By Margarita Artoglou
My roommates and I have a huge secret: one of our favorite bonding activities is binge-watching “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.”
It started out innocently enough: we saw that the show was on Hulu and decided to watch an episode, just for giggles. But once we watched one we were hooked, and before we knew it, we were lost in the Kardashian rabbit hole.
Our obsession started with the newest episodes, and we justified our love of the oft-criticized reality show by claiming we liked to observe the Kardashian family’s luxurious lifestyle and family vacations to exotic locales (they’ve been to Armenia, Bora Bora and Cuba, just to name a few).
But then we decided to throw it back to the first season, when the family was fighting for cultural relevance and most of America only recognized the Kardashian name from the OJ Simpson trials.
There was nothing glamorous about those first few seasons, but they were as equally hypnotizing as the more recent, better edited and glitzy new seasons. Back in the old days, the Kardashian sisters—Kim, Khloe and Kourtney—ran their clothing store Dash while Kim juggled a burgeoning modeling career.
Caitlyn Jenner, at that time known as Bruce Jenner, spent most of her screen time taking care of middle-school aged Kendall and Kylie, while Kris Jenner struggled to run the household and manage Kim’s career. They were, for the most part, a regular and somewhat relatable family.
In those first years some people had heard of the Kardashians, but they were not the mega-influencers they are today. It was crazy to go back to season one and see Kim folding clothes at Dash when I have seen her season 16 closet that’s larger than my house.
It was really hilarious to see the sisters wearing god-awful 2000’s fashion and tacky makeup when they are now looked upon as style-icons and trendsetters. Viewers who have only watched the newer seasons or only know the Kardashian crew from tabloids and social media will be shocked and entertained by the contrast—10/10, would recommend.
I am still trying to figure out what makes “KUWTK” so much more appealing than other reality shows, to the point that it has been on the air for 10 years (the 10-year anniversary special aired this past Sunday). I recognize that the “plot” is contrived, the dialogue is far from riveting and nothing too dramatic ever goes down in Calabasas, the Kardashian’s hometown. Still—I can’t look away. (Literally: my roommate and I plowed through the entirety of season four in one night.)
I have a hunch that I, along with the rest of the show’s guilty-pleasure viewers, am captivated by watching a seemingly regular family catapulted into fame and work to stay on top. To watch “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” from the very first episode filmed in 2007 is to watch the cultural phenomenon of a family going from virtually unknown to household names.
People love to hate on the Kardashians. Ten years later, people still bring up Kim’s leaked sex tape, and reduce the entire family’s fame to that one public misstep. Regardless of how you feel about Kim and Co., though, you have to give props to the family’s ability to skyrocket to unprecedented levels of fame: there’s “KUWTK,” its multiple spinoffs (who remembers “Kourtney and Khloe Take Miami”?), Kim’s mobile phone game, book deals, clothing and beauty lines and a subscription-based app for each member of the family. Kim and the Kardashians have become so much more than a sex tape star and her sisters.
People say the Kardashians are famous for no reason, that they are stupid, vapid, talentless and unworthy of their wealth and fame, but I disagree. As a family, they figured out how they could all play a part in turning what could have been Kim’s 15 minutes of infamy into a multi-million dollar empire that is still growing to this day, which is no easy task. “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” then, lets us watch them at work.
