Mysteriously Absent from Alec Baldwin's New Reality Show: His Masshole Wife's Fake Spanish Accent

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In case you missed it, Chris Klemmer had a terrific post about Alec Baldwin's new reality show that could not have been more accurate:

So while I'm not disagreeing with Chris at all, I will point out that Baldwin is, if nothing else, a performer. A natural born actor. Whether it's at his own trial for Manslaughter:

… to parading his wife and children around in front of TV cameras to expose to all the world what once was, a long time ago in a different reality, referred to as "a personal life." You can no more ask an actor of his caliber not to perform for the public any more than you can ask a shark not to swim. And a shark's swimming results in only a slightly higher death toll than Baldwin's acting. 

So it's to be expected he'd jump from from the dismissal of his charges right to television. It's like one of the greatest speeches ever given by the longest-running character he ever portrayed, the great Jack Donaghy.

In a Season 5 30 Rock, the Tracy Morgan character was angry because he'd just completed his EGOT by winning a Best Actor Oscar for the movie Hard to Watch. His problem was that everyone respected him and was taking him seriously for the first time. Making it impossible for him to be the ridiculous, over-the-top, buffoonish manchild he wanted to be. So Jack gave him this suggestion to solve all his problems:

Do TV. No one will ever take you seriously again. Doesn't matter how big a movie star you are, even if you have the kind of career where you walked away from a blockbuster franchise or worked with Meryl Streep or Anthony Hopkins, made important movies about things like civil rights or Pearl Harbor, stole films with supporting roles and then turned around and blew them away on Broadway. None of that will matter once you do television.

Now Baldwin is simply taking Donaghy's advice. Which is how we end up with this:

Which brings us to the major issue with The Baldwins. Hilaria, born and raised in Boston, has completely ditched her Spanish accent for this show. The one that made her famous:

And to be clear, this phony affectation isn't something she got rid of the moment she got hilariously shamed for it four years ago. On the contrary. It made a triumphant return just a few weeks ago:

But for the new show, it's gone. Like Andy Dufresne, it's vanished like a fart in the wind. Amazing. 

Speaking personally, I think this is the right move for Hilaria. This proves that much like her older and even crazier husband, she's got good acting instincts. If I were a TV executive giving her notes, I'd suggest the Housewife Hilaria character works much better with her vaguely perceptible Boston accent. That Spanish Hilaria is fine for a quick cooking demonstration, but that's a hard role to stay in. 

To pull off Iberian Peninsula-accented Hilaria over the entire series run would take a total commitment. She'd have to go Full Method. Like Daniel Day-Lewis staying in character the whole time he was filming Lincoln, making Steven Spielberg call him "Mr. President" while he was on the set. That's a tough trick to pull off anywhere, especially in your own home, running around being a mother to your kids for the entertainment of the general public. If she tried to stay in her Fake Spanish Hilaria character, the first time she stepped on a Lego, the Masshole Mom in her would come out and break the audience's suspension of disbelief. 

Now it's up to the producers to give this show's minuscule audience what they're tuning in for. They need to find a way to get Hilaria to say "cucumber" and "onion" without any effort whatsoever. And demonstrate once and for all that the least genuine, authentic thing in the world is what we ironically call Reality TV.