Oscar winner Hilary Swank is back, on a much smaller screen, but we have missed her and we’ll take her, no matter the size on the tube.

Here is our Hilary in Tom McCarthy’s (“The Station Agent,” “Spotlight”) as Eileen Fitzgerald, an Irish-American newspaper reporter.

Irish she is, with a sheet-metal attitude, a dockworker’s mouth, a taste for bourbon, and eyes, when she fastens them on her subjects, that burn to the truth.

When we meet her, Eileen is a tough as a dollar steak, an award-winning New York newspaper reporter with a reputation as a killer reporter.

Her New York job, and her reputation crash when a secretary of defense she has her teeth into, turns his guns on her, blows up her career and sets her on the street, a cold one with caribou on the freeway.

Alone and furious, she sets out to write a tell-all book, but with no friends among her colleagues at the paper, she is jobless.

Out of the cold wind comes Stanley Cornik, (Jeff Perry “Scandal”) the editor of a struggling Alaskan newspaper sitting on the far edges of survival, who drops in and offers her a job in Alaska. We wouldn’t take it, but lucky for us, Eileen does.

Cornik’s Alaskan Daily is almost a Neighborhood News at this point, in a new store front newsroom, resembling a Walgreen’s drugstore, with reporters and editors strangely afraid to push, shove or sharpen pencils, Eileen has no fear of rattling cages. Imagine New York’s Jimmy Breslin in jeans and bad hair.

Her new life starts off in the Land of the Midnight Sun, with a story about several Indigenous women gone missing. Actually, it turns out more than several.

In L.A. this would sound alarms, in a very strange Alaska, Indigenous women share space with missing pets. I have a problem with that story.

The cast, but for Jeff Perry as Cornik, is mostly fresh out of the box, with Grace Dove, Meredith Holzman, the shy and frightened Ami Park, nice guy Pablo Castelblanco and old hand Matt Malloy.

“Alaska Daily” starts slowly with only Swank’s energy and gifts to provide heat, but McCarthy runs a warm ship, even in frigid Alaska.

And where there’s smoke our Eileen will find the fire. Stay tuned.

“Alaska Daily” airs Thursdays on ABC, and streams on Hulu and Prime Video.

J.P. Devine of Waterville is a former stage and screen actor.

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