Three minutes into the premiere of The Baldwins, a Pomeranian saunters into a plexiglass corral in the family’s Manhattan apartment and positions itself to take a leak on a pee pad roughly five feet from the kitchen table. Gross, amusing and predictable at the same time, this unacknowledged moment adequately sums up the new TLC show — if not “celebreality” as a whole.
That sub-genre may have finally come full circle because the scene in question (whether intentionally or not) pays homage to The Osbournes. Ozzy, another resigned patriarch, was always stepping in the shit of one small dog or another. Alec Baldwin’s feet made it through the first episode of his own docuseries unbesmirched, but he’s on an otherwise parallel track to his forebearer. The actor, an executive producer on the show, has cast himself as another bystander to a chaotic family. Albeit, a much larger one…
“I thought that was the outer limit,” Baldwin says of children three and four, as he lists them for the audience at home, “but we kept going.”
Alec Baldwin and wife Hilaria Baldwin have seven children. That number is shared ad nauseam during Sunday night’s episode. The whole thing, by the way, is a tonal head scratcher. Alec spends one half of it Mr. Magoo-ing his way through later-in-life fatherhood and the other weepily fawning over his brood.
“Sometimes I’d say, ‘Why did I have seven kids?’” he tells his wife and the cameras. “Then I realize, [it’s] to help carry me and you through this situation.”
The situation is the 2021 shooting on the set of the movie Rust. The accident, which took the life of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injured director Joel Souza, was the result of a live round being discharged from a prop revolver handled by Alec. The case against Baldwin was dismissed in July 2024, but armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed is still serving an 18-month sentence for her own involuntary manslaughter conviction.
References to Hutchins are sobering. Interspersed with the family’s frenetic daily life and Hilaria’s unsolicited defenses of her decision to marry an older man and of her frequently deployed Spanglish, there are homages to the mother killed at only 42. Both Alec and Hilaria acknowledge that the tragedy has forever altered their lives, and the surveillance video of Alec learning Hutchins had died from the gunshot — a devastating clip I’d somehow managed to avoid until now — is arguably the one true piece of documentary in the entire hour. It might have resonated more, were it not bookended by scenes from the family circus.
But seeing as how this show is all about quickly changing the subject, let’s get back to Hilaria’s accent. Prior to the Rust shooting, the tempest that most plagued the Baldwins was the lingering public confusion over Hilaria’s ethnicity. In late 2020, when most of the world was spending the holidays hiding from a new COVID variant, one intrepid Twitter user posted a long thread of evidence that Baldwin’s Spanish accent and purported identity were pure artifice. Comparisons to Rachel Dolezal, the very white lady who conned her way into a chapter president gig at the NAACP, have followed her ever since.
After all, she was born Hillary Lynn Hayward-Thomas in Boston, Massachusetts, to a family of English, French-Canadian, German, Irish and Slovak descent. She skirts many of the specifics of the case against her, instead acting confused over her legitimate status as a bilingual adult. And, hey, there’s no arguing with the benefits of that.
“I’m raising my kids to be bilingual,” she says in the episode. “I was raised bilingual. My nuclear family now lives over in Spain. I want to teach my kids pride in speaking more than one language. I think just growing up and speaking two languages is extremely special. I love English. I also love Spanish. And when I mix the two, it doesn’t make me inauthentic. When I mix the two, that makes me normal.”
Opening your home to an entire television production, however, is not a habit of normal people. One scene in the episode that best illustrates their privileged scenario (while coming off more than a little patronizing) is when Alec and Hilaria explain that they leave the city every summer for a more spacious retreat in a place called “East Hampton.” It’s a beach town on the far end of Long Island, as you’re likely discovering for the first time, and apparently it can get quite busy during the warmer months.
This is presumably where the bulk of the season takes place and where the family will breath a collective sigh of relief at the outcome of Alec’s brief Rust trial that took place amidst filming last July. It’s also a much better place than a Greenwich Village apartment to film seven children being as feral as they have every right to be.
For what it’s worth, the Baldwin kids seem like an animated and happy bunch. And Alec and Hilaria come across as devoted and engaged parents. One hopes, even in the face of a genre frequently defined by exploitation and disregard for mental health, that those qualities make it through the reality TV sausage factory intact.
English (US) ·