The Baldwins (Discovery +)
RATING: ONE STAR
Childcare manuals don’t often spell out the surest ways to ensure small children grow up neurotic. But now we’ve got actor Alec Baldwin and his wife Hilaria to show us how it’s done.
The Baldwins, a so-called reality show launching today on the Discovery+ channel, supplies textbook guidance for raising a pack of undisciplined tearaways. The only thing to be said in defence of the seven children, aged two to ten, is that their parents are even more appalling.
Previously married to Kim Basinger, Alec has confessed to using cocaine heavily in the early 1980s. ‘I had a white-hot problem,’ he said last year. ‘I think I snorted a line of cocaine from here to Saturn.’
But he promises he’s been sober since 1985. I’m glad he told us because I’d hate to misjudge him on his looks alone: he has the cracked skin and glazed eyes of a bottle-of-whisky-a-day man.
He also claims to have post- traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, though he dresses like a slob in a baggy, stained sweatshirt. Oh, and he’s allergic to cats, he says, even though they’ve got four.
His wife is 26 years his junior, though you might guess it was more. She dresses like a teenager in crop tops and denim shorts. With her rigid smile and loving gazes at her husband, she has the air of a bargain-basement Meghan Markle.
Her great burden, she says, is that she’s bilingual but people online think she puts on a Spanish accent. This makes her ‘sad’ and sometimes puts her ‘in dark places’.
The first hour-long episode is filled almost entirely with footage of their children running riot. The camera returns repeatedly to their faces, making sure viewers can identify each of them by name.
Any prospect of a private childhood is gone for ever. All of them are now public property. That alone may guarantee problems ahead in adolescence.
As though their children won’t already be needing years of therapy, Alec and Hilaria discuss their personalities, giving each of them a label. One of them is a ‘horse’. Another is ‘a weird combination’ of both parents.
And of course, they get everything they want.’ These kids, they have nervous breakdowns if they don’t have the right backpack,’ Alec declares proudly. That’s not his responsibility, though, as he employs two nannies.
The Baldwin brood are not only spoilt rotten but encouraged to whinge, bicker, fight, sulk, and insult their parents.
Before a three-hour car journey from New York to their holiday house in the Hamptons, Hilaria draws endless seating plans so the children can argue about who sits where. Inevitably, the ones that don’t get exactly what they demand have meltdowns.
All this must be designed by the Baldwin PR machine as a deliberate distraction from the family’s real problem. Throughout filming, Alec was awaiting trial on charges of involuntary manslaughter, after shooting a woman dead on a movie set.
Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was fatally hit in the chest by a bullet from a prop gun, while filming a Western.
Baldwin insisted his finger never actually pulled the trigger and that he had no reason to imagine the gun was loaded. Charges were later dropped.
He’s careful to express no remorse on camera, though there’s a lot of self-pity: ‘This past year was just terrible. There was times I’d lay in bed and I’d go, “Wow! I can’t get up.” That’s not like me.’
If this series is meant to make us feel sympathy, it has done the reverse. Last week, Alec Baldwin was just a has-been actor to me. Now I know exactly who he and his wife are. What hideous people.
