Chris Trainor: A TV show about a local newspaper in 2023? We’ll take it

Basically, it’s a primetime TV show on a major network about a small, daily, local newspaper. In the year 2023.

Now, this is pretty rare for those of us on the newspaper side, at least in the modern era. We just aren’t a profession you see as the centerpiece in dramatic TV shows all that often these days.

We live in a country of nearly 400 million people who work in countless jobs, careers and disciplines, from bakeries to tire factories to insurance offices to sales positions and far beyond. And yet, when it comes to seeing those careers reflected on network TV, we’re still all playing second fiddle to a handful of careers: police officers, firefighters, hospital medical staffs and lawyers. Those guys get all the cool shows.

At some point decades ago in an office somewhere off the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, some folks in fancy suits decided that police, fire, hospitals and lawyers were the four major primetime TV professions that they would serve up to us. Oh, there have, of course, been plenty of exceptions through the years. But you can always — always — count a steady diet of the core four on every broadcast network’s primetime lineup.

Heck, sometimes they are lined up in a row, like on Wednesdays when NBC offers “Chicago Med,” “Chicago Fire” and “Chicago PD” consecutively between 8 and 11 p.m. Or sometimes they roll them up in a single show, like FOX’s (admittedly wildly entertaining) “911,” which follows cops, firefighters and EMTs, and throws emergency dispatchers in the mix for good measure.

If you asked any real-life cops, firefighters or lawyers about those shows, they’d probably tell you they get some things right about those respective professions. They can see a piece of themselves in the programs, if they are being honest. But on the other hand, there’s likely a lot that Hollywood gets wrong, or glosses over, for dramatic effect.

There’s probably never been a show that has more altered public expectation than “Law & Order,” in which a murder is committed, the case is investigated, and someone is arrested, brought to trial and sentenced in an hour. Even in the timeline of the show, the murder suspects are often brought to trial just days after the crime is committed. In real life, as we know, it can take YEARS for a murder case to come to trial. I can’t tell you how many times, as a reporter, I’ve heard a real-life police officer or an attorney say, “This isn’t ‘Law & Order’” when referring to a case.

And “Alaska Daily” follows along those same lines. There are some things it gets painstakingly correct, such as a small newspaper’s grappling with the economic and cultural headwinds of the day, the idea of doing more with less, and some of the biting gallows humor that peppers every newsroom. But it also has some eyerollers, too, at times falling into the old trope of conflating reporters with detectives, or perpetuating the idea that The Washington Post is always waiting in the wings to offer a job to a small-town reporter.

But, look, those are just nitpicks. Beggars can’t be choosers, and newspaper folks don’t get many shows about our world these days. “Alaska Daily” will do for now. (Here’s hoping for a season two.) Now, if you’ll excuse me, “Law & Order: SVU” is playing on an endless loop and I’m going to catch the next episode.