I hate stupid humor and mindless TV shows that keep audiences dumbed down. If I’m going to spend time watching a TV series, it has to be worth it. I like to be more than entertained. I prefer shows where I learn about important issues, and I love it when I’m moved to tears.
There have been some quality dramas over the years—too many to mention here—but not nearly enough, considering the plethora of rubbish that’s been produced.
Personally, I gravitate toward shows that focus on the challenging dynamics within families, as well as the trials and tribulations they and their friends face that involve important social, environmental, and political issues of our times.
Thirtysomething (1987-1991), which was about Baby Boomers, set a new bar for realism in prime time dramas. Ken Olin—who was an actor in Thirtysomething—seems to have learned the magic formula from that show, because he produced two more of my favorites—Brothers and Sisters (2006-2011), and This Is Us (2016-2022), which touched on important issues like adoption, alcohol and drug addiction, homosexuality, infidelity, interracial marriage, obesity, PTSD, and racism.
A new series that has recently piqued my interest is ABC’s Alaska Daily—which stars two-time Oscar winner, Hilary Swank.
Over the course of her career, Hilary Swank has chosen to play some courageous and difficult parts based on true life—stories about outcasts, underdogs, and the under served people in society.
Swank has enormous empathy because she knows what it’s like not to fit in. She has been outspoken about growing up in a lower-income family and living in a trailer park in Washington, saying “When you don’t have the resources to make ends meet, you have to find creative ways to get by.”
When she was 15, her parents separated. Swank’s mom, Judy wanted to support her daughter’s desire to act, so they came to L.A. even though they had no more than $75 to their name. For a while they lived in their car, until Judy saved enough money to rent an apartment. Swank has said that her mother, who put her father through college, and always made sure there was food on the table, was her inspiration in life and in acting.
Swank enrolled in South Pasadena High School, but later dropped out.
I felt like an outsider. I didn’t feel like the teachers even wanted me there. I felt like I wasn’t seen or understood. I belonged only when I read a book or saw a movie and could get involved with a character. It was natural that I became an actor because I longed to be those other people, or at least play them.”
– Hilary Swank
Hilary Swank’s Career
The Next Karate Kid
Her first leading role was in the fourth installment of the Karate Kid series, The Next Karate Kid with Pat Morita.
Beverly Hills 90210
She played a single mom in Beverly Hills 90210, but was fired after 16 episodes of what was supposed to be a two-year role. Devastated at being cut, she thought, “If I’m not good enough for 90210, I’m not good enough for anything.”
Boys Don’t Cry – Academy Award #1
But life has a way of turning lemons into lemonade. Because she was fired, she was free to audition for the leading role in Boys Don’t Cry, a film based on the real life story of Brandon Teena, a transgender young man who was gang-raped and murdered in 1993 in Nebraska, when he was 21 years old.
To prepare for the role, Swank lived as a man for a month and reduced her body fat to 7%. She earned only $75 a day for her work on the film. Years later, in 2020, she said a trans actor should have played the part, and had she been offered the role today, she would have refused it,
“We still have a long way to go regarding the safety and inclusion of the trans community, but we now have a bunch of trans actors who would obviously be a lot more right for the role and have the opportunity to audition.”
She may have only earned $3,000 for her role in Boys Don’t Cry, but that role earned Swank an Academy Award for Best Actress.
Million Dollar Baby – Academy Award #2
In 2005, she won a second Oscar for Best Actress for her role in Million Dollar Baby. Swank trained nearly five hours a day in the ring and the weight room and gained 19 pounds of muscle to prepare for the role as Maggie, a waitress from the Ozarks, who persuades the owner of a rundown gym in L.A. (Clint Eastwood) to train her as a boxer. At one point Swank ended up with a potentially life-threatening staph infection that she didn’t tell Eastwood about because she didn’t think it was in keeping with her character.
In the film, she works her way up in the women’s amateur boxing division, and Eastwood arranges a $1 million match in Las Vegas. An illegal sucker punch from behind leaves her a quadriplegic on a ventilator, and the rest of the heart-wrenching film is about Swank trying to cope with what has happened and asking Eastwood to help her end her life.
Freedom Writers
In 2007, Swank starred in the film, Freedom Writers about real life teacher, Erin Gruwell, who was hired to teach English to at-risk students at a once highly acclaimed school that is in decline since racial tensions increased after the L.A. riots two years earlier. This feel good story is about Swank’s struggle to form a connection with her students, some of whom are in rival gangs.
Alaska Daily
All of this background leads us to Hilary Swank’s new ABC TV show, Alaska Daily, which focuses on the “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Crisis” in Alaska, a subject that gets little, if any, attention in the news.
Many of Alaska Daily’s storylines are inspired by real events chronicled in “Lawless” Sexual Violence in Alaska,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles by Kyle Hopkins, a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica—whose mission is to expose abuses of power and betrayals of public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur reform.
The pilot for Alaska Daily was written and directed by Tom McCarthy, who won an Academy Award in 2016 for Best Original Screenplay for the film Spotlight, about the Boston Globe’s 2002 investigation and reporting of widespread and systemic sexual abuse of minors by numerous Catholic priests in the Boston area. Though the Catholic Church turned a blind eye to this pervasive tragedy, the Globe‘s reporting led to the criminal prosecution of five priests and thrust the topic into the national spotlight.
It was gratifying that Spotlight also won Best Picture over films with perhaps more of a box office appeal like the post-apocalyptic Mad Max: Fury Road.
Let me say that in addition to stupid humor, I also hate gratuitously violent films and TV shows. There’s enough murder and mayhem in the real world, without making it up. The correlation between the millions of people who enjoy watching violence on TV or find playing violent video games titillating, and the epidemic of mass shootings in this country that have become commonplace, seems obvious.
While news shows give lots of air time to mass shootings at schools, malls, and grocery stores in the continental U.S., there is little to no news coverage of the murders, rapes, and disappearances of Alaska Natives or Native Americans on reservations, which are ten times higher than the national average. It seems Indigenous people have even less visibility and less of a voice than Black people.
ABC is to be commended for giving Tom McCarthy, Hilary Swank, and the diverse cast of actors in Alaska Daily a voice, at least for now.
Hilary Swank plays Eileen Fitzgerald, a hardened, no-nonsense, truth-seeking New York journalist, who inaccurately reports a story about the new Secretary of Defense that causes her to lose her job.
Her former boss, (Jeff Perry) comes to her rescue, offering her a job working for him at the Alaska Daily, which is located in a strip mall.
One of Swank’s co-stars is the actress Grace Dove, who is part of the Secwépemc First Nations people from British Columbia. Dove, who played Leonardo DiCaprio’s Pawnee wife in the 2015 film, The Revenant, now plays an investigative journalist named Roz Friendly, who ends up working with Swank’s character to solve the murder of an Indigenous girl.
The 10th episode of the series, entitled “Truth is a Slow Bullet,” explains that over the last 100 years, thousands of indigenous women have gone missing. In Anchorage, one native woman goes missing every week.
The show also explains that Alaska lacks the funds and resources to investigate these disappearances and most of the cases go unsolved. It was interesting to learn that many villages cannot afford to have a police officer, so they must rely on underqualified volunteers known as Village Police Officers or VPOs to enforce the law.
Swank spoke to Newsweek about the drama, which premiered on October 6, saying that the real case behind Alaska Daily blew her mind, and that she felt it was immensely important to be a part of the project.
Hilary’s Personal Life
Hilary Swank was married to her first husband, Chad Lowe from 1997 to 2007. After they divorced, she had some serious relationships, but she remained single for quite some time.
In 2014 or 2015 she met the man of her dreams when she was set up on a blind date with Philip Schneider, a social venture entrepreneur—a profession Forbes describes as “capitalism with a do-gooder mentality.”
We met at 10:00 a.m. and parted ways at 11:00 p.m.”
– Hilary Swank
They dated for a year and a half before getting engaged in 2016.
“We stumbled upon a beautiful sanctuary deep in the mountains,” Swank told Vogue. “It had a stunning waterfall that cascades down to rustic cabins built in the 1800s surrounded by beautiful pines and big skies. One evening, Philip dropped to his knee in front of the waterfall and proposed—he sweetly made sure my dogs were nearby so they could bear witness!”
In August 2018, they got married in a romantic ceremony. Their love of nature played a big part in the location they chose for their wedding. “We found exactly what we are looking for at the Santa Lucia Preserve in Carmel, California. It’s a stunning private community surrounded by 20,000 acres of conservancy and an intimate redwood grove populated with trees that are over 800 years old.”
I was overwhelmed with such gratitude and thanks to be marrying the man of my dreams and to see all the people we love together in the middle of such a profound setting. It was a dream come true.”
– Hilary Swank
When Schneider turned 50, he and Swank spent six days off-grid in Alaska. “We went fly-fishing, hiking, exploring, looking for wildlife. Nature is my favorite, and Alaska is nature on steroids.”
Perhaps that was a chance for Swank to check out the terrain and get a feeling for filming Alaska Daily.
Another Dream Come True
There is no word yet whether the show will be renewed for a second season, though that could have less to do with ratings than the fact that 48-year-old Swank is about to become a mother for the first time with twins. And Philip will be a first time dad as well, which is equally exciting for both of them!
Motherhood is something I have been wanting for a long time. And now I’m having not just one, but two. I can’t believe it.”
– Hilary Swank
Here’s hoping for a second season of Alaska Daily, so we can learn more about the challenges the Indigenous people face in our 49th state.
And here is to two beautiful healthy babies for Hilary Swank, who knows what it takes to be a great mom!
Update
On April 10, 2023, Hillary gave birth to a son and a daughter. She wrote, “Posting from pure heaven. It wasn’t easy. But oh boy (and girl) it was worth it.”