At the beginning of the nineties, when La 2 began its broadcast, I was barely three or four. I remember an uneasy feeling waking up in the wee hours to the sound of the unmistakable melody of those credits. To tell you the truth, I’ve always found that thundering harmonica a little unsettling, and yet, for some reason, the music on ‘Doctor in Alaska’ (‘Northern Exposure’) then gave me a calmness, a feeling of familiarity, that everything’s fine.
Actually, I’ve never really known what all that was about, La 2, faithful to her habit of scheduling her best tricks at the end of the day, didn’t give a girl of that age much room to lean out and take a look. I took advantage of any excuse that made me wake up to look at the TV out of the corner of my eye as I passed the half-open door of the living room, curious as to whether I was in front of a prominent event of the week. It never occurred to me to ask my mother what that never-missed TV show was, or maybe I did and didn’t give it too much thought, but whatever, surprisingly, that melody stayed with me and it has stayed with me to this day.
Taking advantage of the fact that Filmin has rescued this generational work something like 30 years latermoved by a curiosity that I intuit shared with other Spanish children of the nineties, I finally set out to dust off that memory, with respect for everything that comes wrapped in a fragile layer of nostalgia.
More than nostalgia
It would be absurd to deny the nostalgia factor to start a series like ‘Doctor in Alaska’ in 2023. What’s more, it would almost seem like the only reason why a series developed on a premise strongly linked to the way of life and mentality of the nineties It could still be of interest after the technological revolution of the new millennium, especially if we consider the brutal evolution of communications and mobility in the last decade.
However, even with its heavy 30 years on top, the series retains a prodigious validity that amazingly connects our parents’ generation with ours. A sign that our concerns are not so far from those of our predecessors and that our youth is not really that different from what our parents lived through.
Even in the most connected times in history, wandering, seeking and finding oneself, finding ourselves lost and longing for another time and another place continue to be our constants. AND our current nomadism in search of the best experiences and job opportunities It’s not that different from that half-enforced exile of Dr. Fleischman (Rob Morrow) in the Alaskan wilderness.
An existential journey to the deep America
A recent medical graduate New Yorker lands in the middle of a rural area of Alaska, totally depopulated but in full desire for progress, while still clinging to the ancestral customs of the land, with the pride of the native. He, comfortable and somewhat arrogant although with a good background, drags the haughty look of that cosmopolitan youth who lives to the last and it blatantly clashes with the new, apparently inhospitable medium.
Caught in a closed community of marked routines and few apparent escape routes, long before coining the concept of low cost flights and always in search of a public phone, Doctor Fleischman represents a protagonist with many layers within a classic series of its kind.
With a treatment closer to American indie cinema, more widespread in current television fiction than in his contemporary series, the character goes through his own existential journey in the form of introspection channeled through the circumstances that have touched him and of which he complains so bitterly from a more comfortable position than it might seem.
Longing and contradiction, abstraction from ideas and roots, being present and wishing to be somewhere else and above all of it, building the feeling of homeare part of the inner journey of a character that represents adaptation to change and evolution.
‘Doctor in Alaska’, a timeless generational series
The idea of an external agent that shakes up everyday life, facing the silent oppression of a small town, canonically represented as a collective character with certain common traits, is a formula that ‘Doctor in Alaska’ probably did not invent (more pertinent in its original title ‘Northern Exposure’). However, his proposal more than valid in 2023 confirms the new wave of rural dramas as a revision of the previous one and the expression of that collective need to return to the origins after the loss of attachment.
Plagued by little-used cultural references despite the commonplaces and, letting go of the obsolescence of certain uses of the nineties, ‘Doctor in Alaska’ revives reflection on universal themes that are once again questioned such as environmentalism or racial identity. The old debate between country and city reopened after being fed up with the pandemic, it constitutes the basis of a narrative that thirty years ago already passed through the clichés about modernity and the possibilities of personal development in the face of the essence of nature and the plenitude of the soul.
Recurring themes that confirm the validity of this series, which makes us question again the world full of possibilities today. And yes, looking back over the years, we find a fragment of generational life that is the product of the habits of his time, but his appeal to our own current situation put into perspective is dizzying.
Perhaps Fleischman could not make a video call in the middle of the forest, nor would he have dreamed of the possibility of uploading to Instagram the view from the top of Cicely’s ranger’s hut, but beyond witnessing a lifestyle, ‘Doctor in Alaska’ is consolidated as timeless work of any generation in their thirtiesus rediscovering it now, our parents in front of the TV then and possibly also in a few years today’s tiktokers.
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