Yes, Alaska Daily feels real

The themes and focus of ABC's drama about local journalism at a newspaper modeled after the Anchorage Daily News make this a program that feels worth watching

I didn't get to watch Alaska Daily Thursday but was able to stream it last night. A few folks have asked what I think of it (a logical question) so I've given it a little thought.

First things first: I liked the intro episode and think it shows real promise as a series. It's a polished piece of television production with a well-known star and many veteran actors introducing a tightly wrought story.

But people aren't asking me for a dramatic review. They want to know if it feels real.

It feels real.

Not perfectly real, of course. Fictional narratives rarely are, and there are a couple of bits in this opener that felt like a stretch to me. So what?

The underlying local news vibe is spot on: tensions in the staff, pressure on the editors, antagonism from the powers that be. The ceaseless pressure to "do more with less" (which sometimes hides behind its penny-pinching cousin, "work smarter").

Many of the most significant scenes feel like they were actually drawn from ADN experience. Keep in mind that I haven't worked in an Alaska newsroom for more than 25 years, but still: I remember writing about a crooked DA and worrying about his family after his young daughter answered one of my phone calls; we did write about an embezzlement where the perp had a doctor call to tell us she might commit suicide if we reported it; we did our best to juggle the inevitable conflicts between unvarnished truth and contextual realities.

There's a scene in the baseball movie Money Ball where a new player discovers he has to pay for his soft drinks in the Oakland clubhouse; in Alaska Daily it's Eileen asking about the non-existent Nexus account that makes the same point.

As others have noted, it's doubtful any new reporter would be booked into the Captain Cook, and unlikely there would be a beaming rookie/intern available to drive her everywhere. Once again: so what?

The program (like the Daily News itself nowadays) is far more tuned to cultural and ethnic themes, and to the constant struggle for gender fairness. (We were less overt about these things in my era, but we worked on exactly the same set of problematic prejudices and systemic barriers.)

The focus on missing and murdered indigenous women is a brave and much-needed theme, an echo of ADN's "Lawless" Pulitzer and the one before that, "A People In Peril."

There is one glaring difference that cannot go unmentioned: our local attorney throughout most of my career – John McKay – kicked ass for free speech, transparency and access to public information on a regular basis. We never once needed to call a New York lawyer

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