The Baldwins Is Desperate to Convince Us That Alec and Hilaria Are Normal

Alec Baldwin has lived many lives in the public eye, each stranger than the last. He had a typical rise to fame, graduating from soaps to prime-time to movies over the course of the 1980s. Soon he was an A-list heartthrob; a 1990 TIME profile that praised his combination of beauty and brains ran with the headline “The Hunk From Red October,” and in Clueless, the slang term for a hot guy is Baldwin (i.e., Alec and his three look-alike brothers). As he aged out of his leading-man era, in the mid-aughts, Baldwin gamely parodied his alpha-male persona as 30 Rock’s imperious network exec Jack Donaghy. And in the 2010s he alternately courted and resisted controversy, hosting a talk-radio show, hurling a gay slur at a paparazzo, defending his Boston-born second wife’s Spanish accent, impersonating Donald Trump on SNL, and—extremely temporarily—quitting public life in a widely mocked New York cover story. 

Then, in 2021, Baldwin was on the set of an indie film, Rust, on which he also served as executive producer, when a prop gun he was using to rehearse went off, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. Though the weapon was supposed to have been loaded with “dummy rounds,” it had actually contained live ammunition. A tragic accident that was, above all, a wake-up call for gun safety in the entertainment industry, the shooting also ensnared Baldwin in a highly politicized, years-long involuntary manslaughter case. Although a judge dismissed it midway through the trial, in July, Baldwin’s reputation, unstable as it was before the Rust disaster, remains in flux. So he could really use some good publicity these days. Which is probably why a man with three Emmys is now reinventing himself as a reality-TV star.

The Baldwins, premiering Feb. 23, isn’t just a reality show; it’s a TLC reality show. Notorious for rubbernecking unscripted fare like 90 Day Fiancé, My 600-lb. Life, and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo—as opposed to the self-aware, rich-lady docusoaps in the Bravo stable—the erstwhile Learning Channel has cast Baldwin as the patriarch in one of its many shows that gawk at big families. He and his aforementioned culturally “fluid” wife, Hilaria Baldwin, do, after all, have seven children under 12 years old. (Baldwin’s eldest child, 29-year-old Ireland Baldwin, whom he famously denounced in a voicemail when she was 11 as a “rude, thoughtless little pig,” is the product of his previous marriage, to Kim Basinger.) Call it Alec & Hilaria Plus 7. And lament that the show—which also counts the couple as executive producers—is so obsessive in its quest to make the Baldwins seem like normal human beings, it forgets to be even a little bit interesting.

Kids are everywhere in the series premiere, which was the only episode provided for advance screening. The typical scene finds Alec and Hilaria trying to have a conversation in the spacious, five-bedroom Manhattan apartment that is nonetheless too small for their brood, as said offspring play and yell and pester at their feet. The children are cute! In an interview paired with footage of a family trip to the barbershop that feels as premeditated as any Selling Sunset brokers’ open, he describes the four boys, approvingly, as a “gang.” With summer haircuts achieved, the harried parents load the kids, various pets, and a pair of nannies who play a suspiciously minor role in the show into two cars for relocation to their home in the Hamptons. Alec grew up on Long Island and has owned this property for 40 years, Hilaria informs viewers, as though being a Baldwin in East Hampton is just like being Bruce Springsteen in Asbury Park.

Because if there’s one thing The Baldwins want to impress upon us, it’s that there is nothing weird or privileged or otherwise suspect about the Baldwins. Hilaria touches on the media tempest surrounding her accent, reiterating that she was raised bilingual. And she shows self-awareness in admitting she understands why she, a yoga instructor 25 years her husband’s junior, was labeled a gold digger early in their relationship. But the truth is, when they met, “she had what she had, and she was happy,” says Alec. If anything, he doomed her to life in tabloid hell. Also: “I don’t actually understand what a prenup is,” Hilaria laughs. Whether or not you believe her doesn’t matter as much as the choice to so forcefully rebut the prevailing narrative.

This agenda is even more conspicuous in the show’s handling of Alec, who is spun as being a good guy despite pugnacious tendencies too evident to deny. “Can he be a curmudgeon? Absolutely,” Hilaria allows. Yet “the world very much misunderstands Alec.” Words she uses to describe him in, again, a single 41-minute episode include: funny, kind, handsome, smart, generous, tenderhearted. When his flaws, and their exceedingly minor disagreements, come up, they always serve the purposes of underlining how relatable the Baldwins are. A discussion of Alec’s OCD is paired with footage of him tidying the family’s heap of shoes. At one point, he complains that he and Hilaria used to be collaborative parents but now she just says no to him. Wives, am I right, fellas?

What they say about Rust is so carefully worded, so deliberate in foregrounding their acknowledgment that Hutchins and her family were the incident’s true victims, it could have been scripted by a crisis PR team. But the strain the case has put on the Baldwins is palpable, and perhaps the most authentic element of this snoozy infomercial of a reality show. The premiere closes just 10 days before the trial; “I’m happier when I’m asleep than when I’m awake,” says Alec. Then he addresses a question that is sure to form in viewers’ minds, watching this 66-year-old attempt a feat of endurance parenting that would exhaust a man half his age, in a flash of introspection. “Why did I have seven kids?” he asks Hilaria. “To help carry me and you through this situation.” It’s an answer vulnerable and psychologically complex enough to make you wish for a show that really did humanize the Baldwins, instead of just bugging us about how normal they are, like a toddler tugging on his dad’s pant leg for attention.