5. Holling Vincoeur and Shelly Marie Tambo (Northern Exposure)
John Cullum and Cynthia Geary, 110 episodes, 1990-1995
Northern Exposure takes place in Cicely, a small town in Alaska. Holling (played by John Cullum), a French Canadian immigrant, runs the town’s pub “The Brick.” Shelly, his girlfriend (and later wife) works there as a waitress. She is a former beauty queen (“Miss NorthWest Passage”) from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. At the beginning of their relationship Shelly is eighteen years old and Holling is sixty-two. The relationship could easily seem creepy but it is not. The complexity of their relationship and the history between them make the characters believable (and likeable, they are one of my favorite TV couples ever).
Actor John Cullum describes their relationship eloquently during an interview:
“Holling, a former professional hunter of ruthless, uncompromising ****er instincts and nerves of steel, is totally at the mercy of a young girl one third his age and will do anything to please her out of pure love. Shelly, an innocent, uneducated, and seemingly empty headed high school beauty queen, is naturally intelligent and clear thinking and instinctively understands the most complicated social problems even though she is convinced she does not.” The interviewer is a fan who is conducting a research project about Northern Exposure for her doctoral thesis, fans of the show should check out the website cicelyonline.com for the full interview.
A fictional TV couple, Holling and Shelly find each other in a small town far away from the Canadian towns where they were raised. Is there anything stereotypically Canadian about them? Holling is a former hunter and he likes to wear plaid mac jackets, but these are characteristics of US inhabitants of Washington State and Alaska just as much as Canada. As a fan of the show, I was pleasantly surprised to discover they are both Canadian, so they get fifth place on my list.