TELEVISION : Multiple Exposure : The cast of ‘Northern Exposure’ faces a daunting prospect, living through dozens more episodes without the show’s creators

Well off the Interstate 90 freeway about an hour outside Seattle, a forest of towering pine trees nearly swallows this small, sleepy town and provides perfect seclusion for the 800 or so people who live here. But on one unseasonably sunny afternoon recently, dozens of curious outsiders quietly lined the main street, which stretches a whole block in length, to witness a showdown.

A petite, fair-skinned brunette with a pageboy haircut burst from a general store and defiantly strode down the sidewalk, dogged by a rather ineffectual man trying to calm her emotional tempest. She was berating him for not having taken advantage of her the night before when she fell asleep in a hotel room from exhaustion and alcohol.

Suddenly she stopped in her tracks and swung toward him like an armored turret ready to explode. “How could you not have sex with me?” she demanded to know.

“What?” the man wondered.

“I was on the bed. I was prostrate, willing,” she said.

“You were asleep,” he whined incredulously.

The bystanders on the street listened intently.

“You couldn’t wake me up?” the woman shot back. “How much trouble could it have been?”

“I tried.”

“Yeah, right,” she said mockingly and stormed off.

It’s not usual for a woman to scold a man for not sleeping with her, but then there’s nothing usual about “Northern Exposure,” the CBS series that led these 200 or so onlookers to the tiny town of Roslyn like some distant star. What draws crowds here is actually an ensemble of stars--the two on hand were Rob Morrow and Janine Turner--in what is arguably network television’s hottest show.

“Northern Exposure,” where nothing is as it seems but everything is seemingly safe, filters the benign world of Cicely, Alaska--a.k.a. Roslyn--through the cynical eyes of a big-city physician who’s stuck there. The fictional, mystical Cicely is an outback, laid-back town that exists inside a non-judgmental world where life is a human safari. Where all people form a complex tapestry of shared experiences. Where spirituality is a cultural handrail that links folks to the past and guides them into the future. Where man and woman are yin and yang, proton and electron, the tension that binds the universe.

But the harmony of that delicately balanced universe is suddenly threatening collapse.

In an unusual move, CBS picked up “Northern Exposure” in March for two full seasons. That brought a sigh of relief to the faithful disciples who loyally followed “Northern Exposure” from the start, when the only thing less predictable than the series’ story lines was its future. But before the celebration could get started, news of another development leaked out: The two writer-producers who brought “Northern Exposure” to life would be leaving their loving creation midway through next season. The question of who will replace them as executive producers has not yet been answered.

That means that “Northern Exposure,” which periodically contemplates nature’s cycle of renewal--how new life often spreads its wings and rises like a phoenix from the ashes of death--will soon be forced to test the mettle of its own proverbial wisdom.

Creators Joshua Brand, 41, and John Falsey, 40, are the artistic leaders, guidance counselors and spiritual gurus for “Northern Exposure.” They have enchanted living rooms across America for two seasons now, amassing a devout following of intellectually, spiritually and emotionally satisfied viewers along the way.

But the two writer-producers, who first teamed up on the long-running “St. Elsewhere” and created this season’s highly regarded civil-rights drama “I’ll Fly Way” on NBC, are also among the most in demand in Hollywood. Which is why they made the difficult decision a couple of months ago to move on to new projects.

The day after Brand and Falsey concluded negotiations with CBS and MCA Television to resign as executive producers after 13 episodes of “Northern Exposure” next season, they packed their bags to board an airplane bound for Jamaica, where their new series, “Going to Extremes,” is filming for ABC (see related story).

Before they were out the door, however, the phone rang and a studio executive informed the surprised producers that MCA had just signed a deal with CBS to deliver a whopping 50 episodes of “Northern Exposure” over the next two years.

As they say in Hollywood, the show must go on.

Especially when it’s a sizzling network show that steadily built momentum through the season, finishing as high as No. 3 in the weekly ratings this spring.

The two creators of “Northern Exposure” will remain loosely involved as advisers after their 13-episode commitment runs out next fall. But control of the series will be out of their hands and turned over to someone new.

“We reserve the right to keep our names on the show if we feel good about what’s being done,” Brand said. “And we reserve the right to take our names off if we don’t.”

Although the cast and crew expressed confidence in the current writing staff’s ability to keep “Northern Exposure” well off the beaten trail of prime-time programming, a shadow of uncertainty has been cast over the series.

“Personally, when this show starts to slip from the vision that it is now, I’m bailing out. You know I’ll get out,” said John Corbett, who stars as Chris-in-the-morning, the philosophical ex-con turned radio deejay who found his salvation in the poems of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” while in the midst of robbing a house one day.

“I’m not going to spend time in my life doing something I don’t care about anymore,” he said. “And if Josh and John abandon ship, and I’m stuck here doing something that’s lost a vision, I’m jumping ship too. I think everybody should jump ship. Everybody here is too good to stay with something they’re not proud of.”

News of the prodigious 50-episode order hit the “Northern Exposure” retinue with a triumphant thud. “It’s like looking at the Great Wall of China,” sighed co-executive producer Andy Schneider.

“It’s a daunting prospect,” agreed supervising producer Diane Frolov. “It’s great, but terrifying.”

“Sort of like quantum physics,” Schneider observed.

Every Monday night at 10, the evening becomes eclectic on “Northern Exposure.” There’s even a record album in the works of the musical mosaic that Brand and Falsey refer to as “the sixth man” on their show, using a basketball reference. They have featured songs from around the world, ranging from German opera star Frederica von Stade’s “Bailero” to South African Miriam Makeba’s “Embhaceni.”

Watching “Northern Exposure” is a lot like reading a good book--and not just because of the pop references to Kathy Battle, Monty Python and Def Leppard or the wise words of Carl Jung and Soren Kierkegaard that roll off characters’ tongues as naturally as a friendly “Howdy.” The show’s stories unfold like a road map, demanding active involvement from the viewer to determine whether the narrative is on track to a final destination or branching off on some small country road that leads to nowhere but is kind of nice to drive down just the same.

On the surface, “Northern Exposure” presents the young, urban Angst of the quintessential city dweller--Joel Fleischman (Morrow), a nervous Jewish doctor from New York--resigned to spend his five-year residency in Alaska, the final frontier, a state separated physically from the Lower 48 and a little bit closer to the stars. He’s counting the days until he can leave the idyllic town of Cicely, which paid for his schooling, and the eccentric folk who burrow there.

There’s tough-talking Maggie O’Connell (Turner), the fetching bush pilot who builds shrines to the boyfriends who keep dying on her, one of whom happened to be sitting under a satellite plummeting to Earth. Ed Chigliak (Darren E. Burrows), a shaggy orphan raised by native Alaskans, dreams of making movies in Hollywood. Senior citizen Holling Vincoeur (John Cullum), the perpetually dazed owner of the local tavern, shacks up with an innocent teen-age nymphet (Cynthia Geary). And Marilyn Whirlwind (Elaine Miles), Fleischman’s office assistant, dispenses regular monosyllabic advice to the good doctor.

On a deeper level, and this show frequently travels to subterranean depths, “Northern Exposure” is about “love, death and sex,” in the words of its writers. “Cicely, Alaska, is a state of mind more than anything else,” reflected Falsey, a former short-story writer with a master’s degree in fine arts from Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

“Josh and I feel that’s one of the main reasons for its appeal,” he went on. “It’s like opening up a window and letting a breath of fresh air in. You have this small town of people who like each other, who enjoy each other, who listen to each other’s comments, but don’t judge them. I mean, wouldn’t you like to live there?”

Roslyn, the former coal town that turned to lumber before sinking close to impoverishment, has been temporarily transformed into the fictional small town of Cicely, with totem poles lining the street, moose antlers hanging from buildings and a few dressed-up storefronts. Occasionally, when the weather is uncooperative, flocked snowbanks are rolled in on casters, plastic icicles are affixed to roof overhangs and windows are frosted with synthetic ice from a spray can.

Most of the exterior scenes of “Northern Exposure” are filmed in Roslyn. The interiors are shot in Redmond, nearly 100 miles away, inside an old, converted computer warehouse with special insulation to shut out the frequent Northwest thundershowers.

Press reports have circulated about huffy locals in Roslyn clashing with Hollywood outsiders, but nobody appeared to be suffering on this final afternoon of shooting for the season.

After all, the series has injected hundreds of thousands of dollars into the local economy, not to mention the recent purchase of a $12,000 firetruck that’s too big to fit into Roslyn’s firehouse. One waitress at the crowded Roslyn Cafe bitterly complained about all the bustling tourists at the same time she eagerly collected money from them, moving about 40 Roslyn Cafe T-shirts a day at $15 a pop.

And the tourists, hundreds of whom flock to the town daily whether the show is in production or not, were out in force with fingers pointing and shutters clicking. Two truck drivers from Texas altered their route to take a gander at their favorite TV series. Beside them stood a group of social workers from nearby Moses Lake who decided to spend their “mental health day” off there.

“This show is not about the rich,” said a wide-eyed Amy Rochek, 31, standing on a curb beside her husband, Daryl. “It doesn’t try to make people what they aren’t. Everybody is messed up.”

“They’re not pumping a bunch of morals down your throat,” added Daryl, who was lugging a baby in diapers on one shoulder and a camcorder on the other. “It’s country life, which is the way we grew up in northern Minnesota.”

But putting together a show as complex as “Northern Exposure” has taken its toll on the cast and crew, most of whom have been uprooted and moved to the relative wilds of upstate Washington, where 15-hour workdays have been the norm for nearly 10 months.

Then just when the show’s staff was getting ready for a much-needed summer vacation, word came down of the series renewal, deciding not just the fate of the show over the next two years but the lives of the people who are under contract to make it.

Moments after filming the confrontation with Morrow on the street, Turner sat in the cool shade on the bottom steps of a ramshackle building, away from the crowd, contemplating the imposing steps that lay ahead of her.

“When I was doing that scene, it was a very, very intense scene,” said Turner, 29, who also plays Morrow’s will-they-or-won’t-they love interest on the series. “And I didn’t want to just do it angry. I wanted to have the hurt. So I had to recall some things in my life.

“And I was just telling my therapist the other day--because I talk to my therapist on the phone in New York--there’s not even any time to cry. You know, there’s no time to feel. You’re so busy with this schedule. You’re so pumped. There’s not any time to sit back and be human. Everybody needs time to feel and be nurtured and have people around in your life. But I have to put all that on hold for a few years now. Most of us do.”

When “Northern Exposure” premiered in July, 1990, a flurry of stories swirled in the press about the cast, one big happy family all living in the same apartment compound in Redmond. Today a sense of familiarity has set in, and the members of the cast, while no doubt still a happy-go-lucky bunch, have found their own rhythms, settling into homes or apartments throughout the area.

“When we first came here we bonded a lot,” Corbett said. “We all went out to dinner, and hung, and danced. Then we all kind of split up.”

Resigned like Dr. Fleischman to live in a remote town for at least two more years, several of the cast members, including Turner and Geary, are looking into buying property now.

“God, we’ve never been sure what our future would be,” drawled Barry Corbin, the burly Texan who plays ex-astronaut Maurice Minnifield, the town’s enterprising civic leader. Corbin has relocated his wife, two sons and four horses from his Southern California ranch to a nearby homestead. “I’m a 51-year-old actor, and this is the first time I’ve known what I would be doing six months from now.”

Actors by trade are gypsies, and living a transplanted existence for 10 long months a year can feel like a consignment in hell. Cast members are regularly shuttling on weekends to and from Sea-Tac International Airport to revisit the lives they once knew. They tend to forget their high-profile status until they leave the local haunts.

“This weekend I went downtown (to Seattle) to hear some blues music with Richard Cummings, who plays my brother on the show,” said Corbett, a self-described hillbilly from West Virginia whose soft-spoken words and chiseled features have made him something of a sex symbol on the show. “We walked into this place and you could just feel the whiplash start. I call it homage . I go, ‘Hey man, we’re getting homage just for walking in.’ ” He laughed. “That’s a weird adjustment.”

Turner, a fashion model-turned-actress, recalled that “Rob and I went to the Golden Globe Awards, and we came back and said, ‘We won the Golden Globe!’ And the crew was kind of like, ‘Yeah, right, big deal.’ They just kept pushing the dolly. And I’m like, ‘Nobody is into this!’ Rob and I had just been in the midst of all this excitement around the show and nobody here felt that.”

“The success of the show is almost this dream thing that comes back in waves,” said Adam Arkin, who plays the recurring character Adam, an unshaven culinary master with psychic powers who hides out in the woods pretending to be Big Foot. “Nobody here is in that caldron of tension and anxiety. Hollywood is almost extraneous to this show and surreal to this environment.”

The relative isolation of Redmond and Roslyn has indeed provided a protective buffer from the high-pressure cooker of Hollywood. “I had some Hollywood meetings recently,” Turner said, “and it’s just really bizarre. I realize how out of touch we are. But in a way I like it because it keeps us kind of naive and fresh. We don’t have to deal with the politics.”

There are some curious Hollywood onlookers waiting to see if the security of a two-year renewal, which the networks have given to several series this year to help lock down the spiraling salaries and production costs associated with a successful TV show, will lead to a creative letdown.

“I was very ambivalent when I got the call (about the two-year pickup),” Morrow said. “I mean, here is a great thing. Financially I’m in wonderful shape. I have credibility, and I can get other jobs. But people are typing me now. I’m exhausted. I’m scared that I’m going to dry up a little in terms of my edge. I’ll find myself every once in a while not caring about a scene, or part of a scene, and I won’t know it. Then I want to die, because I love acting. It’s like a religion. And to not care about it. . . .”

He paused, shaking his head. “But this wears you down.”

Right now everyone is taking a much-needed break from the show, which just wrapped shooting three weeks ago.

Burrows should be on his Harley about this time--”a great stress reliever,” he says--cruising through Arizona, New Mexico and Texas with some buddies. Corbett and Morrow, the series’ breakaway stars along with Turner, had to turn down feature film offers this summer because of timing; so Corbett hopes to fly to France and Morrow will stay in Washington for the Seattle Film Festival, where he has entered a small film he produced last summer. Turner was lucky enough to negotiate a starring role opposite Sylvester Stallone in “Cliffhanger,” a mountain-climbing adventure directed by Renny Harlin (“Die Harder”), now filming in Italy.

And on the first of July they all come back to start a new season of “Northern Exposure.”

Shooting in the Pacific Northwest has never really been easy for “Northern Exposure.” But in creating the series, Brand and Falsey set out to solve what they saw as an “existential problem”--how do you build the elements of surprise and spontaneity into the assembly line of TV production? One way, they felt, was to go on location.

“Neither of us had been to Alaska, but we just had this sense of size,” said Brand, a former poet and playwright with a master’s degree in English literature from Columbia University. “Based on what we pictured, there’s no place in Los Angeles where we could shoot it without doing ‘Tales of the Gold Monkey,’ where you go to a back lot with this claustrophobic field of vision, throw a lot of greens around for a jungle and hear some prerecorded monkey chatter. You can’t stretch your eyeballs, because you’re not there.”

When Brand and Falsey were developing “Northern Exposure” in 1988, about the same time their critically acclaimed drama “A Year in the Life” was gasping for breath on NBC, at one point they considered plopping Joel Fleischman in the Louisiana bayou. They ultimately chose Alaska because of its extreme contrast to New York.

Authentic locations were first scouted in Alaska, but the ideal spots were so isolated that they required puddle-jumper airplanes to fly into. When the producers learned that “Northern Exposure” would be a limited summer replacement series with a paltry budget of $800,000 an episode, less than the allocation many half-hour sitcoms shot in Hollywood receive, they settled on Roslyn.

To achieve the feel of Alaska, production designer Woody Crocker asked his nephew in Anchorage to go to smaller villages and take pictures of everything he saw and send them over. Crocker also phoned bars in Alaska to see what they drank there, which is how he found out about the brand Alaskan beer, brewed in Juneau. Bartenders from the Yukon sent loads of empty bottles, containers and labels to use as set dressing.

“Northern Exposure” began shooting on a grueling six-day schedule per episode, compared to eight days now. The producers couldn’t afford to pay overtime, but everyone worked anyway. “It was death,” recalled producer Matthew Nodella. “We killed everybody.”

“It was a tough time,” Crocker concurred. “But everybody, the actors, the crew, all put something extra into it because we wanted to be picked up. That spirit carried us through. Every one of us tried to take our little portion of the show and make it better.”

“Northern Exposure” premiered for a modest eight-week run in the summer of 1990, was picked up on a trial basis for another eight episodes that fall, before finally receiving a full-season order of 22 episodes last season. The budget was increased to $1.2 million an episode and will probably jump again with the two-year order.

“This is a case where the critics and the press helped really push something, at least in the minds of the American public,” said Jeff Sagansky, president of CBS Entertainment. “Most of the time I don’t think the public is too sensitive to what the critics say, but when all the critics say the same thing, like they did on ‘Twin Peaks,’ they can really create a groundswell of support for a show. It doesn’t happen very often.”

Ed Dances With Crane . . . Disenfranchised Ranger . . . Ex-KGB Agent Wants to Sell Maurice His Dossier . . . Road Kill . . .

The latticework of index cards, tacked up on a bulletin board inside Schneider and Frolov’s drab office overlooking the parking lot of an industrial building in Santa Monica, far from the expansive Pacific Northwest, reads like a crazed writer’s stream of conscious. Whenever the writers, who are forever culling newspapers and magazine articles, stumble upon likely subject matter for a “Northern Exposure” episode they pin it up on the board.

Joel Gets Hit by Big Rock . . . Cannibals--Donner Pass . . . Ed Adopts Judaism . . . Suicidal Dentist . . .

“A few days ago I read an article in the Los Angeles Times that said mushrooms are not separate entities but a small link in a complex biological chain,” said Schneider, who is married to Frolov. (As the writer-producer team who supervised most of the scripts this season, they are the favorites to replace Brand and Falsey.)

“And they found this mushroom in Michigan that stretches out for 38 acres as one organism,” Schneider continued. “I have no idea that we’ll ever use that.”

“But doesn’t that sound like a ‘Northern Exposure’ episode?” Frolov kicked in with a smile.

Scattered elsewhere in their office are reference books on philosophy, anthropology, psychology--general-education leftovers from the writers’ undergraduate college days that turned out to be useful after all. There’s also a copy of John Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations,” “The Oxford Anthology of English Poetry” and some popular works on science, including a compendium of contemporary essays on physics and math edited by Timothy Ferris, author of “Coming of Age in the Milky Way.”

“You have to be involved in this show,” said Frolov, who studied theology and dance as an undergraduate at Berkeley and earned a master’s degree in playwrighting at UCLA. “The watcher has to be engaged on an emotional level and think about things, in some ways like a reading experience. It’s not like watching a car chase where everything is shown to you.”

“That’s what’s so positive,” added Schneider, who was a Russian literature major at New York University and a Russian translator before he turned to TV writing in the mid-1970s on “Forever Fernwood.” “When I started out in television, the basic rule was, ‘It can’t be too dumb. You should tell the audience what they’re going to see, tell them what they’re seeing and then tell them what they just saw.’ It doesn’t have to be that way.”

The outrageous set designs called for by the scripts have become a trademark of “Northern Exposure.” Crocker has been called upon to construct a 10-foot bear skeleton out of welded steel, a psychedelic circus bus with floating Chagalls painted on the side and a $20,000 catapult using 9,000 pounds of lead counterweights attached to a 48-foot laminated arm to fling a 600-pound cottage piano 100 yards through the air--part of a performance art exhibition by Chris.

For the season finale that airs May 18, an episode that travels back in time to the founding of Cicely, when two lesbian lovers named Roslyn and Cicely infused a small frontier town with imported art and culture from Paris, Crocker was granted $70,000 to faithfully re-create the main street of Cicely as it might have existed in 1909.

Right now, Schneider and Frolov, who will receive no summer hiatus, are up to their elbows in research material on clocks. They are working on an episode for next season inspired by an article they read about a town that finally received a clock it had ordered 100 years ago. There’re also plans for a new ensemble character--a hyper-allergic man living inside a plastic bubble who comes to Cicely to find the least toxic environment.

“He’ll be our environmental barometer,” Frolov said. “The theme is that we all live inside of a bubble.”

“This show is like an organism,” Schneider said. “It does change. It can’t help but go through some changes. We hope to maintain the quality and the kind of interesting stories that Josh and John have promoted. It’s a daunting task, even if Josh and John were here to maintain the quality for 50 episodes. But as Diane says, we just have to take one script at a time.”