Hilary Swank is on the story in ‘Alaska Daily’

Hilary Swank is reporting for duty for her return to series television.

After limited runs in the Netflix space saga “Away” and the true FX drama “Trust” in recent years, the twotime Oscar winner (for “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Million Dollar Baby”) is committed to a potentially longer stay as a journalist who tries to salvage her career by moving from New York to Anchorage as ABC’s “Alaska Daily” premieres Thursday, Oct. 6.

Also featuring Jeff Perry (“Scandal”) and Matt Malloy (“I Love That for You”), the show was created by executive producer Tom McCarthy, an Oscar recipient for co-writing another newspaper drama: “Spotlight,” which won the Academy Award for best picture of 2015.

“It’s an interesting medium to work in when you’re used to working in films, where you have a lot of tweaks made in advance,” says the friendly Swank, whose early TV history included a “Beverly Hills, 90210” stint. She notes that lately, “I liked doing a semi-long-form project more than I thought I would. I had found that for me, TV was almost claustrophobic because you play a character for so long, but you also have the opportunity to play gradations of what your character is going through. And that is a nice challenge.”

Swank describes her new character Eileen Fitzgerald, who enters the Alaska scene by tackling a cold case, as being “very into details. For her, being a journalist is about finding the truth and putting that out for people to discover for themselves. I think that’s something that people are really wanting right now in general, not opinions, but just going back to good journalism where you’re trying to get to the bottom of things. That’s (Eileen’s) sole objective, and she loves it.”

McCarthy was “the draw for me to step into this,” Swank notes ... not only because of “Spotlight,” but also his earlier film “The Station Agent,” which she says “blew me away. He brings a nice levity to his work, and I think this type of material really shows that.”

Though “Alaska Daily” largely is being filmed in British Columbia – as was Swank’s Alaska-set 2002 movie “Insomnia” – she reports that one episode does take her and her colleagues deep into Alaska itself.

“We’re actually able to explore some of the Great North, which is really awesome,” she enthuses. “What’s funny is that my husband just turned 50, and it was on his bucket list to go to Alaska, so we went to a very remote area with no phone service that you had to take a seaplane to the middle of nowhere to get to. I called that my prep work for the series.”