Did they ever do the Dvds with the correct music? I thought the rights to use the original broadcast music was prohibitive.
Being from the UK, I bought an early disc of it, season 1, I think and it was encoded in the old NTSC low def format, and looked horrible. It might even have had a cloth jacket over the dvd itself. I think I bought the reissue with the good picture. Or swore I’d never buy anymore Northern Exposure because of the horrible version I bought.
I also remember it going really bad at the end, when Joel had left. And Maggie. Or one or the other. And they kept coming back every so often. And the DJ’s normally good chat was crap. A bit like Season 5+ of the West Wing. It was always broadcast really late at night in the UK, and new seasons never announced, so I may well have given up on it because of that as well…
They never got most of the original music but they got fairly good replacement music.
The final season was without question inferior. Actually a common thing for shows. Dick Van Dyke, Barney Miller, WKRP were among the few shows that avoid this.
When they repeat these (which they must do once in a while somewhere), do they have the original music?
It just strikes me as a case of being one of the few times its worth getting a non dvd rip torrent, or indeed, if lucky enough to be in the area of broadcast, pulling them off the more interesting dvrs (such as Humax, which you can grab such files).
I really enjoyed the show, but then I went off to college, and keeping up with it wasn’t exactly a priority anymore, although I caught what episodes I could when I was back home during breaks.
I enjoyed the show a lot when it was being broadcast. A while back I bought the DVDs for the first 3 seasons but then left off. I should probably get the remaining seasons and see the rest.
I loved most of the characters, but the one thing I disliked was the two lead characters. Neither Joel nor Maggie appealed to me much, especially in their inability to communicate with one another. I know the sexual tension/love-hate relationship trope is standard, but they were particularly infuriating.
Near the end of the third season there was an episode that was particularly WTF in terms of “how times have changed.” Joel and Maggie find themselves forced to share a hotel room on a trip outside of Cicely. Maggie (no doubt deliberately in order to overcome her inhibitions) gets drunk but overdoes it and passes out. Joel, being a gentleman, doesn’t take advantage of the situation. However, when they wake up in the morning, he allows Maggie to think they did have sex, and she professes to be embarrassed.
A few days later, he confesses he they didn’t actually have sex. Her reaction is to become totally outraged that he didn’t rape her (as it would be construed today). :smack::smack::smack: Even in 1990s terms that was one fucked-up relationship.
Those are fair critiques, but I think it was all the quirky support characters and even quirkier recurring minor characters that made the show so great. Adam & Eve, the Flying Man, Mike Monroe, Graham Greene as Leonard Quinhagak, etc.
Agreed. I loved Ed, Chris, Ruth-Ann, and the recurring characters. I liked Holling and Shelley as well, but that’s another relationship that probably wouldn’t fly today.
Loved the show to death. I even quote it from time to time. It was one of those few things that my mom and I could actually agree on watching 100% of the time, and I really rather miss it.
Think it’s time to start checking on how one might acquire the run…
I loved it during its initial run, but tried to watch it again from the beginning a year or two ago. I feel that it just didn’t age well, and didn’t get more than a few episodes in. I still revere it, but am afraid to continue watching it.
It wasn’t supposed to be funny. A LOT of the Cecilians didn’t like Joel Fleischman, he was a whiner, crying how unfair that he was marooned there, how sullen he was. He didn’t have Marilyn’s admiration or respect. And she did her job just fine, working with a whiner who thought he was too good for the place. She didn’t have to kowtow.
Joel was never supposed to be liked. I think Maggie was, but the writing kind of dragged her into his orbit making her unlikeable. But having a dislikable lead works sometimes, Orange is the new black had the same.
Maggie on her own could have been likable, especially if she had just unreservedly hated Joel. It was her dithering that made her annoying.
On OITNB, Piper’s role pretty much got reduced to just another character in later seasons. And even if she wasn’t that sympathetic, she was still far from the least likable character!
Exactly! Shows that hummed along with sexual tension often crashed after the tension was resolved.
One of my favorite episodes was Joel’s Three Ghosts of Yom Kippur, which was (obviously) a spoof of A Christmas Carol. The ending where he’s running to get through the gates before they close–that actually is reflected in the YK liturgy. And the one where Shelly missed her Catholic “smells and bells” and hubby (the old guy–can’t remember his name) fixed up the chapel with lots of candles and then sang to her. That actor was really a great singer.
Janine Turner had to be one of the most beautiful women in the world. I gather she was moderately well-known from some soap opera, but with long hair. That short-short pixie cut showed off her perfect features.
Holling (old Guy) was played by John Cullum who has had a very long Broadway career. He played Rutledge in the movie and the play 1776. I know he was in Camelot’s original run and from what I remember reading a lot of other singing roles on Broadway.
Which was apparently the complete opposite of actress Elaine Miles’ actual personality.
Agreed that Maggie and Joel weren’t all that appealing. The charm was in the minor characters - Marilyn, Chris (and his brother Bernard), Ed, Leonard. Even Adam and Eve.
Ruth Ann was another of my favorites. One episode was set when the ice on the river broke up, which apparently caused uncontrollable horniness in all Cicely’s residents. Joel orders a Victoria’s Secret catalog. When it arrives at Ruth Ann’s store, he claims that he wanted to order some lingerie for his fiancee. But she tells him that if he wants it for “onanistic purposes”, she has some Playboy and Penthouse magazines in the back that he could have. Completely deadpan, of course. Joel takes one of the Playboys because it has “an interview with Kurt Vonnegut that he’d like to read”. Her next customer is Maggie, who’s returning a rented videotape of softcore beefcake porn.
I used to own a spinoff novel that I wish I still had. It was a series of letters written by residents of Cicely, after the town is hit with a freak anomaly that causes everyone in the town to stay awake constantly, without fatigue. As soon as they leave the environs, they fall asleep (as Maggie finds out when she attempts to fly). Maurice, being Maurice, attempt to sell the town to Kim Basinger (this was when she was in the news for buying her hometown of Braselton, Ga.). But when she and her representatives arrive, the anomaly has worn off, the whole town’s fallen asleep where they stand, and she flees, thinking the populace has committed mass suicide at the thought of her buying the town.
Not the only show to suffer from having its music changed. A few days ago, I was watching the episode of St Elsewhere in which Dr Caldwell (Mark Harmon) gets his face slashed. The background music for that scene in the original broadcast was “Eye in the Sky,” by the Alan Parsons Project. It had been replaced with some generic tune that had lots of annoying boom-chikka-boom percussion.
The ice breakup episode was one of my favorites. Holling developed a desperate need to fight somebody and ended up getting punched out by the big lady cop (played by Diane Delano, a familiar face on the screen).
It was her dithering that made her annoying.