The Good Whale

In the summer of 1993, the movie “Free Willy” — about a captive killer whale that’s heroically set free — was an unexpected hit. But when word got out that the real whale who played Willy, an orca named Keiko, was dangerously sick and stuck in a tiny pool at an amusement park in Mexico City, the public was outraged. If Warner Bros. wanted to avoid a P.R. nightmare and not break the hearts of children everywhere, then it was clear: Someone had to free Keiko — or at least try.

Keiko was hardly an ideal candidate for release. He’d lived in the care of humans for more than a decade, since he was a calf. He had millions of human fans but not a single orca friend. And he had missed out on uncountable lessons about how to live in the ocean — skills no trainer in the world knew how to teach.

“The Good Whale” tells the story of the wildly ambitious science experiment to return Keiko to the ocean — while the world watched. An epic tale that starts in Mexico and ends in Norway, the six-episode series follows Keiko as he’s transported from country to country, each time landing in the hands of well-intentioned people who believe they know what’s best for him — people who still disagree, decades later, about whether they did the right thing.

• Daniel Alarcón is an award-winning novelist, as well as host and Executive Producer of the Spanish-language podcast Radio Ambulante. He has written fiction for The New Yorker since 2003, and more recently reported from Latin America for the magazine. In 2021, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. He teaches journalism at Columbia University.