Chris Stevens (Northern Exposure)

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Chris Stevens is a fictional character in the television series Northern Exposure. He was played by John Corbett.

[edit] Fictional Biography

The character Christopher Robin Stevens was born in West Virginia to a traveling salesman. His father spent half his time with Chris and his mother and half with a second family in Oregon; Chris and his half-brother Bernard Stevens, born the same day, knew nothing of each other until they met as the result of a dream thirty years later.

Lacking a steady father figure, Chris grew up a hoodlum. As an adult he experimented with several drugs and was imprisoned for Grand Theft Auto. He learned much from his fellow inmates; when he was paroled in 1986, he was broadly educated in the ways of the world. He travelled to Alaska to seek his fortune and became a DJ at a small radio station in Cicely, Alaska.

Chris's lineage is "short lived", with his father and uncle Roy Bower both dying before the age of forty. As such, Chris believes he will die before forty as well, causing a mid-life crisis on his twentieth birthday. He lives simply in his Airstream trailer next to the lake where he reads Thoreau and creates sculpture.

[edit] Function in Script

Chris is perhaps Cicely's most poetic soul, given to reading Walt Whitman, Carl Jung and Maurice Sendak on the air. He is also Cicely's only clergyman, ordained in the "Worldwide Church of Truth and Beauty" when he answered an advertisement in Rolling Stone. He also serves as a figure the citizens look up to for advice. He is relatively calm, much of it based on the teachings of philosophy.

Chris is also self-taught in physics, which he loves to discuss.

Northern Exposure
Characters
Joel Fleischman | Maggie O'Connell | Maurice Minnifield | Chris Stevens Shelly Tambo | Holling Vincoeur | Ed Chigliak | Ruth-Anne Miller | Marilyn Whirlwind Phil Capra | Michelle Capra
Episodes