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...