ABC has canceled the television drama series “Alaska Daily” after one season, according to Variety publication. The series, advised by Anchorage Daily News Publisher Ryan Binkley and leftwing ADN writer Kyle Hopkins, starred Hilary Swank as a reporter who left her New York City reporting job after a “fall from grace” and joined the staff of an Anchorage newspaper “to find both personal and professional redemption.”
The series ran one season, with 11 episodes. Filming was done in British Columbia starting last August and concluding in January of 2023.
The series was loosely inspired by the 2019 Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica series of stories, “Lawless: Sexual Violence in Alaska,” which was an anti-Gov. Dunleavy hit job during Dunleavy’s first term in office that was meant to feed the recall efforts by Democrats. It won the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize.
But the series has flopped with the public, whose understanding of journalism is markedly different than it was during the Watergate era of the 1970s, which spawned the thriller, “All the President’s Men” in 1976, which was about the scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon.
According to a Gallup poll conducted last year, 70% of Democrats, 27% of independents, and 14% of Republicans have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the news media. Thus, the make-believe life of an Alaska reporter may not be as interesting to the public as the Hollywood entertainment class believes it to be.
