The Only Baldwins Spinoff I’d Want to Watch
Amid vague and unpredictable societal collapse, there is one question that plagues the cultural landscape: Will The Baldwins return for a second season? The Discovery+ docuseries followed Alec and Hilaria Baldwin, to say nothing of their myriad children and animals, for a stressful summer during which the actor sat trial in New Mexico for the 2021 shooting of Halyna Hutchins on the Rust set and then returned to New York to reckon with his life ahead. This Sunday’s finale marks the end of a bizarre, depressing, and sometimes extremely funny show about a family like none other. Alec joked that in order to come back, his kids “want more money; they want a lot more money.” A second or third season seems like a nightmare for a family who has already put up with enough. Most of the children don’t appear to like being on-camera, and how often can we watch Alec and Hilaria discuss how to parent over brunch? A continuation feels inevitable, but The Baldwins should leave the Rust and family tragicomedy aside for a more pointed spinoff going forward. Only who should the show spin off?
The breakout star of the season is undeniably Alec and Hilaria’s youngest daughter, Ilaria, whom the family calls Baby. Baby is iconic: She is mostly bald, toddles around, and constantly gets things messy. She secretly runs the household. Adults and fellow children bow to her will as she stumbles from room to room with seemingly free range over their Hamptons estate. But Baby, sadly, cannot sustain a season of television. She cannot yet speak in articulate sentences, and though a silent, baby-focused reality show has a bizarre old-timey appeal, like a pre-WWII Disney short, that’s probably not what Discovery+ audiences are looking for.
The show could pivot to focus more directly on Hilaria and her yoga practice or even Hilaria and eldest daughter, Carmen, who are two peas in a pod. They riff and snap at each other with a charming mother-daughter rapport, the latter almost like a third adult in the house at age 11. These two could learn to cook, or do crafts, or teach skin-care basics — a regular Joan and Melissa Rivers for a new generation, taking swipes at Alec, celebrities, fashion, whatever.
But the most obvious and clear spinoff of The Baldwins is a show that already exists within the margins of the season that currently aired: the PBS-style show Alec threatens to launch into every time he starts thinking about the history of something. Several times throughout the series, Alec will start to delve into a tangent about, well, literally anything: the history of the Hamptons, the history of Long Island, the ocean, the Suffolk County water authority, old houses in their neighborhood. And any time Alec starts to go long on a topic he’s clearly passionate about, another one of his family members, often Hilaria but sometimes Carmen, will cut him off with a yawn or a scold or a noise. Alec is boring when he rambles about this stuff, The Baldwins argues. That’s the wrong instinct to follow. Rather than exploit the Baldwins’ menagerie of children for more television, the show should pivot to let Alec ramble about whatever topics he wants.
Outside of acting, this is where Alec shines: He’s a great WQXR host and, like all men of a certain age, he is happiest when he can just list things he knows or read facts aloud in real time. And because he’s Alec Baldwin, with his gravelly voice and wry charm, he can make something like the Suffolk County water authority sound compelling. It’s understandable that those anecdotes might not hit in a family where the median age is 8, sure. But if The Baldwins became Reading a Random Wikipedia Page With Alec or Alec Explains the Deal With the Hamptons, it would transform the whole affair from an exercise in lurid gawking to gentle education. There are more stories that sit at the heart of The Baldwins, if only the show gave Alec an opportunity to tell them, boring as they may be.
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