Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Alaska Daily’ On ABC, Where Hilary Swank Is A Canceled Star Reporter Who Starts Over In Anchorage

It feels like we’ve gone into the era of Oscar winners not only singing on to streaming shows, but now plying their trade in big broadcast network projects. First it was Susan Sarandon in Monarch on Fox, now it’s Hilary Swank in the ABC drama Alaska Daily. Will the presence of the two-time Academy Award winner (as well as another Oscar winner, writer/producer/director Tom McCarthy) elevate the project beyond normal network fare?

ALASKA DAILY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man leaves the U.S. consulate in Shanghai. He goes to a restaurant to meet reporter Eileen Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank).

The Gist: Eileen presses her consulate source for a thumb drive that has information about General Raymond Green (James McDaniel), who was about to be confirmed as defense secretary. When she gets back to the Vanguard, the paper that she works for in New York, a researcher questions the single source right before she’s about to publish.

Eileen tells the researcher to go away, and when the article publishes, it goes viral. But she’s soon called back into the office when someone on the general’s team is claiming that the documents her source gave her were fake. She decides to quit than get canceled by the “scared, woke wussies” at her paper.

Four months later, she’s still working on the story, this time for a book, when one of her old bosses, Stanley Cornik (Jeff Perry). He’s the new executive editor of The Daily Alaskan in Anchorage and he needs an ace reporter. Why would Eileen want the job? Because she needs a fresh start and he wants someone on the story of how Indigenous women are going missing or being murdered and the stories are being largely ignored, including by personnel-strapped papers like his.

Of course, her aggressive way of doing things makes people like the acting articles editor, Bob Young (Matt Molloy), who wants to maintain the already-shaky relationship the paper has with the Anchorage PD. Eileen chafes when Stanley puts a young reporter, Roz Friendly (Grace Dove) on the story of a particular Indigenous woman’s disappearance, but Stanley knows that Roz’s personal background will foster a connection with the woman’s mother, who thinks the paper covered her daughter’s disappearance all wrong.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Tom McCarthy created Alaska Daily, and he wrote and directed the pilot. So the show has the feel of his Oscar-winning film Spotlight, albeit with a broadcast network sheen to it. Mix with a little bit of Men In Trees and a little bit of Lou Grant (yes, we’re stretching back that far), and you’ve got the formula for Alaska Daily.

Our Take: There are parts of Alaska Daily that feel hopelessly outdated, which is why we cited Lou Grant here. The virtuous, crusading reporter getting to the bottom of a mystery, or an underreported story isn’t exactly a new idea. There are moments that land with a thud because of the fact that this show is on broadcast network TV instead of cable, like the aforementioned “woke wussies” line, something that Swank, the two-time Oscar winner, must have cringed at when she saw it in the script.

There’s also the Alaska angle (the show was actually shot in British Columbia). Too many shows over the years have played the Alaskan setting for its quirks, starting with Northern Exposure, and it seems that there are a bunch of examples of “Alaska tends to do this to you” dialogue, like when Eileen meets a “poet-pilot” (Joe Tippett) at the local watering hole.

Yes, Alaska can be a character in the series, especially when it comes to how the Indigenous people there lack protection from the state, and how they’re covered with a lot of bias from the media up there. And, yes, there can be some “fish out of water” storylines, where the big, bad, Pulitzer winner from New York does things her way vs. the small-city, folksy way the folks in Anchorage do their jobs. But both of those will grow old without some interesting characters to support Swank.

What the show has going for it is that Swank isn’t throwing her Oscars around and trying to out-act her younger and mostly unknown co-stars. It helps that veterans like Perry and Molloy are there for Swank to play off of, but there’s no evidence that she’s playing on a different level than her co-stars (unlike another recent series with an Oscar winner, Monarch with Susan Sarandon). It could be Swank’s previous TV experience (90210, people!), but she fits within the ensemble and doesn’t try to chew scenery.

It also has McCarthy and showrunner Peter Elkoff (The Resident) there to make sure the show doesn’t spin into network ridiculousness. Are things a bit more black-and-white in the morality department than he might have shown in one of his films? Absolutely. But McCarthy also knows how to let a story develop slowly, even under the restrictive 42-minute format. There’s no neat resolutions at the end of the first episode, just continuing stories that will pay benefits later.

Sex and Skin: Eileen sleeps with the “pilot-poet”, but there’s no nudity on ABC, folks.

Parting Shot: Like she did on the plane from New York to Anchorage, Eileen has a panic attack in the parking lot of the strip mall where the paper’s tiny office is located. This is after telling young reporter Yuna Park (Ami Park) that she needs to pursue the article on a big developer using government funds for personal use, even after the developer said doing so would ruin his life.

Sleeper Star: Here’s a good place to acknowledge the rest of the cast, whose characters barely had enough screen time to develop any kind of idea as to who they were: Veteran reporter Claire Muncy (Meredith Holzman), reporter Austin Greene (Craig Frank), who brings his son to the office at times, and young go-getter Gabriel Martin (Pablo Castelblanco).

Most Pilot-y Line: The full “woke wussies” line: “We can choose to fight and stop acting like a bunch of scared, woke wussies more interested in eating their own than reporting the news.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. It may be a low bar, but if we’re watching a network series where we don’t roll our eyes or throw up our hands at what we’re seeing on the screen, there’s a good chance that we’ll want to see more of it. And Alaska Daily had enough to like to make us want to see more.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.