In the Premiere of ‘The Baldwins,’ Alec Plays Nice and Hilaria Speaks Perfect English

Let’s get to the most important information first. Yes, in the first episode of the new TLC reality series The Baldwins (premiering February 23), Hilaria Baldwin does address the Spanish-accent thing. After we see screenshots of tweets mocking the Massachusetts-born yoga influencer’s many years of speaking with a Spanish accent and claiming Spanish origin, Hilaria blithely explains that Spanish has been a part of her life for a long time and her parents moved to Spain at some point. The show does not press her on why, during a Today show appearance, Hilaria acted as if she did not know the English word for cucumber. The producers of the series have to address controversy, but they allow their subjects to frame it in dismissive, even flattering terms.

That means that Hilaria and her husband, the actor Alec Baldwin, also talk about—at much greater length than the Spanish stuff—the 2021 accidental death on the set of Alec’s movie Rust. Alec was the one who was holding the prop gun that fired the shot that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, and at the start of The Baldwins, Alec is awaiting an involuntary manslaughter trial in New Mexico. (The charge was later dismissed.) This show could not exist without at least some discussion of the tragedy, and so the premiere episode occasionally pauses for moments of solemnity and ruefulness before returning, suddenly sunny again, to what seemingly will be the main focus of the series.

The Baldwins is essentially a tweak on TLC’s onetime juggernaut series Jon & Kate Plus 8, which began as an amiable show about a regular couple raising their eight rambunctious children. The series did, as is the entropy of most reality TV, eventually descend into darkness: The marriage fractured amid the pressures of fame; there was a bitter divorce. But it started off kind of cute. The Baldwins hope we find them cute too and work hard to endear us to their seven kids (who are indeed a winsome lot) and the quirks of their marriage. They are nearly 26 years apart in age, which isn’t that remarkable in terms of showbiz romance, though the sight of a 66-year-old Alec surrounded by screaming toddlers does throw the family’s circumstances into curious, though not quite troubling, relief.

I have an old dad; he was 49 when I was born and is 20 years older than my mom. So I am sensitive to knee-jerk criticisms of relationship age gaps and older parenting. There is nuance there; it’s not always some predatory, ruinous arrangement. From what the first episode shows us, the kids seem happy and well looked after.

Where The Baldwins starts to curdle is in its examination of Hilaria and Alec’s specific union—its compromises and inequities and, at least for the sake of these cameras, discomfiting performativeness. Baldwin does his best to be the affably bewildered dad, at one point even turning directly to the camera and giving a look that says, What have I gotten myself into?—but he means to look charming, not alarmed. He is a good actor, so he mostly sells it.

Baldwin has had a contentious relationship with invasive camera attention in the past, finding himself in more than one altercation with paparazzi. It’s ironic, then, to see him now welcoming cameras into his home. One immediately starts questioning his motives. He does seem awfully tired, and there are a few moments in the premiere episode in which a flash of desperation or sadness streaks across his face. But we can probably chock at least some of that up to his worry about the upcoming trial, as well as his grief over what happened on the set of Rust.

Hilaria tries for kooky, but also polished, candidness and proves a less successful spokesperson for the Baldwin brand. This show provides likely the most time any viewer has spent with Hilaria—who now speaks in a high-pitched, American-reality-TV accent—and, unfortunately, she’s not terribly good company. Whereas Alec can rely on a charisma honed over decades of hosting work—from SNL to public radio to the Oscars—Hilaria is mostly experienced in quick TV hits and social media videos. (And, of course, yoga classes.) She can’t quite achieve whatever the reality-show equivalent of finding your light is. Hilaria comes across as both overly eager to ingratiate herself and all too determined to make us envious of her monied existence.

Wealth is mentioned more frankly on The Baldwins than expected. Hilaria refers to Alec as rich, and the couple is not coy about the lovely sprawl of their East Hampton estate. Their home decor, in both Manhattan and the Hamptons, is luxe but tasteful, their cars appropriately gleaming high-end SUVs. One facet of their wealth, though, is only briefly gestured toward: the matter of childcare. Any assistance the couple gets from nannies is pretty underplayed in the premiere. That seems like an awfully big elision to make on a show ostensibly about the happy chaos of raising a large family. I’ll give the Baldwins the benefit of the doubt and assume that the help will be acknowledged more in future episodes. But if the pretense that they’re doing this mostly on their own persists, The Baldwins will have a serious problem at its center.

And, of course, there is the still-lingering absurdity of Hilaria’s Spanish situation, one of the funnier and stranger celebrity scandals (if you can call it that) in recent memory. That, maybe, is the true desperation of the series, watching these two people so strenuously try to keep unseemly or embarrassing things off camera. One feels a little queasy watching the premiere. That said, once it was done, my viewing companion turned to me and said, “Well, I’ll be watching every episode of that.” Maybe that’s the only review you need.