Keeping Up With the Kardashians to end next year after 20th season
Keeping Up With the Kardashians, the pop culture phenomenon that spearheaded the emergence of a new kind of global fame born of reality TV, will end after its 20th and final season next year, its first big breakout star Kim Kardashian West has announced.
“It is with heavy hearts that we’ve made the difficult decision as a family to say goodbye to Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” Kardashian wrote in an Instagram post.
The show, which premiered in 2007, was the launchpad for several family members’ fashion and beauty business empires. The youngest family member Kylie Jenner appeared on the Forbes billionaires list in March 2019 at the age of 21.
“We are beyond grateful to all of you who’ve watched us for all of these years – through the good times, the bad times, the happiness, the tears and the many relationships and children,” Kardashian West said.
The Kardashian name was not particularly well-known before the show’s debut season. Older viewers might have recalled that patriarch Robert Kardashian, who died in 2003, had been a member of OJ Simpson’s legal defence team in his highly publicised 1995 murder trial. And Kim, the eldest daughter, had been on TV in the early 2000s as a guest on hotel heiress
Paris Hilton’s reality show The Simple Life.
Keeping Up With the Kardashians was publicised as a fly-on-the-wall reality series following matriarch Kris Kardashian and her three daughters Kim, Kourtney and Khloé as they launched the clothing business D-A-SH in Calabasas, California. It followed in the footsteps of The Osbournes – which had chronicled the domestic life of the heavy metal singer Ozzy Osbourne
and his family since 2002. In 2006 the family matriarch Kris Jenner began shopping the idea of an unscripted show about her family.
Months before the show’s premiere, a leaked sex tape of Kim and her ex-boyfriend, singer Ray J, appeared online. Subsequent allegations that the footage was leaked deliberately to drive up interest in the Kardashian name have been strenuously denied.
In an early review, the New York
Times’ Ginia Bellafante characterised the show as being “purely about some desperate women climbing to the margins of fame”. Almost without exception the critics never got on board, but viewers loved it, and millions tuned in on a weekly basis.
Boyd Hilton, the British TV critic and entertainment director at Heat magazine, said the show conveyed an intimacy that was at the heart of its appeal.
“The Kardashians wasn’t the first show of its kind to open up the celebrity reality TV world but what made it different was that it felt more intimate, it was borderline haphazard in the way that it was filmed and not as slick as the other shows,” he said. “It instantly had a no holds barred feel to it even though you were witnessing this extraordinary world of wealth and privilege. It felt more real than a lot of other reality shows.”
Various controversies, often manufactured, kept the show in the headlines. In 2011, Kim married basketball player Kris Humphries in a series of special episodes watched by over 10 million viewers, and then filed for divorce 72 days later.
Over subsequent seasons, half-sisters Kendall and Kylie Jenner took on more prominent roles. The show documented Kendall’s burgeoning career as a model and Kylie’s launch of the makeup brand that would land her on the Forbes billionaires list, before the magazine accused her family of inflating the value of her business and struck her from the list in May 2020.
Their Olympian father also became a series star, specifically while transitioning to become Caitlyn Jenner in 2015. Caitlyn’s transition spawned a spin-off reality series, I Am Cait, and made her one of the most visible LGBT figures in America. She provoked
controversy with her support of Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential elections.
Over the years, the family leveraged its fame to amass a fortune and popularised the role of social media influencer. Kylie is currently reported to be paid $1.27m per sponsored post and sister Kim $1m. Critics have labelled their lucrative aesthetic as “blackfishing” – appropriating black cultural trends such as hair braiding and wearing darker makeup for their own gain.
Recently, Kim has spoken about mental health in relation to her husband, the rapper Kanye West, who has bipolar disorder and is pursuing an independent run for president. After a rambling address by Kanye West in Charleston, Virginia, in July, Kim, who married him in 2014, asked the public for “compassion and empathy”.
In 2019, Kim also reportedly began studying to become a lawyer, following her role in lobbying Trump for the release of the non-violent drug offender Alice Marie Johnson in 2018.
“You can be pompously dismissive of the show, but their skill and talent was in creating their own world of celebrity and their own soap opera, which was very compelling,” said Hilton. “It was all about fame for fame’s sake.
“I’m not sure the Kardashians know whether they are acting for themselves or for the camera any more, since the line between what is real and what is contrived is so thin. Yet they have created a world which is endlessly watchable and dramatic. People watch them for the same reason they would watch [British soap operas] EastEnders or Corrie.”