We’re now four episodes into The Kardashians, the Frankensteined reanimation of the Kardashian-Jenner reality television empire that began with Keeping up with The Kardashians in 2007. And like the titular monster at the heart of Mary Shelley’s novel, it’s its own sentient beast that’s forever oscillating between hilariously clumsy missteps and egregious crimes toward humanity.
The series premiere—a term I use very loosely since their last show went dark less than one year before the absurdly glossy Hulu counterpart debuted—opened with an astonishingly long drone shot through the richest and most exclusive parts of Los Angeles that puts Michael Bay’s directing work in Ambulance to shame. One by one, we’re treated to a nauseating and motion-smoothed check-in on The Femmepire to see what each Kardashian and Jenner is up to now, and it plays like we’re tallying up millions. There may as well have been a net worth total ticking up in the corner of the screen for the first five minutes.
Kourtney emerges onto one of the many balconies of her massive estate. Khloé takes a call amidst her twentieth home renovation of the last decade. Kendall gives herself a sound bath in her backyard the size of a public park. Kris closes a deal in her office on the other side of the Kylie Kosmetics warehouse, where Kylie presides over a shoot. Kim wraps up her own photo session at the SKIMS offices and peels out of the studio in a car that costs more than the combined median rent of every city in the country. In short, not a thing has changed.
But everything has changed since the Kardashians first rode Kris Jenner’s one-woman-made wave onto the scene in the late aughts. The world seems like a much darker place now that the atrocities of the everyday are amplified by social media, and the Kardashians have reached a point of such enormous, unfathomable wealth that their presence in the world of reality television no longer feels like escapism but rather a well-manicured middle finger to the rest of us as we attempt to outrun the latest fireballs of horror flung at us daily.
This was never more glaringly evident than the moment on Monday evening when tweets about Kim Kardashian wearing Marilyn Monroe’s infamous “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress to the Met Gala were interspersed with reactions to the Supreme Court’s draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. This entire current Kardashian era feels like the moment in the original series when Kim lost her diamond earring in the ocean, to which Kourtney then responded, “Kim, there’s people that are dying”—only multiplied by one hundred after each member of the family took turns hitting the slay button.
Watching these billionaires go about their decidedly mundane lives is not just boring, it’s verging on offensive. To counteract that, the Kardashians have had to slap a new layer of polish over the convoluted nature of their reality television personas. It has somehow made them more…
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