The Baldwins Isn’t Alec Baldwin’s Comeback—It’s Basically ‘The Comeback’

It’s difficult to explain exactly what TLC’s The Baldwins is. The whiplash-inducing reality show about Alec and Hilaria Baldwin and their seven-child brood alternates between a quirky comedy about a family bursting at the seams and a tragic true-crime documentary about the Rust shooting. But the most fascinating part of this strange program is watching Alec, an Emmy-winning actor, awkwardly try to adapt to the medium of reality television. It’s an environment with which he’s clearly uncomfortable and unfamiliar, feelings he channels into hammy outbursts and fourth-wall-breaking asides. His performance keeps reminding me of someone else: Valerie Cherish in The Comeback.

That series, which ran for two seasons on HBO (first in 2005 and then again in 2014), features Lisa Kudrow delivering one of television’s greatest performances. Shot as a mockumentary, it chronicles Kudrow’s Valerie, a former sitcom star, as she films a reality show about her return to acting. Coming from scripted television, Valerie is a fish out of water in this uncharted medium. She struggles with balancing what’s real with what’s fake—appearing authentic and open, while simultaneously pretending a camera crew isn’t following her.

Like Valerie, Alec is an actor who appears to be seeking redemption by turning to a foreign medium that he might have at one time considered beneath him. While Valerie often calls out for her producer “Jane,” it similarly takes Alec about a minute into his show’s first episode to look directly into the camera, as if pleading for help, and explicitly spell out why his five-bedroom apartment is too small for his big family. Valerie attempts to produce her show as she’s being filmed, constantly interjecting about what she thinks should be left on the cutting room floor. Likewise, as they shoot a close-up of him cleaning his garbage can, Alec tosses out a question to the crew: “You don’t really wanna film this, do you?” But when one of his sons says something Alec deems entertaining, he changes his tune: “That was worth the whole day [of filming]! Line of the day!” Alec can’t help but regularly point out the brushstrokes and the mechanics of the show his family is filming as they’re filming it.

Both of these characters, one fictional and one real (I’ll let you decide which is which), are so conditioned by years in show business that they are hyperaware the second a camera turns on. They’ve spent their careers constructing entertainment very consciously; the thought of doing so unintentionally or without effort must seem strange. To both, making good television has always been an active pursuit, not a passive one—hence their desire to ham it up and put on a show. Plus, both are playing the role of themselves—personas they’ve spent decades meticulously crafting and trying to control via media training, publicists, and carefully planned interviews.

Once the parallels between Alec and Valerie became clear, they were all I could see—and became increasingly uncanny. In one episode of The Baldwins, Alec invites the camera to focus on a framed photo so he can reminisce about his career highlights, very much like Valerie proudly showing off her People’s Choice Award and gallery wall of mementos. Alec has a photo of him on Letterman; Valerie has one of her on Leno. At one point, Alec randomly breaks into his Tony Bennett impression in front of an unimpressed Hilaria, a move similar to Valerie awkwardly slipping into her Woody Allen or Al Pacino. Both The Baldwins and The Comeback even feature their two leads going through the humiliating ritual of filming a project in a full-body motion capture suit.

They also both feature conflict-ridden marriages. In The Comeback, Valerie’s relationship with her husband Mark falters as she prioritizes her career and reality show. Alec and Hilaria’s constant bickering, however, doesn’t seem to stem from the camera crew’s presence; their Phantom Thread–esque relationship, in which she forces him to drive to the Hamptons in a car full of cats after he explains he’s terribly allergic to them, just seems to be their norm. And if anything, Hilaria is the one who appears more comfortable and better suited for reality TV.

Though the show doesn’t address this head-on, it seems fair to assume Alec and Hilaria didn’t sign up for a TLC reality show for the love of the game. Instead, we get the sense the family was worried about the result of Alec’s trial and may have chosen to make the show so Hilaria could have another revenue stream if necessary. At the grand opening of a new Planet Hollywood in New York earlier this month, the couple even hinted at the prospect of Hilaria continuing this pursuit solo: a potential second season could be just The Hilaria Show, Alec said. But if that’s the case, she should have just joined the Real Housewives of New York (as Valerie Cherish once attempted to do with the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills)—which would be more interesting than watching her take what feels like dozens of children to get their summer haircuts.

Moments like these make The Baldwins feel like a typical TLC show about any random family with lots of children. But then when the patriarch shows the kids how to pose, saying, “Marci Klein taught me this,” we’re reminded that he’s Alec Baldwin. Moreover, unlike Valerie Cherish—unless Kudrow surprises us with a third season—he was on trial for involuntary manslaughter.

It’s a bizarre juxtaposition, resulting in a program that’s trying to be too many different shows at once and only some of them are compelling. But more than anything, The Baldwins proves how brilliantly prescient Kudrow’s performance was as Valerie. Even 20 years ago, she was able to accurately portray, beat for beat, what an actor such as Alec Baldwin pivoting to reality television might look like: watching someone acutely aware they’re being perceived, but completely unaware they can’t control that perception—no matter how hard they try.