Episodic Dialogue: Fall Pilots 2022 - ABC's Alaska Daily

Ben Rosenstock helps report on the intention and execution of ABC's newsroom drama

In 2012, when Elementary debuted on CBS, I was TA-ing an Intro to Television course, and we screened the pilot for students ahead of its premiere, which at the time felt like a pivotal lesson in the dynamics of the industry. The property’s familiarity to audiences, its similarity to CBS’ existing lineup, its compatibility with its lead-in, its endless potential to generate story and reach syndication—it embodied how the fall season was built as a microcosm of everything the TV industry stood for, and which it seemed pivotal for students to understand. It was also the year I started writing about Elementary for The A.V. Club, with me and Emily St. James opening things up with an (absurdly) in-depth dialogue on the show’s ties to these broadcast traditions.

In the decade since, though, the logics of broadcast have grown distant for my students, and for much of television criticism as a whole. And so in the spirit of Episodic Medium capturing “the dream of early-2010s A.V. Club” per one paid subscriber, I wanted to put some of this year’s crop of new broadcast series under the microscope with the help of contributors.¹

This week, I break down ABC’s Alaska Daily with Ben Rosenstock, a freelancer writer who you may have read in his coverage of shows like Barry and Cobra Kai for Vulture, and who will be covering The White Lotus here at Episodic Medium starting later this month.

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Myles McNutt: Two years after ABC launched a show (Big Sky) that used missing women as the hook for a soapy thriller, Alaska Daily shows them turning a more serious eye toward missing and murdered Indigenous women in Alaska…to an extent.

See, there’s very obviously a version of Alaska Daily that is just plainly about an understaffed newspaper in Alaska struggling to make do with limited resources as the day-to-day job of running a paper butts up against the feeling that it is their duty to do more to uncover deeper, systemic problems facing the state’s residents. We get a sense of this version of the show with the character of Roz Friendly (Grace Dove), who had been pushing for an investigation into MMIW before eventually having to move onto the Statehouse beat when she felt there wasn’t enough chance of the paper really letting her “go there” with the failures of the police and other authorities (the paper included) to take the issue seriously. And certainly, the show as it stands deserves credit for shining light on the issue, with ABC even including a link to resources for viewers to learn more about the issue outside the series’ plot.

But that isn’t the show Alaska Daily wants to be. By choosing to start with Eileen Fitzgerald meeting with a source from the consulate and then returning to New York to report her expose of a Five-Star General, the show makes a clear statement that it’s more interested in the fish out of water than the fish who were already in her new tank. She’s bold and aggressive in ways that the Alaskan journalists struggle with, and her methods might create enemies but they get results. But when those results were called into question in New York, her own personal behavior in the workplace and on social media allowed the General and his crisis management team to deflect the story. Four months later, she’s ranting about having been canceled by the woke mob, wondering how someone who fought against misogyny could be attacked for demeaning women in the workplace, and feverishly writing a book no one wants to read right when a former editor (Jeff Perry) flies in from Alaska because he wants to start doing real investigative journalism and he thinks she’s the one to help him.

There are many hooks in this setup, whether it’s seeing the mentorship between journalists or the procedural thrill of seeing a story come together as the newsroom collaborates, but it’s hard to shake how repulsed I was by the one it seems most interested in. Hilary Swank is an Oscar-winning actress, but Eileen’s victim complex word salad in the episode’s setup is an absolute mess, with no rhyme nor reason and some unpleasant ties to centrist whinging too dominant among her generation of journalists (many of whom are now on this platform). And while the show certainly seems like it’s going to be about confronting that behavior and forcing her to find a softer side of herself with her new, younger colleagues, I can’t shake the feeling that the show wants us to believe that she was right to be mad at how she was unfairly run out of New York, and that her being “right” outweighs her toxicity. She may not be a fundamentally bad person, given how quickly she becomes invested in the young woman’s murder that is the centerpiece of the investigation, but her view of her own place in the world just made me wonder how much more I’d be appreciating the show’s approach if it Roz was our anchor, and Eileen was the “antagonist.”

Ben, when you pitched me on writing about this show you said you’re a “sucker for journalist stories,” and so I’m wondering where you felt this articulated itself within that genre. Does it find enough of those beats to play here while also dealing with hastened “origin” of Eileen’s fall from grace?

Ben Rosenstock: It’s hard to say this early on. As you said, there are so many hooks in this setup, but the “cancel culture” of it all really distracts from what the pilot’s main goals should be. When I heard Hilary Swank speak the phrase “woke wussies” five minutes in, I started to worry this was going to be an unbearable experience. 

The good news is that the episode immediately becomes much more enjoyable after the rushed and exposition-laden first ten minutes, when it slows down and starts to explore its new setting. One of my favorite parts of this story archetype—the big-city journalist relocating to a small rural town for a story—is experiencing the specifics of that new setting, not just through fish-out-of-water comedy but by immersing us in the environment and people. It’s not thought of as a traditional “journalist show,” but I still think about the way the late Jean-Marc Vallée made Wind Gap, Missouri, such a vivid place in Sharp Objects. You can feel the place, even smell it. There are hints of that here with the gorgeous vistas of rural Alaska and the 11:00 P.M. sunsets.²

Speaking of Vallée, Alaska Daily also has the involvement of an award-winning director: Tom McCarthy, who directed and wrote this episode. McCarthy has of course dabbled in journalist stories before with Spotlight, a movie that really nails what makes these narratives work. It’s at its core an emotional movie, concerned as it is with systemic child sex abuse by Catholic priests; I haven’t seen it in a few years, but I still remember the pain I felt watching one victim (played by Michael Cyril Creighton) recount his experience. But in my view, what makes the movie so good—and what actually makes its Best Picture win a little surprising—is its restraint in its depiction of the “hero” journalists who broke the story. There isn’t much melodrama, and there aren’t many scenes you could classify as “Oscar bait.” (The one real impassioned monologue, delivered by Mark Ruffalo, netted him a nomination and inevitably became his clip.)

That subtlety doesn’t come through here at all. Most of the pilot’s run time is spent with characters gassing Eileen up, telling her how good she is at reporting. And even the characters who are supposed to challenge her still inadvertently contribute to the myth of this girlboss journalist who’s mean and lacks self-awareness but gets the job done. I’m sure the show will pick at that characterization, especially as it intersects with Eileen’s mental health issues. (I had to laugh at her typing the phrase “What is a panic attack” into Google—sorry, “Webbio.”) But I’m not won over by this protagonist yet.

Myles, it seems like we agree that the show is at its best when it’s focused on the nitty-gritty of the newsroom, and of the very important story this team wants to tell. What do you think of the supporting cast that fills out this workplace drama?

MM: They…exist. That’s about the best you can say about them. There’s some clear archetypes—the co-workers who are basically dating, the green reporter who worries about the ethics of her job so Eileen can remind her (above), the by-the-book dude whose feathers get ruffled by Eileen’s tactics—but we’re not given any reason to understand them or feel like they matter here. Despite the fact the show is ostensibly about breaking down Eileen’s ego, it still spends most of its running time stroking it, and it’s hard for other characters to get a word in edgewise.

This is perhaps weirdest for Jeff Perry, who is the editor of this paper, but whose presence feels entirely tied to Eileen. Simple adjustments like showing us his perspective in Alaska before he flew to New York to approach Eileen about making the move would have been an easy way to balance out the show, but McCarthy stubbornly sticks to her perspective there and almost everywhere else across the story. Things start to extend outward slightly when we get deeper into the procedural structure of the pilot, but only so much, as though ABC is worried that developing its supporting cast would lose the luster that comes from a verified movie star anchoring the project.

You point to Spotlight, and I share your affection for that film, but its pace simply doesn’t match up with the demands of a broadcast drama, and I don’t think McCarthy has a clear angle on how to make this either visually or narratively effective in this format. You mention the Alaskan vistas, but outside of the one location shoot at her hookup’s place, the show engages in some rather fake-looking establishing shots as opposed to much city-for-city doubling with British Columbia, and uses some awful driving plates that made me wish characters would just stop getting in cars. The effort to embed Eileen into the community comes in a health center, which is purposefully sterile, but offers none of the actual integration that would sell me on the story here. This may just be a pilot, but there’s no sign that they grasp the awareness of the format’s limitations enough on multiple fronts to overcome them in the weeks that follow.

Eileen’s integration, though, brings us to the central question: although the show is loosely based on an Anchorage Daily News/ProPublica investigation that won a Pulitzer Prize and was led by a white journalist, the choice to so strongly anchor Eileen’s character here has to be noted given the tension we’re observing in the show’s structure. How did you feel the show tried to navigate this, whether through Roz’s involvement or the overall presentation of the issue?

BR: I definitely share your preference for Roz as an ideal anchor for this type of story. I’ll reiterate that despite the pilot’s constant focus on Eileen, my issue isn’t that she’s presented as broadly “correct.” We see her blind spots over and over in this pilot, like when she impulsively reacts to workplace abuse allegations against her by mentioning she wanted to throw her stapler at the accuser. Later, her dogged persistence in forcing Gloria Nanmac’s mother to talk to her doesn’t get her anywhere until Roz steps in to offer real empathy and a personal connection of her own (her best friend/cousin went missing at 17). And while Eileen’s suggestion that Gloria really did commit suicide doesn’t sound completely moronic, the reveal that Gloria’s body was found without her crutches seems to support Roz’s assumption of foul play.

So I tend to think the show is coming from the right place regarding Eileen and Roz’s relative “correctness.” But that dynamic can get stale fast, and I hope subsequent episodes don’t always stick to the formula of Roz exposing Eileen to her privilege. Our protagonist should be someone we can tolerate spending time with, but the more enlightened Eileen becomes, the more this story could risk becoming a white-savior narrative. It might be loosely based on a true story, but we’ve seen that movies like The Blind Side (or Freedom Writers Diary, which Swank also starred in) can still be clumsy despite their basis in truth.

Still, I really do think this is an important story being told, and hearing these subjects being discussed so openly on ABC impressed me a little. Whether this show is capable of presenting these issues sensitively and powerfully while filtered through a white point of view may come down to priorities. Even in the framework of a classic broadcast drama, Alaska Daily could lay bare the social and political forces that allow violence against indigenous women to be swept under the rug. Or it could position those tragedies primarily as instruments for one white woman’s journey to self-awareness. Time will tell.

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In addition to his coverage of White Lotus, Ben will hopefully be back later in the year to check in on Alaska Daily. You can find more of his coverage and insights on his Twitter account.

1. Note that John Aspler, who covered the Quantum Leap premiere with me, has continued to write about the show on his own Substack, Serially Engaged.

2. Myles here to note that I did not force Ben to so vividly connect to the second chapter of my academic monograph, Television’s Spatial Capital, where I talk about textual strategies for articulating a sense of place.