The Baldwins is a fascinating TV show. Es muy fascinante.
The TLC reality series following Alec and Hilaria Baldwin as they raise their seven children has the wholesome echoes of the network’s once-hit show Jon and Kate Plus 8, before those parents’ increasingly toxic relationship shrouded the series with darkness. It’s also, simultaneously, a hagiographic look at the Baldwins’ madcap family dynamic and meticulous PR damage control that wastes no time addressing the couples’ various controversies. ¡Qué escándalo!
The Baldwins, which premieres Sunday night on TLC, matches the frenetic pace of Alec and Hilaria’s life raising seven children and eight pets by cycling through their defenses of various headline-making scandals, almost like a crisis consultant’s PowerPoint presentation come to life on TV.
Take your pick for which segment is juiciest: Discussion of their 26-year age gap and the allegations that Hilaria was a golddigger desperate for fame when they met 13 years ago; Hilaria addressing the media frenzy when she was exposed for supposedly faking Spanish roots; and how Alec’s involvement in the 2021 accidental shooting and death of a cinematographer on a film set impacted him and his family.
It amounts to a truly bizarre viewing experience: You—or, at least, I—tune in desperate to see how they’ll explain away these controversies, and absolutely to see whether Hilaria will be speaking in her occasional Spanish accent while flitting between the two languages. (She does!) You’re also—or, at least, I am—self-aware enough to know that this is blatant crisis management for the family amid their snowballing heap of controversies, and are therefore prone to roll your eyes at the cynical nature of it.
But then there’s this third thing. Dios mío, the pair of them are actually…charming. How susceptible am I to this reality-TV image rehab, that I found the couple and the whole family to be so endearing?
Sunday night’s premiere is titled “Along Came Hilaria,” and kicks off, after a depiction of the maelstrom of mayhem that is life with all those kids and animals, with a rewind to when Hilaria entered the picture, sparking the first of several tabloid cycles they’d weather.
She was a 27-year-old yoga instructor when they met; he was 53. Their whirlwind engagement, marriage, and the birth of their first child had gossip blogs labeling her a golddigger, especially given Baldwin’s reputation as a “curmudgeon,” which Hilaria agrees in the series that he can certainly be.
“She had what she had and she was happy,” Alec says. “Then I sucked her into this disgusting, filthy world I’m in. I think she’s less happy as a result of what we had to put up with.”
“I haven’t googled myself in a very long time, but I know what the word on the street is,” Hilaria says. And she concedes that, if she was a stranger reading those details about their relationship, she might agree with that word. “What would I think…?” she coyly teases.
The Rust shooting
We get glimpses of their son Rafa’s chaotic ninth birthday party, and then the episode moves on to the shooting on the set of Rust.
At the time the series was filmed, Alec had been indicted on an involuntary manslaughter charge in the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, who was killed by prop gun that Baldwin had handled. A July trial was looming as cameras rolled, with Baldwin facing up to 18 months in prison. (The case would eventually be dismissed with prejudice.)
The Baldwins shows, via grainy security camera footage, the moment when Baldwin learned that Hutchins died. “No!” he gasps, covering his mouth. “Watching Alec and his pain, and 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.
“I have one overriding thought,” Alec says. I have one overriding concern. That is letting seven children know that I love them…I’m worried.”
The incident and the trial are revisited several times throughout Sunday’s premiere. The major revelation is that Alec was, according to Hilaria, diagnosed with PTSD. “Everyone who is friends with Alec has seen his mental health decline,” she says. “And he says, in his darkest moments, if an accident had to have had this day, why am I still here? Why couldn’t it be me?” He wakes up in the morning and wonders, “Why did I wake up?”
“Halyna lost her life in the most unthinkable tragedy,” Hilaria says. “A son lost his mom. We are going to feel and carry this pain forever. This will be a part of our family story.”
This, again, is a fascinating experience for a viewer. It’s wrenching to watch. And it’s, morbidly—but let’s be candid here—what we want to watch. We want to know what they have to say about this. But even if it’s to be expected, isn’t a bit…icky to see this kind of victimization spin in the case where a mother is dead?
The Spanish scandal
Elsewhere in the series, there are copious scenes of the bedlam with so many kids running around, and the toll it takes on 66-year-old Alec to be chasing around seven children under the age of 10. These sequences, which basically act as interstitials between the various rounds of damage control, are a blast. The kids are all adorable. And, it must be said, Alec and Hilaria have an incredibly telegenic dynamic. It’s very Lucy and Ricky—but, I suppose in this case, gender-reversed.
Which brings us to the Spanish.
Should you need to be brought up to speed, one of the wildest media controversies of recent years was when, during the pandemic in 2020, when we were all captive audiences for salacious news stories, Hilaria was accused of “impersonating a Spanish person.”
Clips of her slipping in and out of Spanish in TV segments, forgetting the English words for certain things, and speaking with a dialect were juxtaposed against the information that Hilaria grew up in Boston and has no Spanish lineage. The Atlantic called her an “identity hoaxer.”
The first footage in The Baldwins of Hilaria speaking Spanish is in a home video after the birth of her first child, in which she tearfully whispers, “You are okay,” to her—in Spanish. Then, there are instances of Alec himself talking to the kids in Spanish.
During one of their confessionals, Hilaria starts talking at hyperspeed. “Let’s talk slower,” Alec says. “You’re speaking English in a Spanish cadence, which is always perilous for me. Slow down just a kiss. I can’t understand you.”
Then various headlines of Hilaria being “exposed” are shown on screen, and Hilaria begins to explain herself.
“I’m raising my kids to be bilingual,” she says. “My nuclear family now lives over in Spain. I want to teach my kids pride in speaking more than one language…I love English. I also love Spanish. When I mix the two, it doesn’t make me inauthentic. When I mix the two, it makes me normal.”
About the “scandal” that her Spanish-speaking sparked: “I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me sad, or make me hurt, or put me in dark places.”
And so The Baldwins gives us all the content we could want from the show. It doesn’t run from the drama; in fact, it engages with it head on. Is that a noble thing? I don’t know. But, and perhaps against my better judgement, it’s certainly entertaining. If one episode covered all this, I can’t imagine what will come up in the rest of the episodes as they unfold.
