Along the way, there are secondary character subplots, secrets revealed and a trip at gunpoint to a snowy (!) "illegal growers' camp." We learn from fuzzy flashbacks they've both got trauma in their pasts: He's got mental and physical scars from his time as a Marine and she's still wearing the wedding ring from her mysteriously absent perfect husband. Mel at least hits it off with bar owner Jack (Martin Henderson), though I've seen more sexual chemistry between zoo pandas. Please don't shoot people cutting through your yard.) And when a baby is left in a laundry basket on the steps of the practice, the two butt heads about what's best for the little girl because in the country we don't call social services for abandoned infants. "You know, in this county, trespassers can be shot on sight," he barks at her. In perhaps the most outlandish plot thread, Mullins, the rural town's only doctor, doesn't want an NP/midwife (*deep Humboldtian sigh) and won't let her see patients. Turns out she's been hired by Mayor Hope McCrea (Annette O'Toole), a perpetually scurrying woman who has also catfished her into accepting a broken down "country chic" log cabin as housing. The grumpy local who comes to her rescue mocks her small car and shames her for offering cash for the ride and only reveals he's her reluctant new boss Doc Mullins (Tim Matheson) after she's accidentally insulted him. Nurse practitioner and midwife Mel Monroe (Alexandra Breckenridge) is on her way from Los Angeles to a year-long stint with a rural physician when she's run off the road by an 18 wheeler. The series opens with familiar enough shots of two-lane blacktop winding through biggish trees (sorry, British Columbia). Those who've read her work will have to let me know how she captures our region on the page, but the streaming episodes (filmed in Vancouver) are flat and flavorless.
Her Virgin River novels represent a chunk of her 50-book oeuvre and are set in a fictional town of the same name somewhere in our very real Humboldt County.
Then I plunged myself into the far less exciting Netflix adaptation of a series by one of its prominent members, Robyn Carr. Down the RWA rabbit hole I learned the genre has undergone some major shifts in terms of who's telling the stories and what kinds of protagonists they're putting forth, and it made me consider what we expect from the filmed genre. Last week I treated myself to a deep dive into the roiling drama of the Romance Writers of America, a professional organization undergoing a page-turner of an upheaval stemming from one member's critique of another member's blithely racist novel.
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