year-old Dr. Joel Fleischman dreamed that he was with a beautiful Eskimo woman. She offered him some root beer and then asked if he wanted ice with the drink. When he said, ‘Sure,’ she nonchalantly chipped ice off the wall of her igloo.

But for the most part, comedy in “Northern Exposure” does not mean punch lines and sight gags. Instead, Brand explained, it comes from a gentleness of spirit that pervades the town of Cicely. This Alaska is much more a notion than an actual locale, representing a benevolent live-and-let-live universe. It’s a place where dreams are as real and as significant as waking life, where wildness and unpredictability is cherished, where the Aurora Borealis is a guest star.

“We chose Alaska for its mythic, larger-than-life qualities,” Brand said. “It fills a certain necessary myth in our imagination. A place that is still wild and unfettered and free. A place where anything that is not nailed down could slide, where people can re-create themselves and become anything they want to be.”

Into this world of juvenile delinquents-turned-philosophers, ex-astronauts, ex-beauty queens and an American Indian who idolizes Woody Allen wanders Fleischman, the viewer’s surrogate in this often irrational world. He brings a big-city need to judge, an urban incompetence with car engines, plumbing and electricity, and cravings for bagels and central heating.

Though the Anchorage Daily News took offense when Fleischman, in a fit of desperation, called some of Cicely’s inhabitants “psychotic rednecks” in the pilot episode, and the L.A. Weekly dismissed the characters as a “busload of performers acting quirky to beat the band,” the natives of Cicely could never be mistaken for “The Dukes of Hazzard.” The town deejay quotes Tolstoy, Jung, Whitman and Maurice Sendak. The ditsy, Lolita-like lover of the 60-year-old proprietor of the town’s one bar and grill reads D. H. Lawrence while pouring decaf.

These characters keep the show’s writing staff reaching for their reference books, their dusty old college anthologies, searching for the perfect line of poetry to stick in their characters’ mouths.

“I have never worked on any show where I had to use a quote of Nietzsche,” said Diane Frolov, the show’s supervising producer.

“Usually, it’s, ‘Look out. He’s got a gun,’ ” said her husband, writing partner and the show’s co-executive producer, Andrew Schneider.

Freed from traffic jams and the harried rush to get ahead that consumes the life of most big-city dwellers, Schneider said, the people of Cicely have the time and the disposition to reflect on life’s big issues: love, death, sex, self, fate and the nature of the universe--what in Russian literature they refer to as “the damnable questions.”

The big question confronting “Northern Exposure” at the moment is whether it will be back in the fall.

Peter Tortorici, senior vice president for program planning at CBS, said that the series has “a really strong chance” of winning renewal, but he added that the network is evaluating its performance during the sweeps to see if it can hold up in the time period against fierce competition. In the fall, it would face ABC’s “Monday Night Football” in most of the country, in addition to movies and specials on NBC and Fox.

He acknowledged, however, that CBS executives would cancel it at some risk. The word is out that many of the programmers’ spouses have been asking to read new “Northern Exposure” scripts as they come in because they can’t wait to see what happens next.

“Yeah, my wife is one of those,” Tortorici said. “I keep telling everybody around here that we’ve got to do everything we can to make this thing work because I don’t want to go home and face the consequences if it doesn’t.”