Suffering Is Not a Competition
“It’s Really Complicated,” the title of the second episode of The Baldwins, is a pretty significant understatement. Having introduced Alec, Hilaria, and their menagerie of children and animals in the series premiere, The Baldwins can now delve into the scope of the shooting on the Rust set in 2021 and how it upended their lives. That the tragedy takes hold of the series’ first half — as confirmed and intended by TLC — sets the show on a very strange course of trying to question who is suffering most in the aftermath.
Outside of the kooky big-family dynamics and brief Baldwin-related career retrospectives, The Baldwins focuses on the twofold suffering of the family: how the Rust tragedy impacted Alec personally and how the ramifications of it continue to impact the rest of the family. That Alec suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder is a point of interest in the first episode, mostly demonstrating that having OCD and seven kids is inadvisable (noted), but the show’s deep dive into Alec’s post-traumatic stress disorder and subsequent depression makes for heartfelt, if not grim, viewing. To that end, The Baldwins is a somewhat compelling exploration of grief and the ways in which Alec seems incapable of ever shedding the weight of what he witnessed and did, regardless of intent. He moves through his Hamptons house like a ghost, bags heavy under his eyes. In a television landscape rife with true crime and routine cases, it’s rare to see a representation of someone grappling with their role in an accidental death. When Hilaria, her voice thick with tears, details that Alec told her he didn’t want to be alive anymore in the days following the shooting, her pain feels as raw as it did three years ago.
Beyond the heady emotional appeals from Hilaria and Alec, there’s the clear conversation around the looming trial in New Mexico. The trial occurred in July 2024 and found Alec acquitted, but in the show’s timeline, we are still in the weeks leading up to his court dates, and the framing of the episodes treats this obligation like a monster hiding in the closet. “Alec’s trial in New Mexico is coming up,” Hilaria explains, “and that’s a scary thing to go through when you have seven kids right behind you that you’re supposed to be maneuvering.” She’s not wrong — but Hilaria continues to weaponize the family as a reason against his sitting trial, that a father of so many children can’t be taken away from them, regardless of the circumstances. It’s true that Alec did not know what his fate might be at the time of filming, but too many confessionals and staged conversations exploit and overwhelm the viewer with his family’s belief that the court is treating him unjustly. In a to-camera confessional, Hilaria tells a story about their eldest daughter, Carmen, 11, asking about her father’s forthcoming departure. “She said, ‘When Daddy goes to New Mexico, do I have to say good-bye to him? Do I have to say good-bye to him for a long time? Should I say good-bye to him in a special way because I might not see him for a long time? Because they’re trying to take my daddy away from me?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, you should,’” Hilaria explains.
The Baldwins is torn between the fact that Alec and his family are not the people who suffered most in the Rust tragedy and that, for the record, they did suffer a lot. That suffering is clear and apparent even without Hilaria explaining to the camera that their daughter is afraid “they” will take her father away. Who is “they”? How have they communicated what is happening to these children? For all that The Baldwins claims to be family focused, we see Alec and Hilaria in only two modes: lightly scolding their myriad children for age-appropriate misbehavior, or enjoying a nice outing or day at home while constantly reminding everyone of the circumstances of that enjoyment. It almost seems as though any genuine pleasure this family has is meant to be taken as direct perseverance of the injustice they’ve suffered, rather than, say, family bonding.
The nature of Hilaria and Alec’s discussions on their children’s scant understanding of the shooting suggests a much more cut-and-dried situation. That’s fine to explain to children but much worse to feed to the presumably adult audience watching this show. The confessionals or staged adult conversations in which the Baldwins remind the viewer of all they’ve endured undercut the scope of what went awry on the Rust set and take up far too much oxygen on a show in which the subjects try to argue they are not facing the worst of it. They do acknowledge, quite directly, that they are not the real victims. But the Baldwins have a show through which to argue all this; Halyna Hutchins’s family does not. There is a tactlessness to the repeated abject misery the Baldwins face, not simply in the show’s footage but in their own narration of the events we see. Their lives are hard through circumstances mostly out of their control, but their continued implication of the viewer makes sitting through the episodes a real test of endurance. It’s one thing to suffer, and it’s quite another to make it worse.
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