YMMV / Northern Exposure

• Diagnosed by the Audience: Ed's shyness, odd bouts of tunnel vision, and reluctance to make eye contact indicate he may be on the autism spectrum.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Has its own page.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: Most episodes have at least one or two deleted scenes (the first meeting between Maggie and her rival in "Learning Curve", Holling finding the cave of his Animal Nemesis in "The Final Frontier", a Dream Sequence that a guilty Maurice has for pulling a Parental Marriage Veto in "Sleeping with the Enemy", etc.) that generally improve the plot or make jokes seem funnier, but that were cut to keep the episodes short enough for their timeslot.
• Growing the Beard: Season 2 is much better regarded than Season 1, as the characters find their niches and the sweetness, comedy, and Magical Realism all gradually increase. Season 3 improves on all of these aspects and is probably the season with the best-liked episodes and guest stars while also benefitting from having more than eight episodes to draw out character arcs.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Maurice is dating a police officer who is aghast when she finds out Maurice cheats on his taxes. Maurice protests: "Look, it's not the law, it's the tax code. I bet Donald Trump doesn't pay a dime." Two decades later, Trump launches an unexpectedly successful bid for the presidency, and his undisclosed tax returns became a highly controversial political football as Democrats attempted to gain access to them.
  • In early season 3, Ed and Ruth-Anne praise Spike Lee as a great filmmaker but think that he'll improve once he inevitably grows out of his "preachy" phase. Thirty years later, both Lee's insistence on attacking social issues and the reception of his movies have only gotten better.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Joel can be a whiny know-it-all who constantly tries to assert his superiority over other people, but him being forced to be a smalltown doctor for years due to a Read the Fine Print contract, suffering from a sense of isolation due to there not being other Jews in Cicely, being dumped by his fiancee, and his Cosmic Plaything status can all make him pitiful.
  • Maurice is a greedy and arrogant racist, homophobe, and Dirty Old Man, but some episodes give him major Lonely at the Top vibes, and he is incapable of seeing generous and thoughtful actions by important people in his life for what they are and is obsessed with the idea that people have an angle while viewing some of his most selfless actions as moments of weakness. He also has some regrets about his relationship with his late brother and is unlucky in love (although this is often his own fault).
  • Maggie is mostly a heroic character but can be a hot-headed and judgmental Straw Feminist at times, with one of her most controversial actions being hitting Joel hard enough to break his nose in response to an insult, refusing to apologize, and then trying to evict him when he sues her in response. Still, she leans a lot heavier on the woobie side due to her Doom Magnet Cartwright Curse (and how at least one of those boyfriends-whom she eventually admits she thought about marriage and kids with-constantly cheated on her), the glimpses of her dysfunctional family life, and how her house burns down with most of her possessions.
• Retroactive Recognition: James Marsters appears in two episodes of the series (playing a different character in each) in seasons three and four respectively.
• Seasonal Rot: It started at the beginning of the fifth season. Contractual disputes with the cast caused a reduction in Joel's role in the show. At the same time, David Chase (of The Sopranos fame) assumed the position of Showrunner, and he despised the show's basic premise, later saying, "To me it was so precious, so self-congratulatory... I felt it was a fraud at its core." He admittedly only took the job for the paycheck. The decline accelerated the following year after Joel left and was replaced as town doctor by Phil Capra.
• Signature Scene:
  • Among the many strange dream sequences in the series, a common favorite is Joel dreaming of himself making a music video of the song "Simply Irresistible" and then getting propositioned by the backup dancers while rambling about how he knows this is a dream and expects to wake up before anything really good happens.
  • Adam and Eve's wedding in the season 3 finale is one of the most remembered moments in the series, even though neither is a main character.
  • Ed and Ruth-Anne playfully dancing over the grave plot that Ed just bought Ruth-Anne as a present in "A-Hunting We Will Go" is something that fans enjoy recreating or making other tributes to.
  • The puppet show Shelly puts on for Holling in "Things Become Extinct" might be the most well-known moment between them in all six seasons.
  • Joel saying Kaddish for his Uncle Manny as his neighbors watch respectfully is a short scene, but one with iconic status in most fans' eyes.
• Strangled by the Red String: The Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends pairing of Chris and Maggie in the final season is a big part of why that season has a bad reputation, due to their limited chemistry (especially on Chris's part) and lack of significant prior interactions.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Ranger Burns, the Bunny-Ears Lawyer fire ranger whose years of isolation have taken a toll on his social skills and who views Joel as his Only Friend, could have been a decent semiregular character but only makes two appearances and is played by different actors in each of them.
  • Animal-loving mathematician Amy and Chris get into a relationship with an intriguing and compelling beginning and work hard to make it a lasting one when circumstances threaten to split them up, but she vanishes after her first episode, to the disappointment of many fans.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The tie-in book Letters From Cicely involves an insomnia pandemic in the town which lasts for weeks. Written by veteran humorist Ellis Weiner, it ends up being one of the best "episodes" of the show. It's too bad it was consigned to a media tie-in, it could have made a good multi-part episode (or even an overarching plot for an entire season!)
  • Adam's first two episodes portray him as someone the townspeople view as a mythological Bigfoot, with them doubting Joel's claims that he met Adam. When Adam takes a job in town and begins interacting with people more, there’s no sequence of people reacting to meeting the person they’ve gossiped about face-to-face and admitting Joel was right.
  • Holling's long lost grifter daughter Jackie mentions having two young adult kids who are budding white-collar criminals. Some fans would have liked seeing Holling meet his grandchildren and potentially be able to set them on the right path, but they never do appear in person.
  • Maggie becoming mayor in season 6 has the potential for a big arc that gives her a lot of interesting experiences, but the election between her and Hunter Trapper Walt takes up all of one scene, and Maggie only exerts her authority or proposes any changes a couple of times for the remaining half-season.
• Values Dissonance: A lot of modern viewers are unsettled by how both Maurice and Holling first became lovers with Shelly when they were fifty and sixty respectively and she was a teenager (as she is either eighteen or twenty in season 1 and and left Maurice for Holling a year-and-a-half ago). The fact that Maurice became infatuated with Shelly while she was a contestant in a beauty contest he was judging can feel especially inappropriate.
• The Woobie: Poor, poor Ed. Few things ever seem to go right for him, and when they do, they don't seem to last long. Yet he takes almost all of it in stride, even when characters like Maurice are insulting him to his face.

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