XPost: alt.politics.republicans, sac.politics, talk.politics.guns   
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   From: noreply@dirge.harmsk.com   
      
   After accidentally killing someone on set, the actor could have   
   stepped out of the spotlight. Instead, he stars in a reality show   
   about the ordeal.   
      
   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.   
      
   ...   
      
   https://www.thefp.com/p/america-didnt-need-alec-baldwins-sob-story   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)