Trying to play Skyrim on external monitor

I'm not sure this is the best place post, maybe someone can point me in the right direction if not?

I'm trying to play Skyrim on an external monitor but I'm struggling to get the damn thing to cooperate. From the options menu in the game's launcher there are two listings under Graphics Adapter, both the name of my dGPU. In other games I've seen a similar selection where one is set to one monitor and the other for the second monitor but for Skyrim it doesn't seem to change anything. After the game's launched I can't use the windows key. I've tried using windowed mode to drag it over but I can't interact with the window at all before being locked into the game.

Nvidia Control Panel doesn't recognize my laptop's display while the external monitor is connected. After some reading online this seems to be by design. Inspite of this there's no way to set the game to launch with the external monitor and it shows up in the Nvidia app again as my only display.

This is actually my first time starting Skyrim and I was planning on going through without any mods, but if there's a mod to add a display selection in the game's settings or something like that that would be cool.

Anyone know if there is a fix for this?