Kardashians Inc.: The end of a show and the end of an era
“At this point, we can pretty much all agree that the Kardashians’ quest for fame has been successful,” said Kyndall Cunningham in TheDailyBeast.com. As the final episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians aired on E! last week, ending a 14-year, 20-season run for the hit reality show, the Jenner-Kardashian clan had become, to Variety, “arguably the most famous family in the world.” Self-styled “momager” Kris Jenner and her daughters Kim, Kourtney, Khloé, Kendall, and Kylie aren’t about to disappear; they’ll launch a new show on Hulu late this year. Meanwhile,
Kim has become a billionaire, the much younger Kylie is nearly there, and all their sisters long ago ceased being famous for desperately chasing fame, said Jordan Julian, also in TheDailyBeast.com. Like them or not, the Kardashians “deserve much of the credit for originating the brand of social media celebrity that dominates pop culture today.”
In 2007, when the show debuted, “there were few things more compelling to an audience than a nobody who was on their way to becoming somebody,” said Alyssa Bereznak in TheRinger.com. The entertainment industry’s gatekeepers were losing power, and many of us found it amusing to root for a family at the edge of fame who were covetous of more. Kris’ first husband had been one of O.J. Simpson’s lawyers; her second was former Olympian Bruce Jenner. Oldest daughter Kim was widely known for a sex tape that had leaked months earlier. Five or six years later, the Kardashians had become the A-list celebrities they’d aspired to be, with Kim and her new husband, Kanye West, even gracing the cover of Vogue. The family was still terrible, “but they were our terrible family.” And for a while, their dramas matched their notoriety, including in 2015 when Bruce, now Caitlyn, came out as a transgender woman.
“At a certain point, the family became bigger than the show,” said Elizabeth Wagmeister in Variety. All along, the Kardashians were endorsing products, launching product lines, and feeding content to the gossip industry. They also cultivated followings on social media. While KUWTK’s U.S. cable audience peaked about a decade ago at 10.5 million, the stars’ Instagram followings soared past 100 million each, even 200 million. Kim and
Kylie now demand roughly $1 million for a single post. “The world has changed,” Kris said recently, referring to the proliferation of social media apps that give celebrities instant access to their fans. “We can give them all of the information anyone would ever want to know in real time.” Once the Kardashians were dreamers; now they’re merely marketing experts, said Lovia Gyarkye in The Hollywood Reporter. By the final episodes of KUWTK, the ability of these women to generate capital had become “the entire point of not just the series, but the empire.”