Reality television producers had been circling Alec and Hilaria Baldwin for years. His Hollywood fame and history of public combustibility, her social media following and their many children and pets were all classic ingredients for a slice-of-life series.
Last year, the couple decided to let the cameras in.
They did so at perhaps the most precarious time of Alec Baldwin’s life: the month before he was scheduled to stand trial in New Mexico on an involuntary manslaughter charge, in connection with the fatal shooting of a cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, on the set of the movie “Rust” in 2021. The result is a fly-on-the-wall series called “The Baldwins,” which premieres Sunday on TLC, a network whose marquee titles include “90 Day Fiancé” and “Sister Wives.”
The first episode of the show has landed a bit uneasily with critics, who view the show as something of a crisis communications project. Here are six takeaways from the episode.
The premiere begins just ahead of Alec Baldwin’s manslaughter trial.
The filming started in June last year, just before Baldwin was scheduled to stand trial in New Mexico. In the first episode, the couple drives their seven children (and six of their eight dogs and cats) from their home in New York City to their home in the Hamptons, where they often spend the summer.
The decision to start filming was a risk. In the event that he had been convicted, Baldwin, who was handling a revolver on set when it discharged a live bullet, would have faced a potential maximum prison sentence of 18 months.
Instead, the trial ended early with an unquestionable victory for him and his legal team. A judge dismissed the case after finding that the state’s actions with regard to certain evidence amounted to prosecutorial misconduct. Baldwin, 66, who has long denied responsibility for the shooting, is now suing the prosecutors who handled his case, as he still faces several lawsuits.
But when the cameras started rolling, the outcome was in doubt. “I have one overriding thought, I have one overriding concern — and that is letting seven children know that I love them,” Alec Baldwin says in the episode before acknowledging, “I’m worried.”
The reality show’s producers faced a delicate task.
For the producers of the reality show, there was the delicate task of making a show that balanced two imperatives. First, it had to align with the kind of light, unscripted fare about family and marriage that usually airs on TLC; at the same time, it had to address a tragedy that is still being litigated in the civil court system.
“We weren’t there to talk about what was happening legally,” said David Metzler, an executive producer of the show who has been involved with reality series like “Queer Eye” and “Catfish: The TV Show.” “We were there to see how Alec and Hilaria were parenting through a very difficult time in their life, and to see how their relationship was affected and to see how they were working as a family to get through it,” he continued. “We dealt with the emotional side — we didn’t deal with the legal side.”
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