Reality television producers had been circling Alec and Hilaria Baldwin for years. His Hollywood fame and history of public combustibility, her social media following and their many children and pets were all classic ingredients for a slice-of-life series.
Last year, the couple decided to let the cameras in.
They did so at perhaps the most precarious time of Alec Baldwin’s life: the month before he was scheduled to stand trial in New Mexico on an involuntary manslaughter charge, in connection with the fatal shooting of a cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, on the set of the movie “Rust” in 2021. The result is a fly-on-the-wall series called “The Baldwins,” which premieres Sunday on TLC, a network whose marquee titles include “90 Day Fiancé” and “Sister Wives.”
The first episode of the show has landed a bit uneasily with critics, who view the show as something of a crisis communications project. Here are six takeaways from the episode.
The premiere begins just ahead of Alec Baldwin’s manslaughter trial.
The filming started in June last year, just before Baldwin was scheduled to stand trial in New Mexico. In the first episode, the couple drives their seven children (and six of their eight dogs and cats) from their home in New York City to their home in the Hamptons, where they often spend the summer.
The decision to start filming was a risk. In the event that he had been convicted, Baldwin, who was handling a revolver on set when it discharged a live bullet, would have faced a potential maximum prison sentence of 18 months.
Instead, the trial ended early with an unquestionable victory for him and his legal team. A judge dismissed the case after finding that the state’s actions with regard to certain evidence amounted to prosecutorial misconduct. Baldwin, 66, who has long denied responsibility for the shooting, is now suing the prosecutors who handled his case, as he still faces several lawsuits.
But when the cameras started rolling, the outcome was in doubt. “I have one overriding thought, I have one overriding concern — and that is letting seven children know that I love them,” Alec Baldwin says in the episode before acknowledging, “I’m worried.”
The reality show’s producers faced a delicate task.
For the producers of the reality show, there was the delicate task of making a show that balanced two imperatives. First, it had to align with the kind of light, unscripted fare about family and marriage that usually airs on TLC; at the same time, it had to address a tragedy that is still being litigated in the civil court system.
“We weren’t there to talk about what was happening legally,” said David Metzler, an executive producer of the show who has been involved with reality series like “Queer Eye” and “Catfish: The TV Show.”
“We were there to see how Alec and Hilaria were parenting through a very difficult time in their life, and to see how their relationship was affected and to see how they were working as a family to get through it,” he continued. “We dealt with the emotional side — we didn’t deal with the legal side.”
Lawyers for Baldwin have said in legal filings that the actor has dealt with the loss of acting roles and income as a result of the prosecutors’ decision to investigate him and bring a criminal case, although it is unclear how much that factored into Baldwin’s decision to agree to the show. In an interview with People magazine ahead of the premiere, he said that the reality show was a chance for him to work while also focusing on his family.
“For me, work-related things really aren’t that critical anymore,” he said. “I thought, ‘I get to spend time with my family.’”
The Baldwins discuss the emotional toll of the fatal shooting.
Before fully addressing how the shooting affected the Baldwins, Hilaria Baldwin makes something of a disclaimer. “In no way is it meant to compare with Halyna’s loss, with her son, who has no mom,” she says. “It breaks my heart.”
She and her husband also delve into the emotional effects on them and their family, noting that their youngest three children don’t know a life before the tragedy that upended Alec Baldwin’s life and career.
Hilaria Baldwin says her husband has post-traumatic stress disorder from the ordeal, and Alec Baldwin says there are times when he feels as if he can’t get out of bed. “That’s not like me — I’m not like that at all,” he says.
Hilaria Baldwin quickly addresses an internet preoccupation with her accent.
Years after the online uproar over the fact that Hilaria Baldwin sometimes speaks with a Spanish accent despite a Boston upbringing, she delivers a carefully worded response. “I love English; I also love Spanish,” she says in the show. “And when I mix the two, it doesn’t make me inauthentic — when I mix the two, that makes me normal.”
Hilaria Baldwin explains that she is raising her children to be bilingual, noting that her family lives in Spain. As for the criticism: “I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me sad and it didn’t hurt and it didn’t put me in dark places,” she says.
The bulk of the show is not about the ‘Rust’ tragedy.
In an interview, the show’s producers said that the trial occupies only the first part of the season; the filming resumed after the case was dismissed and he returned home. Even in the first episode, the subject of the shooting fades in for brief moments.
The rest is geared toward capturing the joyful mess of a nine-person household. The children ice a birthday cake; Alec Baldwin cleans up toys; the boys get summer haircuts; and the parents, who are both executive producers of the show, banter over their 26-year age gap. (Hilaria notes that she was around 5 years old when “The Hunt for Red October” came out.)
Television critics are wary of the show’s public relations angle.
The show’s first episode was met with skepticism among critics. In Time magazine, the television critic Judy Berman writes that the show is “so obsessive in its quest to make the Baldwins seem like normal human beings, it forgets to be even a little bit interesting.” In Vulture, the critic Kathryn VanArendonk writes that “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.”
In The Daily Beast, Kevin Fallon calls the show “a crisis consultant’s PowerPoint presentation come to life on TV” — but, he acknowledges, the family is endearing, and the show’s willingness to engage with the drama of their lives is “certainly entertaining.”
