When La 2 of Televisión Española premiered Doctor en Alaska "no en sabíem més, teníem (casi) quinze anys" and so on. For a teenager like myself, immersed in the pathological optimism of the post-Olympic fever of '92, the cult series by Joshua Brand & John Falsey was an incomprehensible rarity. If Barcelona was (almost) the center of the world, you tell me what the heck we could be interested in the misadventures of a New York doctor (and therefore terribly snobbish) in a place at the ass end of the world like Cicely. Doctor en Alaska was the cultured series of our parents and older siblings with studies: we still allowed ourselves to waste time with couples who foreshadowed a mysterious-dystopian future (Scully & Mulder) or the general idiocy of the world (Beavis & Butt-Head). We were young, life worked, the middle class existed, and Barcelona organized parties. What more did we want?
At home (now yes) we are professional culture vultures and we have succumbed without complaint to the revival of Northern Exposure (as good know-it-alls, we are pleased to cite the titles in the original language) concocted by Mr. Filmin with great cunning. I would say that my costella, who likes everything mountainous, is very attracted to the scarce emotional empathy of Dr. Joel Fleischman towards the rest of humans, which must be the same reason why he adores me. Personally, I find the surreal genius of the characters in the product in question amusing, but I consume it every night only because its protagonist misses New York in a way that is notoriously familiar to me and despises the goodness of people in general as if he were my twin. But beyond each one's contingencies, I would say that this hype (at home we also speak millennial language) explains some more transcendent things about our present.
Northern Exposure is, first and foremost, a praise of predictability. After a couple of decades in which television narrative has ridden the maximum complexities of what is to come about the end of the planet and in which even period series are produced with an undisguised aesthetic presentism, the life of Dr. Fleischman brings us back to the warmth of first-world problems. After all, after living the apocalypse of Lost or of Stranger Things, that an unfortunate scientist from Flushing with snobbish pretensions has to spend a few years of his life in the region is no tragedy either. Northern Exposure returns to a vital notion as solid as that what must happen (at least, in a fictional structure) is good that it ends up happening; this is how we already know for now that, despite the initial horror and the protagonist's anti-provincial disgust, Fleischman will end up rooting himself in his adopted territory.
Also in terms of human-natural relationships, Northern Exposure takes us to the comfort zone of a pacified anthropology. Despite the freak character of most of Cicely's inhabitants, the surreal nature of their traumas is so healthy that we would end up paying them a fortune to exchange them for our own, which have a much more precarious and violent structure. We know that the passage of time will fix all their tensions and that the American impulse to integrate the discordant individual into the community will eventually manifest itself sooner or later. It is not strange that this has been a celebrated audiovisual return in Catalonia, and it should be related to the re-edition of Jordi Pujol's works and the return of post-Transition novelists. Like it or not, we are in a gray time where we need Biden to save America and Xavier Trias to clean up the city's shit for us.
Thirty years have passed and the world has become a much wilder place than the forests of Alaska. In fact, just ask the inhabitants of Roslyn, the small Washington village where the series was actually filmed, who are fed up with nostalgic tourists and would pay anything to live in peace. See how much things have changed, that even Manhattan snobs would put in many parentheses the advantages of the city we love and who knows if we would end up accepting Dr. Fleischman's sentence as a blessing from heaven. Living in the warmth of Alaska, with an extravagantly predictable existence, surrounded by adorably crazy people and romantic relationships with heteropatriarchal problems. Where do I sign? Who would have told us recently that we would end up embracing life in the county…