Alaska Daily and The Company You Keep Prove Network TV Is Not Dead

By

Scott D. Parker

Remember a few weeks ago when I lamented the end of New Amsterdam and wondered if there would be any more network TV shows I’d watch? Well, it didn’t take long before two very different shows landing on my viewing schedule.

Alaska Daily

Curious about the throughline of the series—the disappearance and murder of indigenous women in Alaska—the wife and I watched the pilot of Alaska Daily, the new show starring Hilary Swank. She plays Eileen Fitzgerald, a famous New York investigative reporter in New York who gets fired for asking too many questions. Amid her public humiliation, her old boss, Stanley (Jeff Perry) shows up. He has a job for her: investigating the systemic crisis of murdered and missing indigenous women in Alaska. The sticking point is, obviously, that the new job is in Alaska. Stanley knows Eileen and all he has to do is get her hooked on the story.

She gets hooked and she moves to Alaska where we promptly have a fish-out-of-water story mixed with a this-is-how-we-do-it-in-the-big-city story. But it works well.

The indigenous women story is the season-long arc and little pieces are uncovered in each episode. But you also get a story of the week. In each episode, you’ll see some of Eileen’s fellow reporters either get rubbed the wrong way because of her or learn something from her that they can then use. It’s a good push-pull dynamic.

Two things particularly stand out. One is obvious: the importance of journalism, especially local journalism. In episode 7, Eileen has a long conversation with another character who thinks all she does is twist facts around. She counters the argument by pointing out things that reporters have contributed to society. It’s a general “If not us, who?” argument that I find matches the tone of 2023.

The other aspect of this show I really dig is Eileen herself. She’s single-minded in her devotion to her job, so much so that she sacrifices personal relationships. She’s a loner, and her lover is being a reporter and uncovering the story. We’ve seen characters like this before, but they’ve almost all be male. With Eileen, you get the female version of it, and it’s refreshing.

I find it fascinating that the topic of violence against indigenous women is featured not only on this American network TV show but also on Amazon’s Three Pines. Perhaps with more exposure, more can be done to stop this crisis.

The Company You Keep

On the other end of the ledger is another new show, The Company You Keep. We saw the trailer while watching America’s Funniest Videos one Sunday evening and were intrigued. I didn’t watch This Is Us but I knew the Milo Ventimiglia starred on it. Milo’s also in this show opposite Catherine Haena Kim. He’s a con man named Charlie from a family of con artists: mom, dad, and older sister. She’s a CIA operative named Emma, daughter of a retired senator whose brother is running for his dad’s seat, and no one in the family knows she works for the government.

In the pilot, Charlie’s family earn $10 million from a job but Charlie’s fiancée steals it. Emma discovers her partner is having an affair. Charlie and Emma meet at a hotel bar and a weekend of passion ensues. But they are both secret about their real selves and real jobs. Naturally, they fall for each other but still keep up the mysterious fronts. Cut to the end of the pilot where the bad guys who used to own that $10 million show up at Charlie’s family bar. They demand repayment plus interest, and you have this show’s schtick: A Con of the Week.

And it’s so much fun. It doesn’t hurt at all to have Milo and Catherine look so dang good and look good together. As the credits rolled from the pilot, I said to my wife, “Ah, so it’s pretty people doing cons every week. I’m in.”

The supporting cast is fun, especially William Fichtner as Charlie’s dad. He’s good in just about everything he’s in, but a particular favorite is his role in the 1999 movie, Go. James Saito plays Emma’s dad, an actor who has been in a ton of things, but I particularly enjoyed him in the old Eli Stone TV show.

If you are a fan of heist stories, you’ll probably get a kick out of this.

Me and Murphy

By Claire Booth

9 p.m. every Monday. All through high school. You could find me without fail in front of the TV, watching Murphy Brown. Those are, of course, formative years, and no fictional character impacted me like Murphy did.

She made me want to be a reporter. She was loud and aggressive and smart and independent and successful. She even walked like she owned the world, one high-heeled foot thrown in front of the other, striding over everything in her way.  

In TV and books—hell, in life—those traits usually got women chastised, ostracized, hurt. But not Murphy. Those qualities got her the story. And it made me want the same thing and know it was possible that I could have it.

So off I went off to college to study journalism. There were additional reasons I chose that career; I love to write, I'm curious to a fault, and I ask more questions than a Trivial Pursuit game. I decided early on that broadcast journalism wasn’t for me. I liked print. I liked the physical words on a page; I liked the permanence; I liked the byline. But the Murphy didn’t leave me. I wanted to do the pin-you-to-the-wall interviews, the big investigative pieces. That broadened as I went through school and started working. I wanted to do stories that helped people through tragedy or confusion, let them know about important issues, or commemorated significant events.

Murphy Brown’s 10-year run coincided with high school and college and my first few years as a reporter. My viewing got a little sporadic as time went on and I entered the working world with a crazy schedule and very little time off. I'm still insanely busy, but there will be no way I’ll miss a single episode of the new series, which premiered Thursday on CBS. It’s the same cast playing the same characters. Now they’re trying to make it in the 24-hour cable news cycle, instead of on the staid 60 Minute-ish show Murphy worked for the first time. 

Thursday’s episode was good. It was heavy on the exposition and a few of the jokes felt a little too broad, but I think everything will settle down quickly. There are a lot of plot possibilities with Murphy’s son, now an adult, and his career in journalism. He has his own cable show on a conservative network that competes directly with Murphy’s new one on a rival channel. There's also the perennial comedic promise Murphy's inability to find a good secretary, which continues with this first new episode.

But the revived show’s greatest potential is the same one it had all those decades ago: that young people, women especially, will watch it and decide that if Murphy can be complicated, fierce, ass-kicking, and successful—so can they.

Winston Churchill, in the Movies and as a Daring, Young War Correspondent

By BiblioArchives / LibraryArchives - http://www.flickr.com/photos/28853433@N02/19086236948

With a certain dynamic, charismatic Englishman showing up in the cinema at the end of this week, I thought I’d ask a friend of mine what he thought about the resurgence of interest in one of history’s greatest leaders and what shaped the man who rallied a nation. Simon Read is the author of Winston Churchill Reporting: Adventures of a Young War Correspondent.

Simon started out the same way I did, as a newspaper reporter (we met while covering crime for competing papers). Simon then turned to true crime, writing several fantastic books in that genre. Then came Winston. Before he became the epitome of the elder statesman, he was a daring journalist who covered multiple wars. Didn't know that? Then read on . . .

By Simon Read

Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s finest hour, rallying Great Britain to carry on its solitary struggle against Nazi Germany in the summer of 1940, is getting the big screen treatment this month in Universal’s “Darkest Hour.” Churchill is a man frozen in time: forever the determined war leader with the bulldog scowl and ever-present cigar. The image has become so pervasive, the man’s almost been rendered a caricature—one that overshadows his stunning achievements and true depth of character.

In today’s troubling political climate, Churchill can seem something of an aberration: a politician who spoke the truth regardless of the political cost, who put country before party, and who torpedoed his career multiple times to do what he thought was right. That’s not to say the man was without fault. His views on empire and the superiority of the English-speaking peoples are painfully outdated today. But there was never any question as to where Churchill stood, good or bad.  He is, when compared to many of today’s leaders, a tonic.

He viewed his life prior to becoming prime minister at the age of sixty-five as a prelude to his greatest challenge.  “I felt as if I was walking with destiny,” he wrote in his memoirs, “and that all my life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” But what forces shaped him into the man he ultimately became? I think his most formative years were those he spent as a war correspondent.  Between 1895 and 1900, Winston Churchill emerged on the world stage as a brazen young journalist and author, covering wars of empire in Cuba, India, the Sudan, and South Africa. In those far-flung corners of the world—reporting from the front lines—he mastered his celebrated command of language, discovered the joys of a good cigar, learned to love the pleasant burn of strong whiskey, and established his reputation for courage and his enthusiasm for armed conflict

He always sought out danger and thought little of his personal safety, so convinced was he of his destiny.  “I have faith in my star—that is that I am intended to do something in the world,” he wrote to his mother at the age of twenty-three from one battlefield.  “If I am mistaken—what does it matter?” He was even more forthcoming several months later in a letter home dated Dec. 22, 1897. “Bullets—to a philosopher my dear Mamma—are not worth considering,” he wrote. “Besides I am so conceited I do not believe the Gods would create so potent a being as myself for so prosaic an ending . . . I shall devote my life to the preservation of this great Empire and trying to maintain the progress of English people.”

Throughout the various campaigns in which he served as both soldier and journalist, he was nearly hacked to death by ancestors of today’s Taliban, took part in one of Britain’s last great cavalry charges, and escaped from a POW camp and slogged hundreds of miles across enemy territory to freedom. He wrote bestselling books and penned numerous articles, firmly cementing his bona fides as a man of words and action. His experiences allowed him to better empathize with the fighting men on both sides—a trait that would define his attitude towards wartime leadership: “In war: Resolution. In defeat: Defiance. In Victory: Magnanimity. In Peace: Goodwill.”

His adventures as a war correspondent, more than any other, shaped his complex feelings on war. His reporting taught him how to relate the battlefield experience to everyday people. As prime minister, he would use to his advantage what he knew of war to convey to the British public in Shakespearean tones the horror and glory of their most desperate hour.

As a young man, he had told his mother he believed he was one day destined to save Britain and its Empire. In that dark summer of 1940, Churchill found himself in his element.

A former newspaper reporter, Simon Read has always been fascinated with Winston Churchill’s time as a journalist. Winston Churchill Reporting: Adventures of a Young War Correspondent is the first book to solely address that period in the unforgettable Englishman’s unforgettable life. He doesn’t consider it a biography or a work of history – although it contains elements of both. It is, instead, a true tale of adventure featuring Winston Churchill in the starring role. When writing the book, he described it to friends as “Winston Churchill as Indiana Jones.” For more information, historical photos, and maps, visit www.winstonchurchillreporting.com. Simon can also be found on Twitter at @simonreadbooks.