Alec and Hilaria Baldwin Are Shockingly Candid in New Show

This Week

I bravely watched the Alec and Hilaria Baldwin reality series.

The only reason I’m still watching The Traitors.

My silly lil’ SNL50 thoughts and reactions.

The best moment of the week.

Did Alec and Hilaria Baldwin Just Charm Me?

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.

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?

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 judgment, 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.

Today’s Top Entertainment News

The Memes Are Saving The Traitors

The Traitorsis both the best reality competition series I’ve watched on TV in a long time, and the most annoying one. I skip home from work on Thursday nights, whistle a lil’ happy tune as I cook dinner scroll through Doordash, and snuggle up in the corner of my couch to turn on the new episode of The Traitors when it launches at 9 pm. And then I proceed to groan, roll my eyes, and scream at the TV.

The majority of the cast members’ decisions make no sense, the best and most-fun competitors keep getting sent home, and the remaining annoying people seem to be dialing up their insufferableness with each successive episode.

Yet, whether due to expert editing or the fact that this merry band of reality-TV lunatics can’t help themselves, the series remains a lot of fun. That fun, however, is barely stitched together with individual moments or ridiculousness and fleeting hilarity. In other words: the memes.

(Warning: Some spoilers ahead.)

This week’s episode featured an epic showdown between fan-favorite Carolyn and fan-nemesis Danielle, which, given their respective penchants for histrionics, became a fount of glorious memes.

Chiefly, there was Danielle’s camp meltdown after the roundtable results, a divisive moment:

Of course, there was the return of Danielle’s polarizing choice of headwear:

There was the completely random, utterly pointless, and yet, as is The Traitors way, totally fabulous and entertaining appearance by former cast members Kate and Parvati:

This person captured fans’ collective reaction to the fact that the show’s most pointless cast member, Ivar, is still on the show instead of our faves:

And then there is the context-unnecessary clip of Gabby and Britney saying the word “bamboozled,” somehow sounding as if the Minions were learning to speak the word for the first time:

I will be sending this bamboozled meme as a reaction text to everyone I know for the foreseeable future. For that, I am not sorry, and for that, I am grateful to The Traitors.

Advertisement

Errant SNL50 Thoughts

Saturday Night Live is a show that’s designed to be bad. And that’s why it’s been so great. For all the think pieces published over the decades of “Is SNL Dead?” or whatever, I think we all do understand that experiment, and the potential that comes out of it.

Producing from scratch 90 minutes of live comedy each week is a set-up for failure, which is why so many great comedy minds have flocked to—and thrived in—the challenge. We want SNL to be able to be bad, so that when genius hits, it recalibrates comedy as we know it. Or, at the very least, has us laughing hysterically.

I had a blast watching both the SNL50 concert and the anniversary special last weekend, endless TV events amounting to, in the end, about 2 percent of my time here on Earth.

Both provided a veritable field day for people—i.e. me—who enjoy spotting random celebrities in crowds at live shows. If someone hid a recording device in my apartment last weekend, it would be hours of silence, interrupted on the nights of the specials with squeals and chirps of “Meryl Streep!” “Jerry Seinfeld!” “Julia Stiles!” “Kristen Wiig!”

Everyone’s favorite SNL cast is the one they grew up with, so mine is the era with Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, Ana Gasteyer, and Cheri Oteri. As such, the absolute highlight of the entire weekend for me was when Ferrell and Gasteyer revived my all-time favorite sketch, “Marty and Bobbi Culp,” at the SNL50 concert.

I wasn’t in the room at Radio City Music Hall, but it seemed to me watching at home that it got about a similar-sized ovation as huge stars Nirvana, Lauryn Hill, and Cher.

And Then There’s ThisSNL50 Moment

The sweetest part of the entire weekend happened in the final seconds.

More From The Daily Beast’s Obsessed

The Monkey: It turns out that a toy monkey is the most malevolent movie villain we’ve seen in years. (Now in theaters)

Old Guy: It’s Christoph Waltz’s turn to be an AARP hit man. (Now in theaters)

Reacher: Reacher is back! Tell your dad! (Now on Prime Video)

Zero Day: It should be a crime to get Robert De Niro to do a TV show and waste him like this. (Now on Netflix)

A Thousand Blows: Definitely the new Peaky Blinders. But is that retread enough? (Now on Hulu)

Advertisement

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.