Swank’s Eileen Fitzgerald joins the Alaska Daily newspaper after being fired from her New York job when a story went wrong and she was “canceled” by the public. But it is not the desire to reinvent herself that draws her to the local paper but the prospect of looking into the unexplained deaths of countless indigenous women.
Eileen is put in charge of investigating the death and is paired with fellow reporter Rosalind “Roz” Friendly (Grace Dove), who feels a personal connection to the investigation.
Is ‘Alaska Daily’ Based on a True Story?
Alaska Daily is based on an investigation into the high rate of sexual assaults and violence in Alaska against indigenous people, mainly women, and how a lack of law enforcement meant cases kept rising.
These investigative reports were done by Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, it was given the collective title of Lawless and it featured dozens of articles reporting on the systemic issue and interviews with survivors of sexual assault.
The investigation was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, and those that worked on it were also given national and regional honors for their work.
Though this is the inspiration behind the ABC show, creator Tom McCarthy chose to simply use it as a stepping-off point for his series and the cases that are shown in the TV show are not real.
Swank spoke to Newsweek about how McCarthy was the person to first show her the case, saying: “I read the article, I knew about the missing, murdered indigenous women, I knew about that. But the story was just [shocking].”
Despite the show being fictional, Swank said that she hopes the show will shed a light on the real issue that it is based on.
“To me, I knew about that, and yet so many people don’t know about it and it’s happening right now, right this second, and no one’s doing anything about it, it is horrific and something needs to be done,” she explained.
Swank and her fellow cast members are not playing real people, and so the Million Dollar Baby star has said that she didn’t feel the need to try and base Eileen on anyone in particular: “I just took what was off the page and working with it and growing with it, you know.
“The characters are fictionalized, all of the journalists that are portrayed, so I’m not planning her off of [someone], or acting off of anything other than [what has been written] with the pen.”
Alaska Daily airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET on ABC.
