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Alec and Hilaria Baldwin are no strangers to the camera. This time, they’re turning it on themselves – or rather, TLC is – with a new reality show The Baldwins, starring the controversial couple and their seven children.
The series, which premieres Sunday, introduced the family while the kids played and left toys strewn about the floor.
“This apartment is like a toy store now,” Alec remarked as he cleaned.
But the pilot episode also hints at some messes in the Baldwin family that can’t be as easily tidied. The show comes on the heels of turbulent times for Alec, who filed a lawsuit against New Mexico prosecutors, alleging that they violated his rights and defamed him by mishandling the “Rust” case. Meanwhile, critics still aren’t convinced that Hilaria’s Spanish accent is real. The Baldwins promises to take viewers behind the scenes with the family: “the good, bad, wild, and everything in between,” Alec and Hilaria said.
Who are the Baldwins of ‘The Baldwins?’
Alec, an Emmy-winning actor known for his impressions of President Donald Trump on “Saturday Night Live” and his role as Jack Donaghy in “30 Rock,” and Hilaria, a yoga instructor and entrepreneur, met at a New York restaurant in 2011 and started dating shortly after. They moved into their Manhattan apartment later that year, and got married the following year.
In the show, the couple does defend their roughly 26-year age gap.
“People think that I married you for money, fame, glamour, all of these things,” Hilaria, 41, said. ” … I get to see the Alec who’s really fantastic. He’s funny, he’s kind, he’s handsome, he’s extraordinarily smart, and he’s so generous.”
“I fell in love with my wife because she’s so special. I never met anybody like this before,” Alec, 66, said.
And they have how many children?
The first episode of The Baldwins covers their love story and spends a considerable amount of time addressing the public controversies about the family, including its large size.
Alec said he and Hilaria never planned to have so many kids, but he’s fallen in love with each of his children. Hilaria said it was a “curious choice” Alec made to parent seven kids and eight pets while having obsessive-compulsive disorder, a diagnosis he revealed in 2021.
The “Baldwins” pilot doesn’t overtly mention that Alec has a total of eight kids when including Ireland Baldwin, his daughter from his first marriage to actress Kim Basinger. In 2007, Alec had made headlines amid his custody battle, after he called his tween a “rude, thoughtless little pig” in a leaked voicemail published by TMZ. (Shortly after, he apologized for losing his temper, adding that had been “driven to the edge by parental alienation.” Ireland has since referenced the infamous recording in recent years, including in a Comedy Central roast.)
What happened with Hilaria, again?
The series premiere also touched on the 2020 backlash surrounding Hilaria’s fluctuating Spanish accent. Internet critics accused her of faking her accent and masquerading as a Spanish woman after videos resurfaced of her inconsistent speech patterns and webpages incorrectly identified her as Spanish. In one of the more viral videos, she appeared to forget the English word for cucumbers while presenting a gazpacho recipe on the “Today” show. She blamed it on a “brain fart.”
Hilaria, who was born in Boston as Hillary but spent some of her childhood in Spain, said she grew up in a bilingual household and wants to raise her kids to have pride in being bilingual too.
Amid criticism that she’s committed to a “decade long grift,” Hilaria has continued to make headlines. In December, a video surfaced in tabloids of her appearing to forget the English word “onions” while she cooked a Spanish dish.
Does she address her accent on the show?
Yes, she continues to defend herself in the premiere episode.
“I love English. I also love Spanish. And when I mix the two, it doesn’t make me inauthentic. When I mix the two, that makes me normal,” she said in the show. ” … It was my family, my friends, my community who speak multiple languages, who have belonging in multiple places, and realize that we are a mix of all these different things, and that’s going to have an impact on how we sound and an impact on how we articulate things and the words that we choose and our mannerisms. That’s normal. That’s called being human.”
She also continued to use her accent in the pilot – sort of. She mostly spoke with an American accent, but occasionally a Spanish accent poked through and she peppered in a few Spanish phrases to her kids.
As Hilaria began to ramble on about her prenup with Alec in the episode, her husband told her, “Let’s talk slower. You’re speaking English in a Spanish cadence, which is always perilous for me.”
How does the show address the ‘Rust’ shooting?
Throughout the pilot, the parents also discussed the struggle of protecting their kids’ innocence while preparing for Alec’s trial, stemming from a shooting incident that occurred on the set of the low-budget western movie “Rust” in 2021.
“Our older ones were much younger, but have had the awareness, because of their age, to be able to understand what’s going on. The youngest three don’t know a life without this,” Hilaria said. “We’re going through some very stressful things and we’re trying to parent through it.”
“Our lives are very, very different. Our children have been forced to recognize that,” Alec said. “They’ve been forced to deal with that, with us, in their own way.”
How did the ‘Rust’ trial end?
Alec had been charged with involuntary manslaughter after a prop gun he was rehearsing with discharged a live bullet, killing the movie’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and wounding its director, Joel Souza. Spoiler alert: A judge dismissed the case in July after finding that prosecutors intentionally withheld information from the defence team.
The abrupt end to Alec’s case, which the judge ruled could not be retried, marked the closure of an investigation marred by errors. The actor was initially charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter in 2023. However, Alec’s charges were later downgraded because they included a firearm enhancement law that was passed months after the shooting. Prosecutors then dropped his charges in April 2023, before he was charged once again in January 2024. Following the trial, Morrissey filed – but later withdrew – an appeal to the decision in December.