How to tell a JsonResult action method in MVC to use a different Serializer Method

Question

I am working on an MVC application with an Angular front end. Before I was manually passing the view-model which contains a number of different fields including date-times directly to the view as an ActionResult parameter, then manually serializing it in the view with Newtonsoft before binding it to the angular model and displaying it.

ie:

in the controller:

ActionResult MainView()
{
    ....
    return View(model);
}

in the view:

ng-data-init="init(@Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.SerializeObject(Model.ItemList))"

This worked fine and all the information was displayed properly.

However I recently switched to using a JsonResult function and an Angular $http call to automatically update the data in the view in the background. Everything is working fine except that the DateTime fields aren't being properly translated/formatted by whichever serializer the JsonResult object uses internally.

ie:

in the controller:

    public JsonResult REIDataRefresh()
    {

        ...
        return Json(model.ItemList, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
    }

in the angular:

$scope.data

$scope.LoadData = function() {
    $http({
        method: "GET",
        url: 'Home/REIDataRefresh',
        params:{'_': +new Date() }
    }).then(function success(response) {
        $scope.data = response.data;
    }, function error(errResponse) {
        alert("data " + errResponse.data + " status " + errResponse.status + " headers " + errResponse.headers + "config " + errResponse.config + " statusText " + errResponse + " xhrStat " + errResponse.xhrStatus);
    });
};  

// Initial data load
$scope.LoadData();

When I run the model through Newtonsoft.JsonConvert.SerializeObject it all formats correctly and the dates are exactly what is expected -

mm/dd/yyy

But when I pass them through the Json() return via the JsonResult action method the DateTimes looks like this:

Most of these MVC constructs are new to me so my only guess is that the serializer that is baked into Json() works differently than the one I was using before. So there are only two potential solutions I can think of: either find out how to tell angular how to format those weird DateTimes it's getting from the JsonResult, or tell Json to use the serializer I was using before instead of its default one, but I have no idea how to accomplish either of these things or if they're even the correct solution.