It’s pathological how hypocrite Alec Baldwin — the ultimate ‘leave me alone’ star —?shamelessly puts his private life on public display
Winston Churchill is credited with saying, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Unless you’re Alec Baldwin — then, apparently, make a reality show.
“The Baldwins,” now airing on TLC, is sold as a fluffy peek into the chaos that ensues when a Hollywood star and his much younger wife have seven “Baldwinitos” under the age of 11. (The devoted family man keeps saying on the show he has seven kids when, in fact, he has eight including daughter Ireland, 29, with first wife Kim Basinger. But who’s counting!)
But it’s also cheap and exploitative: a terribly bad idea obviously cooked up to engender sympathy toward Alec as he faced a criminal trial for involuntary manslaughter in the 2021 accidental shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, the mother of a young boy, on the set of his movie “Rust.”
One minute the actor is taking his adorable kids for haircuts and explaining their unique little personalities. The next, he and his fake-Spanish wife, Hilaria, are in confessional-style interviews talking about the toll this ordeal has taken on poor Alec’s health as he battles PTSD and survivor’s guilt.
In the third episode, Alec and Hilaria are shown returning from the dismissed trial and home to their brood, who stayed behind in the family’s sprawling Hamptons estate.
“Halyna didn’t get to go home. And that’s what makes everything so painful,” Hilaria says of the deceased, without a scintilla of self-awareness.
I’ll let lawyer Gloria Allred, who represents Hutchins’ mother and sister, take this one:
“The Baldwin reality show at once celebrates Mr Baldwin’s joy of being with his children while ignoring the fact that Alec Baldwin took a child away from her parents.”
Whatever goodwill Alec might have had is squandered by the tone-deaf decision to let cameras into his home so that he and his wife can whinge about their pain.
The best course of action would have been to shut up and let the tragedy pass and the wounds heal — in private.
But of course, we’re talking about the paparazzi-boxing man Page Six once dubbed “The Bloviator.”
In 2014, Alec wrote a 5,000-plus-word essay in New York Magazine bidding adieu to public life. “This is the last time I’m going to talk about my personal life in an American publication ever again,” he assured.
After the tragic shooting of Hutchins, he was caught on camera at the Santa Fe, NM, sheriff’s office whining, ‘I don’t want to be a public person.”
In the reality show, he declares: “The stress and pressure of public life” is “not good” for him at his age.
So ?hola! TLC viewers and welcome to Casa Baldwin — the one place that could actually be a sanctuary for the irascible actor, if he actually wanted to get away from cameras.
But Alec wants to escape fame about as much as he wants to escape Manhattan. “I just can’t live in New York anymore,” he wrote in NY Mag in 2014. (Guess where the show is filmed?)
When the couple is not discussing their own trauma, the series explores their “love story” and 26-year age gap.
Baldwin paints Hilaria, raised by Yankees in the tony Boston neighborhood of Beacon Hill, as a flexible Cinderella who was teaching yoga and “mopping” floors when he met her.
“And she was happy. I sucked her into this disgusting world,” he said.
Yes, of course, he made her be an “Extra” correspondent and appear on the “Today: show.
I was hoping the show would explain Hilaria’s fake Spanish accent, which she uses shamelessly and arbitrarily. But we get no more than a few random onscreen tweets about it.
During one conversation, her husband tells her to hit the brakes.
“You’re speaking English in a Spanish cadence which is always perilous for me. Slow down, I can’t understand you,” he says.
They should have shown 2013 footage of Baldwin telling David Letterman, “My wife is from Spain,” and asked him to explain that.
Instead, Hilaria continues by being vague as always, saying that she was raised bilingual.
“I love English and I also love Spanish, and when I mix the two, it doesn’t make me inauthentic,” she says, adding some gobbledygook about her community “who speak multiple languages and who have belonging in multiple places.”
I come from a bilingual family and grew up among many other Americans who do as well, and I still do not understand why she speaks English with an accent.
But this show does offer one point of clarity.
These two narcissists are a perfect match.
