Early on in “Mulholland Drive,” the late, great David Lynch’s 2001 surreal masterpiece of American aspiration and degeneration, the young innocent Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) arrives in Los Angeles from small-town Ontario to pursue her dream of becoming an actress. On her way to L.A., Betty befriends a sweet pair of senior citizens, whom she then parts with at the airport. “It’s time to say goodbye, Betty. It’s been so nice travelling with you,” the older woman says, her eyes twinkling kindly. “Remember, I’ll be watching for you on the big screen!” “O.K., Irene. Won’t that be the day!” Betty responds, hugging the woman and shaking the hand of the man, who heartily wishes her “all the luck in the world.” As Betty gets into a cab, the couple, too, enter a car to presumably make their way to the city. But when Lynch’s camera captures them in the vehicle’s back seat, the wholesome mood suddenly shifts. The pair’s smiles—seemingly so warm just moments prior—now appear painfully, alarmingly, pasted on, throwing their earlier sincerity into question. With their teeth bared in a frozen rictus grin, this couple appears to be hiding a darkness which we are left only to guess at.

I kept thinking about this scene as I watched “The Baldwins,” a new reality show on TLC featuring the onetime star of “30 Rock” and frequent “S.N.L.” host Alec Baldwin, his wife, Hilaria, a yoga teacher twenty-five years his junior, and their seven children, whose ages range from two to eleven years old. It’s not that “The Baldwins” could be called Lynchian, exactly—it’s a fairly conventional reality-TV program that hardly partakes in the wacky dream logic of “Mulholland Drive.” And yet the director’s highlighting of the menace and despair that lie behind the forced smiles of a bland, upbeat sociability—what David Foster Wallace called Lynch’s “weird irony of the banal”—put me in mind of the Baldwin clan’s show, which follows the family members as they attempt to get through an extended moment of crisis.

In 2021, while in New Mexico, on the set of the Western “Rust,” Alec Baldwin fired a prop gun that, unbeknownst to him, was loaded with a round of live ammunition. The bullet struck and killed the movie’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins—who left behind a husband and a young son—and Baldwin was later charged with involuntary manslaughter in a chain of events that was covered closely by the media. “The Baldwins” documents the family in the days before Alec’s trial, in the summer of 2024, and as the case is dismissed in a Santa Fe courtroom, after the prosecution withheld evidence. The focus of the show, however, is not the legal ins and outs of the proceedings, nor Hutchins’s tragic death, but the effect of these occurrences on the Baldwin family’s life, and, specifically, on the challenges that Alec and Hilaria face as they attempt to successfully parent their many children through the tumult. “When something bad happens,” Hilaria tells the camera, “and you have to look at the kids and you have to say, you know, ‘I’m gonna put a smile on my face, and we’re gonna fake it!’ ”

As a parent, it’s sometimes necessary to wear a mask of cheerfulness to protect one’s children not only from one’s own internal angst but also from harsh outside realities. But the odd and uncomfortable thing about “The Baldwins” is that the attitude Hilaria suggests as a mothering tactic appears to serve, too, as a way for the family to present itself on the show more generally, perhaps in an attempt at image rehabilitation in the wake of the “Rust” shooting. “I have to fill my children’s days with positive energy,” Hilaria says. “It doesn’t mean that we ignore bad things, but they have to see a smile on my face, they have to see me being kooky and silly.” “The Baldwins” treats the viewers as if they, too, were children. While purporting to pull back the curtain and reveal the real life that happens behind the scrim of scandal and celebrity—to find out, in Hilaria’s words, “where do you go from a tragedy”—the show ends up mostly pasting on a frozen rictus grin, whose dark underside we catch only glimpses of.

Even before the trial, the Baldwins were no strangers to negative media attention. When he met Hilaria, “she had what she had, and she was happy,” Alec says, of his wife’s simpler pre-fame life. “Then I sucked her into this filthy, disgusting world I’m in.” One public furor that the family experienced had to do with the question of Hilaria’s Spanish heritage, which many believed her to claim, despite being born and raised partially in Boston under the name Hillary; her Spanish accent still emerges occasionally on the show. (“The Baldwins,” or, at least, the three episodes that have aired so far, deals with Spaniard-gate only briefly: “We are a mix of all these different things,” Hilaria says, vaguely, of her affinity for Picasso’s and Cervantes’s motherland, where, she explains, her nuclear family now resides. “That’s called being human.”) Alec, too, has received plenty of unwelcome media coverage for his propensity to get into public scuffles. “Can he be a curmudgeon? Absolutely,” Hilaria says, seemingly in tacit acknowledgment of her mate’s apparent hot temper. “But you know what? I get to see the Alec who’s really fantastic.” Indeed, the show leans heavily on the cutesy-poo dynamic of a quirky but canny wife who knows how to “handle” her crank of a husband. “I would say yes and then I would do whatever I wanted,” Hilaria says, of a strategy she’s used to deal with Alec.

In a way, “The Baldwins” is a throwback: as I watched, my mind turned to early- and mid-two-thousands reality shows such as “Newlyweds,” starring America’s then sweethearts Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey, or “The Osbournes,” featuring Ozzy Osbourne as a long-suffering paterfamilias driven to distraction by his wild teen kids and henpecking wife, or even “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” which followed a working-class Pennsylvania couple and their eight rambunctious children. Like these series, “The Baldwins” is an at least semi-staged chronicle of an eccentric but loving family unit going about its banal activities, garnished with plenty of manufactured high jinks and an insinuatingly merry soundtrack, which lands somewhere between the “Benny Hill Show” and “Pink Panther” themes. We follow the family to a barbershop, or as they bake a cake and make a mess of it, or as they take way too long to pile into two cars going to the Baldwin East Hamptons home for the summer. (Every once in a while, a silent nanny appears dartingly at the edge of the frame, strapping a child into a car seat or spraying another with sunscreen.) Even Alec’s anxiety, ramped up in the wake of the trial and taking the form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, is occasionally mined for lighter content, as he rearranges the family’s shoes, or stacks the children’s swim goggles in a tidy pile. (Becoming a father of seven kids is, Hilaria says, a “curious choice” her husband has made, considering his mental-health issues.)

All this forced cheer, however, grows like so much treacherous kudzu atop an essentially tragic structure. There is, of course, the awful fact of Hutchins’s death (which is acknowledged several times by both Baldwins). But, too, there is the second-order trauma and suffering experienced by the couple, and especially by Alec, after the shooting, pain that we catch occasional sight of, among the familial shenanigans. “There was times I’d lay in bed and I’d go, Wow, I can’t get up,” he tells the camera, looking like hell. There is undoubtedly something unseemly about making this show in the wake of Hutchins’s passing. And there is arguably something no less unseemly about making a show about yet-unresolved torment and grief that corrals one’s family into an extended act of performance. “The stress and the pressure of public life at my age, that’s not good for my mental health,” Alec tells a therapist whom he and Hilaria decide to see to learn “how to get the water to be calm.” The fact that the session is filmed for consumption by the very public Alec claims to want to avoid does seem at cross-purposes with his expressed desire. Nonetheless, the show must go on. At the very least, the production is a way for us to keep watching for the Baldwins, if not on the big screen, then on the small. ♦