It’s a partially obscured ‘View’

Alec Baldwin’s appearance on “The View” on Friday began with the lie that the conversation was live.

It had been pre-taped Wednesday, with highlights popping up on the Internet and Barbara Walters going on “Good Morning America” to plug the exclusive.

“I want to make sure we get this because we’re a live show,” Walters said to Baldwin on fake Friday, trying to get the actor to talk about whether he was serious about quitting “30 Rock.” Why not reveal the interview was pre-taped? If this little detail was fibbed, what else couldn’t you trust?

Plenty. On the NBC sitcom he now says he wants to quit (abandoning his surrogate daughter, show creator and costar Tina Fey), Baldwin is brilliant as an unstable man with outsized power and a creepy gravitas.

He was almost equally brilliant, exuding the same qualities, on “The View.” It was less mea culpa than grand jury testimony. Baldwin, unshaven and flanked by Walters on one side and friend Rosie O’Donnell on the other, exuded a kind of post-traumatic stress, giving something between a prepared recitation on the dangers of getting divorced from ex-wife Kim Basinger and a tight account of the scourge of “parental alienation.” The implication: It’s what one parent (Basinger) does to another (Baldwin) to drive a wedge between him and their child.

That we were all gathered here because he had threatened to fly to L.A. and “straighten out” his 11-year-old daughter, Ireland, in the meantime calling her a “rude, thoughtless little pig,” became lost in the thicket of his overexplanation.

“You said it to your daughter, and you meant it for your ex-wife,” Walters said of the famous comments.

“Well, I think that goes without saying, quite frankly,” Baldwin said.

So he meant to threaten Basinger? If so, O’Donnell and Walters were effectively signing off on spousal abuse. On a show they do before the nation’s housewives.

“The View” had begun Friday with the co-hosts in empathetic conversation about Walters’ “20/20” piece on transgender children. Much of this maternal, feminine concern about kids seemed to wash away in the face of a charismatic leading man, whose tirade had inadvertently dragged his daughter into a shame-fueled blogosphere.

That Baldwin was stung by our new-fangled Internet paparazzi, his ex-wife maybe in collusion with the “gotcha” vultures, is a conversation, make no mistake. “You find out that everybody who works in tabloid media are people who are filled with self-hatred and shame, and the way that they manage those feelings, they destroy the lives of other people and reveal your secrets,” he said.

Shall we commission a study?

It’s Baldwin’s right, of course, to use this experience to weaken the chances for a great sitcom to survive in a desert of sitcoms. But his pronouncement that he wants to quit acting seems less a high-road decision than yet another projection of his anger-management issues onto the wrong people.

Neither Walters nor O’Donnell, with whom Baldwin seemed to have a particular simpatico, were going to press him, of course. They were there to be friends at a time of personal crisis -- advocates in a daytime-TV mutual support group.

“I love you, I do, and I think you’re a great guy,” O’Donnell said.

In the end, the elephant in the room was Baldwin’s temper, which has spilled into the press before, as when actress Jan Maxwell reportedly quit her role on Broadway’s “Entertaining Mr. Sloane” because she couldn’t deal with Baldwin’s behavior.

On Wednesday, not Friday, O’Donnell and Walters led this elephant onstage, sat there and stroked its trunk. There, there.

paul.brownfield@latimes.com