‘The Baldwins’ Is Alec and Hilaria Baldwin’s Strange Response to the ‘Rust’ Tragedy: TV Review – Variety

By

Daniel D’Addario
Chief TV Critic
On the two parody “Queen of Jordan” episodes of “30 Rock” — in which the sitcom’s cast members were thrust into the middle of a reality show — no character seemed quite so out of place as Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy. A self-possessed, haughtily upright fellow, Jack correctly sees the cameras as an insult to his dignity, but cannot get away from them, or stop himself from embarrassing himself in front of them. There’s an inversely proportional element at work, on “30 Rock” as in life: The more shameless one is, the less one has to lose. But for Jack, whose image is everything, “Queen of Jordan” represents a humiliation. 
Those episodes came to mind while watching “The Baldwins,” TLC’s new reality series about Baldwin, his wife Hilaria, and the seven children they share. (Ireland Baldwin, the adult daughter of this series’ star and his ex-wife Kim Basinger, is not a presence.) The Baldwins divide their time between New York City — in a five-bedroom apartment that, we’re credibly told, has come to seem too small — and the Hamptons, but their attentions are elsewhere. This show chronicles the distractions that plague them and, in so doing, explains its own existence. For Baldwin — not quite as upright as Jack Donaghy, but one of his generation’s most revered comic and dramatic actors — reality TV might, once, have been unthinkable, but for recent misfortunes. He emerges from the pilot of “The Baldwins” (which is all that was sent to critics for review) not quite brought low, but diminished.

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The pilot takes place at the start of summer 2024. Baldwin is distracted by the looming trial he will need to attend in New Mexico, having been charged with involuntary manslaughter in the shooting death of the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins after a film-prop gun discharged live ammunition. The actor cannot possibly know that his trial will last only three days before the charges are to be dismissed on procedural grounds; the legal travails represent for him an expensive, upsetting and reputationally ruinous nightmare. He struggles to speak about them twice over: In the presence of his children, it’s clear he’s trying to keep things light. And speaking to the cameras, an endlessly voluble star seems choked-off. In conversation with Hilaria, the actor recalls a recent conversation with a friend in which he said, “I’m happier when I’m asleep than when I’m awake.” The anecdote sits there, painful and unsightly.

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Baldwin, of course, is not the true victim of the “Rust” shooting, and the show takes pains to emphasize that fact: Sounding a bit stilted, as if scripted, Hilaria declares “Life will forever be different. Halyna lost her life in the most unthinkable tragedy.” This reality, though, hangs uneasily throughout the reality show. What we are watching is a father of seven minor children anticipating the potential end of his life as a parent as he’s known it; as such, the canned, stock reality-show instrumentals feel extra-tinny, the moments of gaiety extra-forced. 
Things a viewer might usually bump up against — Baldwin showing his kids how to smile for a camera by referencing “Saturday Night Live” producer Marci Klein’s method, for instance — come to feel just vaguely sad. And when Hilaria explains the origins of her off-and-on Spanish accent as a result of transatlantic space of the mind she inhabits, what was once a scintillating bit of celebrity-adjacent oddity now just feels pointless. “I love English. I also love Spanish,” she declares. “And when I mix the two, it doesn’t make me inauthentic. When I mix the two, that makes me normal!” OK! What are any of us doing here? 
Hilaria is a fairly intense screen presence, so much so that her swapping between accents from scene to scene is among the less jarring things about her performance here. In one argument, Baldwin tells her, “Let’s talk slower. You’re speaking English in a Spanish cadence, which is always perilous for me.” What had jumped out, though, was not the cadence of her speech but the dynamic that underlies it: Baldwin tells us that “probably after we had our fifth kid,” Hilaria began to be a sort of petty family autocrat, “calling all the shots.” 
“Yes, I agree that’s your reality of it,” she replies.
Leaving entirely aside the stakes of what’s going on with this family later in their summer — this moment, and others throughout “The Baldwins,” feels like being trapped on a vacation with someone else’s family and watching with creeping horror as they get on each other’s nerves. Baldwin is shown cleaning the interior of a garbage can; Hilaria and one of his children gently rib him and describe him as obsessive-compulsive. (“You don’t really want to film this, do you?” he asks the camera operator filming him scrubbing out the bin; either they really do, because an Emmy winner doing grody household chores is the point, or they didn’t, but they also didn’t get much else in the way of usable footage.)

Baldwin’s involvement in the “Rust” shooting was only the latest in a series of scandals and dramas that have engulfed him over time, so much so that he once announced, in a New York Magazine cover story, that he was outright quitting public life. That story ran some 11 years ago; it followed Baldwin’s having been accused of using an antigay slur, which he denied. The death of Halyna Hutchins was an avoidable tragedy into which Baldwin was drawn in; inasmuch as it’s a misfortune that befell Baldwin, it’s one he now compounds with an absolutely unerring instinct to do and say the wrong thing at any given time. A would-be “Jon and Kate Plus 8”-style family sitcom about one kooky family seems like an outright offensive response to this tragedy.
But it may have been the best option available to them. The Baldwins plainly live an expensive lifestyle — commuting from Manhattan to East Hampton via Range Rover is not the budget option — and their patriarch had, up until the “Rust” incident, been working relentlessly. Seemingly unhireable for a time, he accepted the role of a version of himself. Downcast and out-of-sorts, but, if one squints, having a decent enough time. That’s the difference between Baldwin and Jack Donaghy, who can’t contain his contempt for reality stardom: Baldwin is a really good actor. And sometimes he even says something that lands in a place of uncomfortable truth. “I would do anything for my children,” he tells the camera as the episode ends. The existence of “The Baldwins” proves that to be true.
The Baldwins premieres Sunday, February 23 at 10 p.m. ET on TLC and streaming on Max, with new episodes airing weekly.
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Source: https://variety.com/2025/tv/reviews/the-baldwins-alec-hilaria-rust-tlc-show-1236308421/