With "Sex, Lies and Ed's Tapes", Northern Exposure stumbles upon a formula that it will use adroitly for much of the rest of the series, namely, letting the supporting cast of townspeople carry the main storylines while Morrow's Dr Fleischman functions as a cynically bemused straight man, in some ways, standing in for the audience as we witness their bizarrely eccentric behavior. And, quite often, the result is great television. In this case, we get to finally learn about Maggie's 'black-widow' tendencies, as well as Shelly and Holling's 'May-December' relationship. And, following on from the events in "Soapy Sanderson", we're also treated to witnessing the first steps of Ed's fledgling film career. This episode is a perfect example of how the quality and diversity of this cast, along with their wonderful foibles makes this show, at times, so watchable.
4 Reviews
Shelley's Shenanigans
Hitchcoc29 January 2024
A guy shows up at Hollings' bar and it turns out he is Shelley's husband. They got married on a lark one night. Of course, the guy is an idiot who has taken too many blows to the head in hockey games. Holling is mired in depression because he has an old fashioned moral issue with sleeping with a married woman. Yes, and for a while, she thinks she is pregnant. In another bit, Ed is trying to write a screenplay. He has no knowledge about how to do this but his daydreams are pretty funny. Maggie, we realize, has a tendency to have boyfriends who end up dead. Her present guy, has a mole on his side and thinks he is going to die from it. All in all, this is pretty funny.
Holding Action Smacks of Contrivance
darryl-tahirali2 December 2023
The spotlight falls on Cynthia Geary, Janine Turner, and Darren Burrows as Shelly, Maggie, and Ed, respectively, all get significant character dimension in "Sex, Lies and Ed's Tapes" to help build the ensemble cast of "Northern Exposure," but despite some nice framing by director Sandy Smolan, this episode, scripted by series creators Joshua Brand and John Falsey, feels like a holding action although it does illustrate their method of using three distinct storylines that would become a series trademark.
Guess what? Turns out Shelly isn't pregnant after all---she's had a hysterical pregnancy brought on by her love for Holling. Shelly also experienced the same phenomenon with Wayne Jones (Brandon Douglas) back in her native Saskatchewan; (not-so) coincidentally, Wayne arrives in Cicely---looking to get a divorce from Shelly, which gives Holling, unaware that she was even married, a literal pain in the neck when it seizes up on him.
Meanwhile, Joel discovers a cyst on Maggie's boyfriend Rick Pederson (Grant Goodeve), who becomes alarmed and asks Joel to remove it to be biopsied. Rick is well-aware of Maggie's history of boyfriends who have all died during their relationship with her, and Goodeve gets an amusing turn fleshing out his minor character in his scenes with Rob Morrow and Turner, the latter particularly as Maggie and Rick await his biopsy results.
Finally, Maurice, having let Ed use his Macintosh to write his screenplay, becomes exasperated at his conspicuous lack of production: Gripped with writer's block, Ed can only visualize variations of existing movies, including "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Midnight Cowboy"---and check Morrow's impressive impersonation of Dustin Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo along with his throwaway reference to the now-notorious Donald Trump---until he has a talk with Joel. That last displays the series' leitmotif of using fantasy sequences to illustrate the characters' inner lives, which helped to imbue "Northern Exposure" with such remarkable character development, while series composer David Schwartz's native flute-driven "Woody the Indian" underscoring Ed here would become a recurring musical cue.
Douglas manages the sullen truculence appropriate for his still-a-boy hockey player Wayne; accordingly, Douglas's scenes with Geary have the requisite vapidity, underscored by the canny use of Motley Crue's overwrought power ballad "Without You" on the soundtrack, as Geary reveals her performance limitations. Much better are her scenes with veteran John Cullum, who is quietly developing his Holling well past the initial caricature of a backwoods bumpkin. "Sex, Lies and Ed's Tapes" also highlights the Native American angle in typically wry fashion, particularly Jeffrey Carpentier's gloriously hammy cameo as an emcee at a tribal talent show that features Elaine Miles's Marilyn, although much of this episode smacks of contrivance. Still, the show's underlying intelligence, empathy, and charm cannot be disguised.
REVIEWER'S NOTE: What makes a review "helpful"? Every reader of course decides that for themselves. For me, a review is helpful if it explains why the reviewer liked or disliked the work or why they thought it was good or not good. Whether I agree with the reviewer's conclusion is irrelevant. "Helpful" reviews tell me how and why the reviewer came to their conclusion, not what that conclusion may be. Differences of opinion are inevitable. I don't need "confirmation bias" for my own conclusions. Do you?
Guess what? Turns out Shelly isn't pregnant after all---she's had a hysterical pregnancy brought on by her love for Holling. Shelly also experienced the same phenomenon with Wayne Jones (Brandon Douglas) back in her native Saskatchewan; (not-so) coincidentally, Wayne arrives in Cicely---looking to get a divorce from Shelly, which gives Holling, unaware that she was even married, a literal pain in the neck when it seizes up on him.
Meanwhile, Joel discovers a cyst on Maggie's boyfriend Rick Pederson (Grant Goodeve), who becomes alarmed and asks Joel to remove it to be biopsied. Rick is well-aware of Maggie's history of boyfriends who have all died during their relationship with her, and Goodeve gets an amusing turn fleshing out his minor character in his scenes with Rob Morrow and Turner, the latter particularly as Maggie and Rick await his biopsy results.
Finally, Maurice, having let Ed use his Macintosh to write his screenplay, becomes exasperated at his conspicuous lack of production: Gripped with writer's block, Ed can only visualize variations of existing movies, including "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Midnight Cowboy"---and check Morrow's impressive impersonation of Dustin Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo along with his throwaway reference to the now-notorious Donald Trump---until he has a talk with Joel. That last displays the series' leitmotif of using fantasy sequences to illustrate the characters' inner lives, which helped to imbue "Northern Exposure" with such remarkable character development, while series composer David Schwartz's native flute-driven "Woody the Indian" underscoring Ed here would become a recurring musical cue.
Douglas manages the sullen truculence appropriate for his still-a-boy hockey player Wayne; accordingly, Douglas's scenes with Geary have the requisite vapidity, underscored by the canny use of Motley Crue's overwrought power ballad "Without You" on the soundtrack, as Geary reveals her performance limitations. Much better are her scenes with veteran John Cullum, who is quietly developing his Holling well past the initial caricature of a backwoods bumpkin. "Sex, Lies and Ed's Tapes" also highlights the Native American angle in typically wry fashion, particularly Jeffrey Carpentier's gloriously hammy cameo as an emcee at a tribal talent show that features Elaine Miles's Marilyn, although much of this episode smacks of contrivance. Still, the show's underlying intelligence, empathy, and charm cannot be disguised.
REVIEWER'S NOTE: What makes a review "helpful"? Every reader of course decides that for themselves. For me, a review is helpful if it explains why the reviewer liked or disliked the work or why they thought it was good or not good. Whether I agree with the reviewer's conclusion is irrelevant. "Helpful" reviews tell me how and why the reviewer came to their conclusion, not what that conclusion may be. Differences of opinion are inevitable. I don't need "confirmation bias" for my own conclusions. Do you?
"piddly little thing like marriage..."
sherilcarey31 October 2021
This is interesting just in the sense of analyzing what was good about a show that had so much of the hatred of families and values behind the writing and looking back over a lifetime of so much of that in such a high percentage of what the entertainment industry liked to put out. It really doesn't work at all in this episode for the rewatchability showing the level of hate of it they did and trying to disquise it as stupidity and nothingness out of the character the most involved in it. It was just grotequery which weirdly did match really well with the use of the name Woody Allen as a figure for inspiration... all things out of a world that as a whole hates good and healthy things and venerates things as unhealthy and harmful as old men who rape their step daughters.
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