Michael Angelika had the crazy idea to fly to icy cold Alaska for ten days in the middle of winter. As preparation for the trip into the cold, we borrowed all the episodes of "Northern Exposure" from the DVD rental service Netflix. This TV series was dubbed in Germany in the 80s under the title "Ausgerechnet Alaska." In the series, the state of Alaska forces the newly graduated doctor Joel Fleischman to serve as a village doctor in the fictional small town of Cicily for a few years in order to pay off his student loans.
The Jewish New Yorker Fleischman grumpily complies, then naturally keeps complaining constantly like Woody Allen as a neurotic city dweller, but eventually finds his way to the somewhat eccentric residents of the isolated village. Ultimately, however, he remains an outsider in his thick winter parka. Some ideas in the series are truly hilarious. For example, some Native American inhabitants live in Cicily, who don't talk much, form cliques, and celebrate the American holiday "Thanksgiving" by throwing tomatoes at the white population.
The series has its highs, lows, and in the later seasons, some considerably annoying lengths, but one episode is particularly worth watching from a German perspective: When Maurice, a wealthy villager, acquires a huge old German clock with a carillon and the auction house flies in a specialist from Germany to get it up and running.
When Master watchmaker Rolf Hauser (Video) arrives, he turns out to be a leather jacket-wearing heavy metal fan with a Billy Idol look.
The American actor Mark Pellegrino plays the role very convincingly with an exaggerated German accent, covering pretty much all the cliches that Americans attribute to Germans. The nicely edited video under the aforementioned YouTube link is an indispensable document of German-American cultural exchange. Definitely worth watching!