Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is David Schwartz’s Northern Exposure main and end theme, represented here by the extended version of the theme from the first of two Northern Exposure soundtrack albums that were released by MCA Records.

Lemon of Troy is currently recapping Northern Exposure for The Avocado. I sporadically watched the fish-out-of-water show—the creation of St. Elsewhere creators Joshua Brand and John Falsey—when its reruns aired on A&E from 1997 to 2001. (“Jaws of Life,” the one where a wax statue of KBHR-AM owner Maurice Minnifield creeps everybody out, is the episode I remember the most from the A&E reruns.) I never watched any episodes from Northern Exposure’s poorly received sixth and final season, in which Maggie O’Connell, Janine Turner’s bush pilot character, became the mayor of Cicely, Alaska and both Paul Provenza and Teri Polo took over former cast member Rob Morrow’s role as the outsider trying to adjust to Cicely.

When I learned that the streaming version of Northern Exposure restored most of the songs that were annoyingly removed by Universal for its DVD releases of the show, I began watching its entire run in chronological order on Prime last year. I’m stinge-watching Northern Exposure instead of binge-watching it.

The last episode I watched—before my mini-marathon, which I’ll get to a couple of paragraphs from now, two days ago—was the third-season premiere, while Lemon of Troy is way ahead of me and recently recapped the episode where Jessica Lundy returned as Elaine, Dr. Joel Fleischman’s ex-fiancée from Flushing, and the episode where Ruth-Anne danced with Ed Chigliak on her grave. I’ve liked Lundy ever since she chewed the scenery as a pregnant Jersey wife from hell in the 1990 comedy movie Madhouse. I always thought Lundy was more attractive than Turner, an insufferable MAGAt who’s currently co-hosting an unwatchable Northern Exposure rewatch podcast with Morrow. (Lundy’s most recent series regular role was as a U.S. Postal Inspector on The Inspectors, a CBS Saturday morning procedural for kids and one of the strangest 2010s live-action shows that went past the 100-episode mark without ever being a trending topic or the subject of a Primetimer forum. She still looks great. Meanwhile, Turner is the poster child for “MAGAtism, a.k.a. racism, ages you.”)

Graham Greene—a Canadian from the Six Nations Reserve and one of several great Indigenous actors who had recurring roles on Northern Exposure (it was set in a small town with a large Native American population)—is now swirling in the heavens. Lemon of Troy hasn’t gotten to Greene’s first appearance on Northern Exposure as healer Leonard Quinhagak yet. But due to Greene’s death, I skipped ahead to Leonard’s first storyline in the middle of the third season and watched that for the first time, as well as Greene’s four subsequent appearances as Leonard. (After I finished watching that mini-marathon, I’ll be circling back to the second episode of the third season.)

The five Northern Exposure episodes I marathoned in one day a couple of days ago perfectly sum up my feelings about the show: My favorite characters are the Indigenous characters (particularly Marilyn Whirlwind, Joel’s taciturn receptionist, played by Elaine Miles) and Ed, an orphaned film nerd who’s part-white, part-Indigenous and was raised by Tlingits, while the argumentative sexual tension between Joel and Maggie immediately gets tiresome.

The bickering between the doctor and the bush pilot initially gave this cozy fantasy of small-town life (with lots of magical realism) an edge. It kept Northern Exposure from turning into one of those bland and unwatchable Hallmark Channel original hour-longs about idyllic small towns, but halfway through the first season, it also started to make me wish I could change the channel to KBHR. Many people who worked with Morrow and Turner on Northern Exposure’s sets on location in Roslyn, Washington (which became a tourist trap during the show’s run on CBS from 1990 to 1995) got tired of hearing Morrow and Turner’s shrill voices as well.

A 1994 article about Morrow’s departure from the show by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (not the Deseret News, which so many people erroneously attribute the article to) was full of quotes about the fact that he was, during filming, as prickly and obnoxious as the temperamental New Yorker he portrayed. The piece also pointed out that “His co-star, Turner, is infamous for quirky demands and over-the-top tantrums.”

“I think the producers would have been happy if a script had put (Fleischman and O’Connell) on a plane and had it crash and the show went on without them,” said an unidentified industry representative with connections to Northern Exposure who was interviewed in the Post-Intelligencer article.

The Northern Exposure staff writers’ feelings about Morrow’s prickliness and snobbishness seeped into the show, and I like how they got a then-recent Oscar nominee to utter those feelings during his first guest spot on the show.

Greene’s recurring role on Northern Exposure was the show’s most enjoyable bit of stunt casting. The Oscar nomination Greene earned in 1991 was for his non-stereotypical role in Dances with Wolves as a Sioux medicine man who adopted a white girl whose parents were killed by Pawnee warriors. It was great that Greene, Tantoo Cardinal, Rodney A. Grant, and the late Floyd Red Crow Westerman—another Indigenous actor who guest-starred on Northern Exposure (he played the cheeseburger-odor-loving ghost of One Who Waits, Ed’s spirit guide)—played either three-dimensional human beings or ordinary tribespeople instead of tired or over-the-top stereotypes in Dances with Wolves (which was set in 1863), but Kevin Costner’s directorial debut was also a frustrating white savior movie. On Northern Exposure, Greene played a medicine man again, this time from Tlingit territory, but his scenes as the deadpan Leonard are a lot more fun to watch than his scenes as Kicking Bird in Dances with Wolves.

White savior narratives like Dances with Wolves’s were nowhere to be found on Northern Exposure. Joel practiced medicine in a town where bears shape-shifted into humans who wanted to slow-dance with Maggie and people experienced sleepwalking problems that caused them to wake up on the branch of a tree or on the roof of the Brick, Cicely’s busiest restaurant/bar. He was a man of science who often scoffed at the bizarre conditions that sometimes befell Shelly Tambo, KBHR DJ Chris Stevens, Ed, or even himself. His medical school training wasn’t sufficient enough to deal with those crises.

In those situations, Joel became useless. That’s where Leonard came in—his bedside manner was better than the easily agitated Joel’s—and his mix of compassion (something Joel struggled with as a doctor) and old tribal remedies was always effective against the strangest medical or psychiatric conditions in town. Leonard was a modern man instead of the 1860s healer Greene played in Costner’s western. He was able to keep up with Ed’s nonstop movie references. For instance, he once recalled to Ed, whom he mentored in the ways of shamanism, that he disagreed with Pauline Kael over her opinions on Bernardo Bertolucci. The show’s writers even inserted Greene’s past as a carpenter into a storyline about Leonard’s construction of a totem pole that accidentally reignites a feud between Marilyn’s family and the family that adopted Ed.

One of Northern Exposure’s most amusing running jokes was the way that Leonard would straight-facedly say, “Mm-hmm, I’ve seen this before,” whenever he encountered a bizarre problem in Cicely. In 1993’s “Family Feud,” Shelly’s anxiety about the next step in her romantic relationship with the much older Holling Vincoeur, the owner of the Brick, caused her to hallucinate dancers who weren’t there.

One of Greene’s last TV roles—it’s my other favorite TV role of his—was the opposite of Leonard. The third and final season of Reservation Dogs, the show that got great mileage out of the word “shitass,” was mostly about the first Rez Dogs, the idealistic teens who were the Elora, Bear, Cheese, and Willie Jack of 1976, and Greene recurred as a reclusive, bitter, and elderly version of Maximus, Bear’s ’70s counterpart. That final season was an opportunity for creator/showrunner Sterlin Harjo to unite three Indigenous acting legends—Greene and Rez Dogs semi-regulars Wes Studi (who also had a major role in Dances with Wolves) and Gary Farmer—and their scenes together in “Dig,” the show’s final episode, are now bittersweet.

During Rez Dogs and the Marvel Studios miniseries Echo, it was wonderful to see an elder statesman like Greene working with a new generation of Indigenous writers and directors who are carrying on what Greene effectively did as an actor to counter Indigenous stereotypes in movies like Michael Apted’s Thunderheart and Polish director Ryszard Bugajski’s 1991 eco-revenge thriller Clearcut, a lost classic of Canadian cinema and a movie I watched for the first time earlier this week. Clearcut was Greene’s personal favorite project. It’s easy to see why: The movie decried environmental racism against the First Nations without getting preachy or sappy about it, and Greene, in the role of a militant Indigenous activist, got to mutilate the legs of an evil white capitalist and gorily kill a pair of racist cops.

Whether it was a project from an Indigenous creator or a project from a white one, Greene often stole the show and was the definition of a class act. The unidentified disease that killed him is a repugnant shitass.

Today’s prompt: It’s Thursday, September 15, 1994. What would you want to watch?

To get a closer look at the two snapshots of TV Guide, right-click an image and open it in a new tab.

Starting this week, I’m going to be sometimes posting ’90s TV Guide listings as prompts because I have a hard time coming up with prompts that interest people. I got the idea of asking people what they would pick to watch out of a TV Guide issue from two different podcasters who currently do the same thing: Boston stand-up comic Ken Reid, whose long-running TV Guidance Counselor podcast about TV Guide I was a guest on in 2021, and Zach Wilson. The Oregon resident co-hosts Random Access Television with Vulture’s Joe Adalian and regularly posts on Bluesky old program listings from TV Guide to find out what people would choose from the listings. (Wilson also runs on Bluesky the Sitcom People bot account, which posts screen shots or video clips from sitcom opening credits sequences.) The old listings I’ll be posting will come from either Internet Archive PDFs of entire issues of TV Guide or my own collection of ’90s TV Guides.

I remember watching on September 15, 1994 Fox’s first airing of the New York Undercover pilot. I was a Filipino American Bay Area kid who wore Timberlands all the time like a New York boom bap rapper and was curious about this new cop show Andre Harrell, the now-deceased founder of Uptown Records, was co-producing for Fox. (The show’s working title was Uptown Undercover, a reference to Harrell’s label.) The pilot was directed by Bill Duke, a big get for New York Undercover because he directed the entertaining adaptation of Chester Himes’s A Rage in Harlem and the added-to-Criterion-in-2021 Deep Cover. The only episode Duke directed for New York Undercover, the pilot aired as the show’s second episode and pit Williams and Torres against a car theft ring where the perps are youth center kids. Its cold open kicked off with this track: