Alaska Daily

 

Finally got around to watching the pilot of Alaska Daily recently. 

I wondered about the pitch meeting, when someone persuaded a network exec to greenlight this. What was the high concept? "Lou Grant meets Northern Exposure!"? 

The central character, played by Hilary Swank, is a reporter named Eileen Fitzgerald who gets into some trouble in New York City and who sees Alaska as a chance to start over -- or at least as a refuge from her troubles where she can make a living doing what she loves while "working on her book" in her spare time.

This seems akin to the central character of most of the run of Northern Exposure, played by Rob Morrow, who is a doctor named Joel Fleischman who dreams of returning to New York but must serve out a contractual obligation to practice medicine in Cicely Alaska for four years by way of paying off his student loan.    

The milieu of much of the action of Alaska Daily, though, once the premise is settled and Eileen has moved in, is the newsroom. Though the main and the supporting characters often have to leave the newsroom for standard shoe-leather-dependent fact finding, the interest of the viewer is supposed to be held especially by the newsroom dynamics themselves, and the way the characters there interact. 

I do approve of the way they dramatize one of the regular conflicts within journalism: "beat sweetening."  Crime reporters think they have to play nice with desk sergeants, for example, because they will need desk sergeants to cooperate with them. If you burn the sergeant on a story, it may in fact help you get a great story that day, but it may lessen your ability to do your job down the road and for a long time. 

So: sweeten your beat?  Yes, but ... too much interest in sweetening means that police are playing you, and you have become their pr desk. It is a constant tug-of-war, and the argument plays out well in the first episode of Alaska Daily.

One final note. The fellow on the other side of the big desk from Hilary Swank in the photo above is Jeff Perry, whom you may recognized as Cyrus Beane of Scandal. He plays an old friend of Eileen's who is now her Alaskan boss and mentor, Stanley Cornik. He is very good here.