The Baldwins Is Grimmer Than You Imagined
Everyone involved with this should be ashamed.
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The pilot episode of The Baldwins, TLC’s new reality show about actor Alec Baldwin and his family, is one of the darkest and most bizarre hours of television to appear in recent memory. In look and approach, it plays like a combination of The Osbournes and a TLC reality show from the 2010s, the heyday of the channel’s “oh, wow, these people have a lot of kids” programming such as 16 Kids and Counting and Jon & Kate Plus 8. This alone makes The Baldwins a concerning prospect: A brief browse through the history of families featured on these shows might suggest that choosing to be on one is akin to putting your foot in a wood chipper.
What makes The Baldwins spectacularly upsetting, however, is that it’s not just about Alec and Hilaria Baldwin and their seven children and eight pets all living in a five-bedroom Manhattan apartment. It’s not even just about that plus Hilaria’s delightfully ridiculous past scandal of cultural appropriation and misrepresentation. It’s also about the manslaughter case against Alec Baldwin after he fired a loaded prop gun on the set of the movie Rust, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
Is The Baldwins a truly misguided attempt at regaining public sympathy? Probably yes. Is it produced like no one has any idea what happened to the Gosselin family, or how some of the Osbourne family felt about their show, so there’s no problem re-creating that same model? Also yes. But of course, the devil’s always in the details. Maybe The Baldwins is actually a sensitive take on these very complex issues! Maybe this is a thoughtful account from people truly taking stock of the vulnerability and capriciousness of human life. Or maybe it’s exactly what it looks like: an attempt to reshape the public narrative by appearing to be transparent. The Baldwins pilot has a lot to get done and only a little over 40 minutes to do it, so let’s take a look at how it accomplishes its various tasks. Maybe it’s okay, actually?
Lots and lots of footage of exactly how wild it is in the Baldwin household
Alec and Hilaria have seven kids and eight pets (four dogs and four cats). They live in a five-bedroom Manhattan apartment. Everything in their life is so wacky! There are kids hanging from the chandeliers! Kids swinging from the doorframes! Kids underfoot and overhead and popping out of corners like the orphans in Annie! The Baldwins wants to make sure we know this, so the episode opens with shots of all the bedlam. Cats! Kids screaming! Alec Baldwin saying, “Hey, jump to me, jump,” to a toddler who completely ignores him. “What are you doing with that bone,” asks Alec, as a kid goes sprinting past. It’s all set to a big-band jazz-music score, so you know it’s fun and frantic. And relatable! So relatable.
Lest you forget who this is really about, though, the camera zooms in on Alec’s face and he gives a little direct-to-camera glance of exasperation and commiseration. Like in The Office!
Baby only ever referred to as “Baby”
The Baldwins have seven kids, most of whom they seem able to address directly and describe with at least one or two adjectives. The youngest, however, is a 2-year-old toddler referred to exclusively as Baby. “No, no, no, Baby, no, no!” Alec says. “What are you doing, Baby?” Hilaria, later: “The baby is the monster.” At one point, Hilaria does a full-on jump scare after she turns and sees Baby peeking out from the bottom level of a bunk bed. “Oh my God, you’re here,” she says. My original theory was they don’t remember Baby’s actual name. (It’s Ilaria, and another possibility is they keep confusing her for the identically pronounced Hilaria). My new theory, though, is that Baby, with her turn-of-the-20th-century sepia-toned romper, is actually a ghost/faerie who has insinuated herself into their family and is slowly sapping Alec Baldwin’s remaining energy. Or she’s a hallucination, like the baby from Ally McBeal.
Birthday cake!
Everyone gathers around the kitchen counter while all the kids collectively attempt to frost a cake with bright-pink and blue frosting. It goes predictably poorly: The frosting slides everywhere, and Baby drills holes into the side with a spatula. “For about 20 seconds this was a great cake,” Alec says. “Oh Jesus, what did you do to the cake?” asks the kid whose birthday it is.
Dire intonation about how this has been “a hard year”
First it comes as humor, with Alec laughing that he sucked Hilaria into the “filthy, disgusting world I’m in, and I think she’s less happy as a result of what we’ve had to put up with.” Then there’s the cake scene, then, in the hardest pivot ever performed outside of aerial combat maneuvers, Alec gets a phone call about “needing to be there to stand trial.” Serious Music kicks in, along with news footage explaining the Rust tragedy, then police footage of Alec Baldwin, shocked and horrified, learning that Halyna Hutchins died. Remember: This is a show about having so, so many kids, but it’s also a show about being on trial for manslaughter. Contextualizing a woman’s death by embedding it into a show about how happy but also stressed the Baldwins are as a result of her death is … grim. It’s pretty grim.
Alec Baldwin is the oldest, most tired man alive
Sure, he’s only 66, and he’s a vital, energetic actor, but on The Baldwins he is Methuselah. He is Father Time. He is a doddering senior citizen surrounded by his great-grandchildren. His eye bags could carry golfing equipment. His hair is often in the odd, flattened shape belonging to someone who recently woke up from a chair nap. If there’s one thing to take away from The Baldwins, it’s that Alec Baldwin is a sweet and gentle old man, both relatable and lovable. Ignore anything you may have heard to the contrary. (For the record, a producer on The Baldwins has said that the Baldwins do not have final edit.)
Brief pause for mourning, with repeated insistence that the Baldwins know they’re not the victims here
“Watching Alec and his pain … in no way is it meant to compare with Halyna’s loss. With her son, who has no mom. It breaks my heart,” Hilaria says. “This past year was so hard. It was so, so hard. With the kids, it’s tough,” Alec says. And now, back to the birthday party! (“Come here, Baby. Baby, come here,” Alec says, as Hilaria carries out the cake.)
Alec Baldwin has OCD
We know this because Hilaria says so, and also because there’s footage of Alec washing the lid of a trash can and putting toys away. “Since Alec’s trial in New Mexico, it’s become so much worse,” Hilaria says.
Fun outing to get haircuts!
Alec and Hilaria take their boys to get haircuts for the summer. “In New York, I love just being … out,” Hilaria says, over footage of them walking across a crosswalk. This Real Housewives tagline could use another pass.
Brisk tour through how totally normal it is to pretend you did not grow up speaking English
“Slower, slower,” Alec tells Hilaria as they get into a spat. “You’re speaking English with a Spanish cadence, which is always perilous for me.” Sharp transition into: the very chill and obviously wildly overblown social-media crisis of Hilaria’s decision to occasionally represent herself in public as a Spanish woman. Cue the montage of press coverage! “I love English,” she says. “I also love Spanish. And when I mix the two that doesn’t make me inauthentic, it makes me normal.”
There are so many kids — why are there so many kids?
Once again, whenever The Baldwins needs to move into and out of a tricky topic like being on trial in the public eye for cultural appropriation, or being on actual legal trial, the series can simply turn back to its baseline premise. They have so many kids. Why do they have so many kids? The eldest, their 10-year-old daughter, has a very messy floppy bun on the top of her head. Alec wonders why she has chosen to do her hair like that. Around them, the pets skitter in and out of the frame, occasionally wandering into a little acrylic pen so they can pee on a puppy pad.
Wait, wait, wait: Doesn’t Alec Baldwin have a child from another marriage?
Not according to The Baldwins.
Uh-oh! Hamptons travel high jinks!
It’s summer, so obviously the Baldwins are heading to their home in East Hampton, which is where Alec says he feels happiest and most relaxed. This is plausible because presumably they have more space there than in their Manhattan apartment, but the process of getting there is rough, because, again: They have so many kids! How to get everyone into a vehicle, especially when there are also eight pets and two nannies? (The nannies almost never appear, except for one brief shot of a nanny helping to buckle a kid into the car.) Where will everyone sit? Who is holding Baby! Hilaria made a whole chart, but now no one’s following it!!
Alec Baldwin, the oldest and most tired man alive, has PTSD but is not a victim
Once safely ensconced in the Hamptons, it’s time to return to trial territory. Hilaria and Alec are just so worried, and as Hilaria points out (in a to-camera interview, not in front of Alec), he is suffering from PTSD. “Everyone around Alec has seen his mental health decline,” Hilaria says. But again, he is not the victim here! Do not feel bad for him! Except, based on this entire episode, you should definitely feel for him. But you don’t need to feel bad. Maybe a little bad. Have you seen his eye bags?
Alec Baldwin loves his kids so much
In what may be the most unintentionally suggestive exchange of the episode, Alec tells Hilaria that the real reason they had so many kids, he thinks, is that he’s not sure how he could have made it through this past year without them. “Sometimes I say, ‘Why do we have seven kids?’ And I realize: To help carry me and you through this situation,” Alec says. This does not bode well for the Baldwin kids, who should not be asked to carry their parents’ trauma and are now also performing the task of making their parents look relatable on TV. To her credit, Hilaria seems to recognize this. “Yes, we’re blessed to have them, and they give us joy. And at the same time we want to make sure they’re always our children, and they don’t bear the burden of having to carry us,” she says. This is reassuring. Except for Baby, who I remain convinced is a mass hallucination improbably captured on-camera, and whose dread powers I will decline to speculate on.
Hilaria has also had a very hard year
Lest we forget about Hilaria, whose presence in the episode titled “Along Came Hilaria” suggests that, actually, this is the Hilaria show: Hilaria has also had a tough year. Alec feels bad about this. “I feel more in pain about you than about me,” he says. “I think about what it’s done to you, and it’s hurt you.”
But sweet Jesus, there are so many kids?
Really can’t emphasize it enough.
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