The Baldwins Almost Succeeded
At the conclusion of the eight-episode season of The Baldwins, the mind turns to contemplate what it just experienced. It is challenging — not because there’s nothing to reflect on, but because watching the full season of The Baldwins feels like entering a Hamptons-themed pinball machine. You zoom quickly over the bridge from Manhattan and bounce wildly back and forth between beach walks, kids hurling themselves into a sparkling blue pool, shots of Alec shoveling horse manure, and Hilaria and Alec’s couples-therapy sessions. You start spiraling downward as the series continually reminds viewers that Alec was on trial for the accidental shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, only to be flipped ecstatically back up toward the lights-and-distractions zone of dog-pee mishaps and a lovely little lunch with Caroline Rhea.
It’s worth taking a few moments to consider what this season was: its contradictions, its successes, and the moments that made you say, “Wait, wait just a minute: Hilaria bought a dog and tried to hide it from Alec by locking it in her bathroom for two days?”
It is a nearly persuasive piece of crisis-management PR.
The entire series is very nakedly designed to help Alec’s career spring back from his involvement in the horrible death on the set of his movie Rust. The Baldwins are victims here too, the show argues. They have been through something terrible. It has upset Alec Baldwin so much that he may never act again. He has this endearing family with seven kids and a kooky wife and a number of pets none of them seems quite capable of counting. And they are all charming! The kids wail and giggle and leave their toys everywhere, and Hilaria takes a deep breath while struggling to load them all into the car. Hilaria and Alec have tedious arguments about how big a new rug should be. Their deep anxiety about the Rust situation seems sincere. It’s astonishingly easy, at times, to watch The Baldwins and think, Yeah, this poor family has been through it.
But you can never quite forget that the whole exercise was a wild miscalculation.
There are many different flavors, but the rhythm is the same. Just as The Baldwins exits a heartrending segment on how Alec’s OCD has spun out of control as he struggles to deal with the emotional aftermath of the Rust tragedy, the series swerves into some apparently adorable interlude that becomes a sudden shock back into the reality of how truly bizarre this show is.
L’Affaire de Rug, for instance, is a no-holds-barred back-and-forth battle that consumes the entire arc of an episode and features Hilaria’s love of online shopping, Alec’s insistence that they go to a physical carpet store, significant bickering about how exactly to measure the size of a rug, and, at last, Hilaria waiting until Alec has left the house so she and her friend can sneakily replace the old rug with what appears to be a Ruggable (or similar). Then there are the dog trainers who arrive to inform the Baldwins that, yes, dogs can be trained to not pee on rugs. (This is also when we learn about Hilaria’s short-lived attempt to re-create the plot of Beethoven.)
The Baldwins takes plenty of time to explore 11-year-old Carmen’s love of skin care, including rubbing coffee grounds onto her father’s face. There are lengthy sequences of Hilaria working out: doing yoga, running, lifting at the gym, wearing a bikini top while strolling. In brief moments, it’s so tempting to give in and enjoy The Baldwins as a lifestyle show, but because each new development is again bookmarked by the same still photo of a devastated Alec on the side of the road in New Mexico, there’s never any danger of settling into some numbed version of normal.
These two crazy kids do seem to love each other, though.
The course of true love never did run smooth, and based on the evidence of The Baldwins, it’s not hard to believe that the fairy tale of the not actually Spanish yoga instructor and the A-list actor with anger-management issues does, in fact, have a happily ever after. More than once, Hilaria throws out some little comment or jab that suggests she does really see him, as a father and a person. (It’s particularly apparent when she talks about their age difference or his desire to run away from the world when he gets scared.) Alec, for his part, is happy to regularly declare that Hilaria is smokin’ hot, especially in her beachy bikini top. And you know what? Mazel tov.
How are we feeling about actual kids on reality shows these days? Yeah, not great!
The many ebullient Baldwin children are very cute, very rambunctious, and very much not old enough to know the ramifications of becoming public figures before they’re old enough to drive — or to have footage of them weeping over their father’s potential imprisonment captured for worldwide viewing. Worse, even though Hilaria and Alec are portrayed as loving and indulgent parents, there’s no way around the underlying truth that their kids are being used as props in a public-relations battle to make sure the Rust shooting won’t become the defining event of Alec’s career.
Thank God for Baby Baldwin.
She is too young to be a real person, at least not in any way in which capturing her babyhood on TV will become mortifying later in life. The only words she speaks on this series are either profanities (“Bitch!” she exclaims from her carrier as Hilaria gasps in horror) or demands (“Watch Blippi”). And honestly, it’s unclear whether she physically exists on the same plane as the rest of the family. She shuffles through the show with the gait of a haunted doll. Carmen attempts to give her skin care, and she points at things imperiously before Carmen gives up. In the finale, when Alec asks where his other shoe is, he is informed that Baby has it. “So it’s in Cleveland,” he replies. The only person on The Baldwins who refers to Baby as anything other than “Baby” is Alec’s daughter Ireland, who clearly does so because she has never spent any time with Baby.
All the pets are cursed.
The tiny, fluffy dogs who pee on the rugs and skitter around anxiously. The Bengal-patterned cats who lurk on the windowsills and stare. The Baldwins keeps aiming for fun, messy family life, but every time a pet appears onscreen it lurches into horror-movie territory.
The Baldwins’ happy ending tells on itself.
By the end, The Baldwins is drifting toward a sense of conclusion. The trial is over. The kids are going back to school. The family is settling back into a normal rhythm. Yet the show cannot help but point out that all of Alec’s threats of retirement have been proved false. He’s been offered a few movies, Hilaria points out happily. (His IMDb page currently lists five projects in production or preproduction.) He’s about to do SNL again. And she, Hilaria, is working on a book! The series writes its own accomplishments into the ending long before the series even airs. His career has been restored, and hers is being further burnished by the increased public profile. Despite whatever else the show may be trying to accomplish, and despite the Baldwins’ (no doubt honest!) insistence that all they care about is family, the ending emphasizes that the most important thing is getting Alec back to work. Eight episodes of The Baldwins exist, so: mission accomplished.
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