Alaska, of all places
| Television series | |
|---|---|
| German title | Alaska, of all places |
| Original title | Northern exposure |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Year (s) | 1990-1995 |
| length | 45 minutes |
| Episodes | 110 in 6 seasons |
| genre | Dramedy |
| idea |
Joshua Brand , John Falsey |
| music | David Schwartz , Iris DeMent : Our Town |
| First broadcast | Jul 12, 1990 (USA) on CBS |
| German-language first broadcast |
June 10, 1992 on RTLplus |
| occupation | |
| |
Alaska of all things (original title: Northern Exposure ) is an American television series from 1990 to 1995, which was very successful due to its unusual portrayal and laconic humor. The series was set in the fictional small town of Cicely in Alaska . The outdoor shots took place mainly in the city of Roslyn ( Washington ).
characters
The focus of the series is Dr. Joel Fleischman, a young Jewish doctor from New York who has to practice for four years in the small town of Cicely because the state of Alaska has funded his medical studies.
Other important characters that appear in the course of the series are:
- Mary Margaret "Maggie" O'Connell, determined and independent bush pilot , whose lovers have all died in extremely bizarre accidents (including being killed by a satellite, fallen from an oil platform and drowned, turned wrong on a missile test site, fell asleep while hiking in the mountains and froze to death) and who is connected to Fleischman by a love-hate relationship;
- Maurice J. Minnifield, ex- Mercury - Astronaut , aging millionaire entrepreneur and all-American hero who made Cicely the latest Boomtown wants to do;
- Holling Gustaf Vincoeur, bar owner, mayor for many years, friend of Maurice - until he teased Shelly from him; married to Shelly.
- Edward "Ed" Chigliak, Indian filmmaker.
- Shelly Marie Tambo Vincoeur, former Miss Northwest Passage , girlfriend and later wife of Holling;
- Christopher "Chris" Stevens, philosophical radio host, backup priest and ex-convict;
- Marilyn Whirlwind, Dr. Fleischman;
- Ruth-Anne Miller, shop owner and part-time employer for Ed;
- Adam, barefoot hermit and cook;
- Officer Barbara Semanski, energetic and vigorous policewoman, later fiancee of Maurice Minnifield
- Mike Monroe, scientist and researcher, extreme allergy sufferer, is with Maggie O'Connell for some time
Special features of the series
The series is characterized by the fact that it allows the characters not only an individual story but also a personal development. In the course of time, the die-hard New York doctor and 'big city neurotic' transforms himself into a person who definitely finds a place in a committed village community. The stories sometimes demanded a bit of imagination from the audience; there are always dream sequences and in some episodes Ed is accompanied by "One Who Wants", an Indian who has long since died. The fact that this is therefore invisible does not prevent any of the other figures from accepting its presence. In other episodes Ed is accompanied by his little green demon “lack of self-confidence” or sees characters from the Fellini film Fellini's Roma .
Overall, a picture of a small and bizarre community is drawn, whose residents come along with all sorts of peculiarities and quirks.
Broadcast in Germany
Premieres
The Northern Exposure series has a total of six seasons with a total of 110 episodes. Under the title Alaska , of all places , it was broadcast on Wednesday evening at 11 p.m. on June 10, 1992 on the private broadcaster RTL . The already late broadcast date was postponed by another hour from the third season, so that the series was only broadcast around midnight from then on. The broadcast of the fourth season was canceled in December 1993 in the middle of the action.
According to the preliminary end of the series on RTL was Northern Exposure which also uses for from 5 January 1994 RTL Group owned channels VOX to see again from the beginning. The first season was always broadcast on Wednesdays at 9:00 p.m., the second on Tuesdays at 11:00 p.m. Seasons three and four could always be seen on Thursdays around midnight. The fourth season was shown completely on VOX for the first time with one exception. Episode 53 ( Lost in the urban jungle , original title Learning Curve ) was apparently inadvertently not shown because the previous week's episode was broadcast again for the planned first broadcast. The series ran at VOX until July 1995.
After a break of around one year, the fifth season of Just Alaska was shown in RTL's Sunday morning program from October 1996 , while the sixth and final season was broadcast in the night from Sunday to Monday after 1:00 a.m. These two seasons were repeated in 1998 on RTL II's evening program .
The program never achieved the success in Germany that it had in the USA, not least due to a very late broadcast date and constantly changing broadcasting slots. While a number of fan groups formed very quickly in the USA, the series remained rather unknown in Germany.
Efforts to repeat
After the series was broadcast on various RTL Group channels, Alaska, of all places, was not seen on German television for a long time. The newly started private broadcaster Das Vierte announced that it would repeat all 110 episodes of the series from September 30, 2005. The broadcast time was from September 30, 2005 at 6:00 am, from the end of October 2005 at 4:00 pm and since November 14, 2005 at 1:00 pm. For many viewers via cable television, the episodes could not be received because the station position was not switched to the fourth program until 4:00 p.m. or 4:30 p.m. The episode Lost in the City Jungle, which was not broadcast in the 1990s, was shown for the first time . After the broadcast of the series was stopped at the end of 2005, the first episodes of the series could be seen again from May 1, 2006. After less than three weeks, however, the station stopped broadcasting.
Although the broadcaster repeatedly asserted that it had the broadcasting rights for all six seasons, Das Vierte only showed the series until the end of the fourth season and then stopped broadcasting it with reference to the ratings being too low . It wasn't until months later that it turned out that The Fourth had never owned the licenses for the fifth and sixth seasons.
Since December 2009, the series has been on the digital pay channel TNT Serie (to be received via Sky and Kabel Deutschland, among others) in the morning program. After the station repeated only the first four seasons continuously for a long time, the fifth season has also been running since February 8, 2011.
From the beginning of April 2015 to mid-July 2015, the first and part of the second season were broadcast on Prosiebenmaxx.
DVD
Only the first season of the series, consisting of eight episodes, was available as a DVD release in German until November 2015, as only one complete soundtrack is available from the German dubbed version of the series, in which dialogues and the background music used are mixed together. A requirement for a DVD release is a licensing of all pieces of music used in the original version of the series.
In the USA, Canada (NTSC version) and Great Britain (PAL version), the English-language original version of the series has now appeared in full in six seasons. Compared to the German version, the audio tracks with the dialogues and the music were separate, so that some pieces of music originally used in the TV version of the series were replaced by new ones for the DVD release.
On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the series, all six seasons were released in December 2015 in the original German version on DVD in a box with 28 DVDs limited to 3,000 copies. In October 2016 the series was also released in an unlimited DVD box.
Individual evidence
- Darren Burrows : Northern Exposed ( en ), 1st edition, Film Farms, USA 2013, ISBN 978-0615943626 , p. 228.