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On the set, Northern Exposure is just as charming. Falsey and Brand, the producing-writing duo who also created the critical favorites St. Elsewhere and A Year in the Life, have imported a cast and crew of 80 to the mountains of Washington to make a series about America's ultimate backwoods — Alaska. Knowing they were going to spend most of the year posted in Roslyn, the company brought the trappings of Hollywood — overstuffed Filofaxes, red convertibles, and crew members sporting blond dreadlocks. Though there is the occasional grumble about L.A. tans lost to the mists of the Pacific Northwest, and though Morrow ached to have New York bagels overnight-mailed to him, most $ everyone has found something to love among Roslyn's pine trees and tin-peaked rooftops. Corbin stables his horse nearby and sneaks off for some cow roping when he's not ranting as Maurice. Turner, relocated from New York, adores the mocha coffee that comes with a smile at the Roslyn Cafe, where Corbett stops in for the vegetarian burger. "When we get to Roslyn, the metabolism has to slow down a little bit," he says, as he leans back in his chair.

This spring, CBS flirted with cutting costs by moving the show to Hollywood. Everyone protested. "Those mountains, the snow when we get snow — you can't re-create that in Los Angeles," says Brand. It's clear that being in a place where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are reputed to have robbed the bank in 1892 lends something to the rawness of the fictional Cicely. "Roslyn is great," Geary says. "It looks like a movie set, but it's real."

Like Morty the Moose, the knobby-kneed mascot that ambles around Roslyn in Exposure's credits, the show itself wandered onto the schedule unassumingly. Brand and Falsey had been toying with ideas for a show about a displaced urbanite practicing medicine in a small town. "Jeff Sagansky [CBS' entertainment president] said he loved it," recalls Brand, "and that CBS would do it as a summer replacement."

But if CBS expected a standard medical drama, Brand and Falsey had a more eccentric creative agenda. "From St. Elsewhere, we were kind of doctored out," says Brand. "Both John and I could hang up a shingle at this point." The producers instead looked to European films for inspiration, and saw, in Bill Forsyth's Local Hero and Lasse Hallström's My Life as a Dog, in Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso and Federico Fellini's Amarcord, shades of the series they wanted. "America," says Brand, "tends not to make those gentle, warm, offbeat character comedies. We always say that we wanted to create Alaska as a state of mind, a place where people could re-create themselves in a nonjudgmental universe."

Northern Exposure's run last summer drew sturdy if not quite hit-level ratings. Nonetheless, after eight weeks, the town of Cicely vanished from the television map while Brand and Falsey spent last fall and winter trying to get CBS to bring the show's small budget up to industry standards. They finally won more money, but only after a half-year hiatus — a lifetime for a fledgling show trying to build audience loyalty.

But even during its season-long hibernation, Exposure saw its reputation grow. "When negotiations were finally completed," says Falsey, "Jeff [Sagansky] said to us, 'What you did on the first eight shows? Just do it again.'" In March, a screening of an already-aired episode at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art attracted hundreds of viewers who laughed appreciatively at the surreal hour's revisionist take of everyone from bigfoot to Carl Jung. "It gave us a real jolt," says Falsey. "For the first time, we heard 400 people responding. It was incredibly refreshing."

CBS executives heard the buzz as well — "from people on the street, from people with kids at my kids' school, from people I had dinner with," says senior vice president Peter Tortorici. The loyalty the show excites even reached into network offices. "Of course it will be back next September," said one senior CBS executive long before the series was renewed. "My God, there are people here who would start a hanging party if it weren't." When CBS, thirsting for younger viewers, brought Exposure back this spring, it became a top 10 hit among the coveted audience of 18- to 49-year-olds. In the 10 p.m. Monday time slot following Designing Women, the show is drawing its best ratings ever.

Exposure seems to have tapped into a rich vein of American longing. As Turner says: "I think we all yearn for this. We're all becoming very metropolitan and franchised...and Alaska symbolizes something that has kept its individuality."

Certainly, something of a pioneer spirit fuels the cast and crew, who shoot for as long as 20 hours straight in rain, sleet, snow, and rainbows. Most of the actors have uprooted themselves from New York or L.A. to live in Seattle and commute two-plus hours to Roslyn twice a week. Morrow has even had to endure a separation from his girlfriend, Leslie Urdang, a New York theatrical producer, that has offered eerie parallels to Joel's on-screen long-distance relationship with his fiancée, Elaine. "When I got the first script for this season," Morrow says, "I told her, 'Elaine's written off (in an episode in which she dumps Dr. Fleischman with a "Dear Joel" letter).' She was like 'Oh, GAAAAAWD!'" Not to worry: Morrow's real-life relationship is still intact.

Whatever the risks, the rewards are obvious. "Working is the great part," Turner says. "Even if I'm out here 18 hours in the freezing cold, or I have to do a real intense scene and it's exhausting, that still is the great part of it."

At 15, Turner left Texas for New York, where she became the youngest model ever to sign with the prestigious Wilhelmina agency. Still in her teens, she moved on to a prominent role on General Hospital. But by the time she auditioned to play Maggie, she was down to her last $8 and had been pacing New York's diamond district, trying to get up the nerve to walk into a jewelry shop and hock the ring that Alec Baldwin had given her before their engagement dissolved in the mid-1980s. (She couldn't bring herself to do it.) Turner says her role on Northern Exposure has given her more than just steady work; it's allowed her a chance to rediscover a sense of playfulness that was lost in her early career. "I want to go claim the childhood I didn't have," she says. "I'm going to go back to Texas, I'm going to buy a horse and a pickup truck, and go country & western dancing. I'm gonna get that childhood in no matter what."

Settling into their newfound working world, the other actors are fond of recalling the trails that led them to Cicely. Before his stint as Chris "In the Morning" Stevens, Corbett spent six years working in a steel factory and attended junior college, where he discovered the drama department; eventually he made his way into TV commercials. Burrows, who dyed his blond hair black to play the half-Native American teen Ed, grew up in Kansas before making his bloody way through L.A. "In Casualties of War, I got bamboo stakes through me. In 976-EVIL, half my face got ripped off," Burrows says. "I've been mutilated pretty bad."

Not that the physical demands of Exposure have been any less intimidating: This season, Ed lost his virginity. "It was my first love scene," Burrows says. "There are 20 people who have to be there, and I have to pretend they're not and do things you don't do when there are 20 people watching."

The actors have spurred one another on with a lot of mutual cheerleading. Geary says Cullum, who has won two Tonys (for Shenandoah and On the Twentieth Century), encourages her. Everybody hails Corbin, an ex-Marine whose credits range from Macbeth on stage to The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas on screen, as a mentor. And Morrow rescued soft-spoken Miles from a bad case of stage fright. Miles, who lives in Seattle with her parents and used to dance at powwows across the country, never pursued an acting career; she won her job when she drove her mother to the casting session for Marilyn. "I auditioned on Saturday, got called back on Sunday, auditioned again on Monday, and started working on Wednesday. I felt like Cinderella," Miles says. But on her first day before the cameras, her knees wouldn't stop shaking. Morrow, who is at 28 a veteran of 35 New York plays, took her aside, rubbed her shoulders, pepped her up, and started teasing her that her name wasn't Indian enough. "I'm gonna call you Elaine One-Take," he told her after she breezed through her scene.

Off duty, the cast hangs out at the Brick, the bar that inspired Holling's tavern. There, they have their choice of soda water or double-proof Roslyn-brewed beer. "It's the oldest bar in Washington," effuses Geary. "There's a trough of water running under the bar, and when it used to be a men's-only bar, men would just urinate in it." Men who might be man enough for such sport are still there and ready to mix — or mix it up — with the actors. "You're so convincing in that show," one beer-swilling guy told Corbin genially, "that I want you to know I'd like to bust your f---in' nose." Corbin, who is as affable as his character is irascible, escaped without harm.

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