The Free Press
You might know Alec Baldwin as the sexy star of The Hunt for Red October. Or you might know him as the actor who beat involuntary manslaughter charges after he accidentally shot and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins while filming a Western in 2021.
You might know Alec’s wife, Hilaria Baldwin, from her bizarre cancellation the same year, after a Twitter user revealed she had been pretending, for years, to be Spanish, for unknown and perhaps unimaginable reasons.
And you might think, given their recent escapades—her identity hoax, his near-imprisonment—that the Baldwins would avoid the spotlight these days. It’s not like they don’t have enough to do (the couple have seven children, six under the age of 10), or enough room to do it in (they own three homes, including a New York City penthouse and a 10-acre estate in the Hamptons). And after what they’ve been through, self-inflicted or not, surely they could both use a rest.
But no. There will be no rest, no relaxation, no quiet fadeaway into moneyed obscurity while the dust of their scandals settles and the world forgets their names.
Instead, there will be a reality show.
The new series, aptly titled The Baldwins, follows the Baldwin family—all nine of them—during the period in 2024 when Alec was still set to stand trial for involuntary manslaughter, interposing scenes of chaotic, kids-everywhere family life with the torments of the actor’s legal ordeal. The pilot episode debuted late just over a week ago on TLC to universally negative reviews. Critics declared the show “distasteful,” “grimmer than you imagined,” and “a new low for TV”—which is quite the statement considering that TV has previously played host to 27 years of The Jerry Springer Show, 16 seasons of Hoarders, and the short-lived 2005 series Sperm Race, in which (and I swear I am not making this up) a group of German men competed to see who could fertilize an egg the fastest.
And yet, the critics have a point. It’s one thing to gawk at a spectacle like Love Island or The Bachelor or even My 600-lb Life, where the participants have willingly traded their privacy in exchange for a shot at love, or fame, or expert medical care that would otherwise be out of reach. It’s quite another to watch Alec Baldwin, a genuinely gifted actor, stumbling desperately through a painfully contrived exercise in reputation management that doesn’t come naturally to him—and which is, lest we forget, only necessary because he (accidentally) killed someone.
As for how this travesty happened, my guess is that Hilaria had something—or everything—to do with it. The world of reality television is far more her wheelhouse than his: Early in their marriage, she was an occasional lifestyle correspondent on Extra. And a show like this is a savvy venue for rehabilitating her own slightly tarnished image by extension, in that she can cast herself as a stabilizing influence and confidant for her troubled, talented husband, without the embarrassment of having to explicitly revisit such ludicrous incidents as the time she pretended, on live television, not to know the English word for cucumber.
But will it work? The world has never been especially kind to celebrities attempting a comeback after a career-derailing scandal, even the ones who, like Alec Baldwin, have committed no crime. This phenomenon can be traced as far back as the 1920s, when comedian Fatty Arbuckle was charged with the murder, later reduced to manslaughter, of Virginia Rappe, a 30-year-old model who fell ill while attending a party in a hotel suite and died of a ruptured bladder. It is still not known exactly why she died, but rumors quickly began to swirl that Arbuckle had crushed Rappe to death while attempting to rape her. Arbuckle was legally exonerated after standing trial three times. What happened in the court of public opinion was a different story: He was banned from the film industry for months, and died a decade later still trying to revive his career.
The professional cost of controversy became less steep in the decades after Arbuckle’s death, but the expectation remained generally consistent that actors who found themselves at the center of scandals, and especially of homicides, should step back from celebrity life. Matthew Broderick’s career was never the same after he crashed a car in 1987, killing two people; Rebecca Gayheart hit and killed a 9-year-old boy with her car in 2001, then virtually disappeared from Hollywood, and didn’t speak about the incident for nearly two decades. Michael Massee, who fired the faulty prop gun that killed actor Brandon Lee on the set of The Crow in 1993, took a year off from acting after the accident and in 2005 told an interviewer he expected to struggle with the guilt for the rest of his life: “I don’t think you ever get over something like that.”
Even those guilty of less serious offenses—the addicts, the thieves, and other various and sundry bad boys—often retreated from the public eye for years before making a tentative return to Hollywood. Winona Ryder was convicted of shoplifting in 2001 and didn’t return to mainstream cinema until 2009 with a bit part in Star Trek, in which she was on-screen for about five minutes.
Now contrast this careful, strategic brand of reputation management—a calculated fade from view, an artful and tasteful reappearance only when the time is right—with The Baldwins, a show made for the era in which the easiest path to public sympathy is letting people watch you ugly cry on TikTok.
As such, we cannot really blame the Baldwins for The Baldwins, which if nothing else is a product of its time. Signaling shame for one’s misdeeds, and respect for those affected, through the social ritual of stepping away and shutting up, is out of vogue in the social media era. In place of such quaint notions as privacy and dignity, we have a new expectation: that whatever you’re going through, or whatever you’ve done, you will post through it.
This is the era of showing, not telling, and the show must go on.
I say all this as someone who thought the prosecution of Alec Baldwin by Santa Fe authorities was overzealous, and clearly fueled by personal animus on the part of an ambitious DA who wanted to make an example of him. It is right and good that he has his freedom; it would also be right and good for him to return to acting, if he wants to.
But there’s a difference between playing a role in a fictional movie, and playing yourself—as the victim, no less—in a tragedy ripped from real life. And if Baldwin’s atonement for the accidental death of Halyna Hutchins need not be performed in prison, perhaps it would also, still, be better left untelevised.
The great Dolly Parton, perhaps America’s last universally beloved public figure, lost her husband Carl Dean this week. If you hadn’t heard of Dean, don’t worry—neither has anyone else. To read about how he hid from the spotlight, read Batya Ungar-Sargon’s piece, “Dolly Parton’s Disappearing Husband.”