Tom McCarthy's “Spotlight” is the best journalism movie of our era. So while it's no surprise that ABC's daily newspaper portrayal of the writer-director's life is substantially better than the average network drama of the 2020s, it's certainly good news.
In the McCarthy-created "Alaska Daily," Hilary Swank plays Eileen Fitzgerald, a high-profile newspaper reporter whose reports are called into question early in the pilot; Her job loss has as much to do with her claims against her job as it does with the fact that her sudden vulnerability opens up a conversation about her habit of trash-talking her colleagues. She's suddenly, she's spinning her wheels, endlessly reporting on a book that may never see the light of day; Conditions are perfect for her to accept an offer from a former mentor to take a job in Anchorage.
Creator: Tom McCarthy
Stars: Hilary Swank, Jeff Perry, Grace Dove
Swank, who hasn't always been served well by television, has a good handle on her character here: she's a guy she's always played well, so impulsive that he can deliberately blind himself to her flaws. Eileen's competitive streak means she lives very close to the edge, and what feels like passion to her feels like to everyone else an unhealthy addiction to anger, culminating in panic attacks.
The question the show poses for Eileen is whether she can share the best of her professional experience without succumbing, once again, to the ways in which being in her fray destroys her. And the environment offers ample opportunities to explore this challenge. Not only is there a rich and thoughtful texture to, say, the ways in which Eileen and her new colleagues cover the Alaska Native population, a subject with which Eileen is deeply familiar and which her colleagues feel her article has historically not done Justice. The relative greenness of her colleagues means that Eileen must find a way to educate them without giving in to her worst impulses.
“Alaska Daily” isn't entirely averse to clichés: Swank's workaholic journalist is a guy we've seen before, and a fish-out-of-water story has certain beats that it will inevitably hit. But the show's strength is in delving into the character and the situation to find something new behind the basics. The pilot shows promise for what, with time and care, can become a solid entry into ABC's lineup and a welcome weekly dose of McCarthy's sensibility and skill.
“Alaska Daily” premieres on Thursday, October 6 at 10 p.m. Eastern time on ABC.
Watch Alaska Daily 2022 Tv Series Trailer
Comments
Post a Comment