Alaska Daily Is The Series Hilary Swank, Print Journalism and Network TV All Need Right Now

 

 

            Like so many actresses before, Hilary Swank’s career began in television, mostly in forgettable roles on TV Movies and in Beverly Hills, 90210 when it had begun its decline. Then in 1999, she was cast in the incredibly Boys Don’t Cry and won an Oscar. Unlike so many Oscar winners neither that nor the one she received five years later for an equally brilliant performance in Million Dollar Baby led to superstardom in the movie industry. The reason is simple: Swank, while attractive has neither the drop-dead beauty of a Cate Blanchett or Nicole Kidman nor the sunny personality of a Julia Roberts or Emma Stone. All she has is raw talent, and that has never been a commodity that works in Hollywood as much as it should.

            Like so many similarly talented actresses in this position – Laura Linney, Jessica Lange and Viola Davis are the most prominent examples – Swank has spent the last several years migrating to television. Unlike them, her work in the limited series Trust and the Apple+ series Away have met with little critical or popular success. Perhaps the bigger surprise is that she is now turned to network television as the lead role in ABC’s Alaska Daily – though considering the creative force behind it, maybe the bigger surprise is that he is.

            Thomas McCarthy has been one of the best directors working in independent films in the 21^st Century. After creating the much-admired comedies The Station Agent, The Visitor and Win Win, he won an Oscar himself for his superb newspaper film Spotlight, which won him Oscars for producing and Adapted Screenplay. Like so many directors, he started out as an actor, almost entirely in character roles. He also had a connection to one of television greatest series – though it’s one that most fans of the show wish didn’t exist. In the final season of The Wire,  he played up and coming Baltimore Sun reporter Scott Templeton. As the series progress much of the focus at the newspaper angle was based on the fact that Templeton was making up his stories and the brass were refusing to even do the most basic fact checks on his work to boost circulation and possibly win a Pulitzer. This story, along with McNulty’s decision to create a fake serial killer to get money for his own investigation (as you expect on the series, the two stories become interconnected in ways neither protagonist – or indeed anyone else – fully comprehend) are considered the absolute nadir of the show’s creativity and ended up casting a pall not just on the fifth season but on much of the work that Simon and his writers had done the previous four. Perhaps as an act of atonement for this transgression, McCarthy has served as the creator of Alaska Daily which takes the best parts of both the newspaper story of The Wire (and there were good parts) and the overall arch of Spotlight to create one of the best network series in years.

            Swank plays Eileen Fitzgerald, a reporter at a fictional New York newspaper who we first meet working on a major story to bring down the Secretary of Defense for his promotion of a general. When her story is flagged for having a faulty source, the editors decide to retract it, and she pushes back, hard. Almost from the start, McCarthy, and Swank both go out of their way to make Eileen hard to like she treats most people badly, especially women, considers any push against her an attack and criticism as unfair. That narrative plays into the one that the Defense Department is working on, and Fitzgerald is pushed out of her job and her circle of friends. When we next see her several months later, she is writing a book rather than doing anything productive. Then one of her former editors, Stanley gives her a call.

            Stanley is played by Jeff Perry who, like Swank, is also cast against type considering that he is most famous for playing the ruthless chief of Staff on Scandal, whose final act was to murder the attorney general. I admired Perry’s performance even though I loathed his series and am impressed that now he is finally able to take on the paternal boss role. Stanley is currently working at the Alaska Daily and wants to hire Eileen for the paper because he wants to pursue a story. The pretext is an indigenous woman who was murdered two years ago, and the investigation is still open. The larger story is just how common this is. Understandably, Eileen pushes back. Then she decides to go to Alaska.

            The show is, perhaps not surprisingly, shot in Alaska, and as you’d expect Eileen has a lot of adjustment problem, from the emptiness of a big state with a small population to the fact that the sun is always shining six months of the year and she’ll have to wear a mask to get used to sleeping. She is even less happy to fine that her new paper is small enough to fit in a strip mall. And, despite everything that has happened to her, she has not been humbled by her experience. She thinks who she is matters more than where she is and goes out of her way to go over the head of the local editor (Matt Malloy) be abrasive to the local police, and utterly resist working with a local female journalist (Grace Dove). Even the fact that Roz is indigenous to Alaska, has undergone a similar loss in her life, and was pushing for this story before Eileen came into the picture, does nothing to humble Eileen’s arrogance. Stanley has Eileen’s back, at least for now, but based on what we know so far, it’s a matter of time before she gets in over ahead.

            The major plot of story is focused on the investigation of this murder, or rather the lack of one. The police have no interest in following up on this teenage girl’s death. They have refused to make the medical records public to the paper or even the girl’s mother until the decision is forced upon them. They spoke about planning for a registered DNA database for crimes like this, but they made noise about for a few weeks three years ago ‘and hoped they would forget.” The arrogance that overwhelms the authorities is simple – she’s a dark-skinned girl, who cares? The comparisons to how the media fixate on missing white women almost doesn’t have to be made, but the show does.

            If Alaska Daily were only about this investigation, it would be worth seeing. But McCarthy and his writers go out of their way to make it clear what journalism is like these days. The newspaper was saved by the son of a hedge fund manager who promised to make it profitable, and there’s a very clear indication as to how corporations have been hollowing out newspapers across the country for the past twenty years. This was one of the few things that the final season of The Wire did as an overriding theme ‘doing more with less.” But unlike the editors in that case, Stanley is still determined not to let that get in the way in producing good journalism. And both he and the rest of the reporters go out of their way to make it clear that, even in the age of cable news and social media, good print journalism matters.

            So while the series could be all about this investigation, the series follows up on local stories in a way that is almost a lost art even in Peak TV. The pilot spent nearly as much time with a newcomer reporter tracking down the roots of a scandal that would expose a local industrialists misuse of company funds to house his gay lover. After meeting the man, this rookie balked at the idea of putting her name on the story, but Eileen convinced it was important. In the next episode, her story began to trend socially in Alaska, and she was celebrated by her colleagues (even Eileen gave her a high five) but at the end of last night’s episode, the man committed suicide and the reporter was horrified.

            Similarly, much of last night’s episode was focused on a story involving a local diner called Rita and how the owner was selling the place, though clearly unhappy. Claire (Meredith Holtzman) thought the story was about a big corporation pushing a local business out. But a town hall meeting unfolded into chaos and fighting, and not long after that Rita burned down the restaurant. It might seem unbelievable that her reason was that she was so upset that the peaceful community she had grown up it was now unrecognizable but given how much of cable news feeds into that very discourse and how much online aggression has led to public acts of hostilities, it only seems slightly less extreme than so many qualified people getting out of politics and journalism these days.

            I think in hindsight that may be the main reason that McCarthy decided to bring this project to ABC. Yes, he spent much of his early career acting on Boston Public and Law and Order, but he could have no doubt gotten a bigger budget and more creative freedom for this show had he gone to HBO or Netflix. The metaphors between the quality of both print journalism and network television are crystal clear in a way that they just wouldn’t be if cable or streaming had picked up the series. And these days it is just as important to make it clear that both are very badly needed, no matter how limited the audience they may reach then at their peaks.  It’s more likely that Alaska Daily would be a contender for awards had it aired on the former, but even on a network, it seems to be proving that it deserves the latter just as much. I hope that it finds a wider audience with both critics (who are notably snobbish about it) and a much-fragmented audience. A contender for one of the best series of 2022.

My score: 5 stars.