Dr. Joel Fleischman (Rob Morrow) graduated from Columbia University medical school where he attended thanks to a scholarship from the state of Alaska. Though he was slated to work in Anchorage, instead he gets assigned to be the General Practitioner of the tiny Alaskan town, Cicely, to pay for his education. The location is remote, the people are weird and quirky, and Joel wants to return to New York. The show thrived on the "will they or won't they" dynamic between Fleischman and Janine Turner's Maggie O'Connell.