“We’re the modern-day Brady Bunch with a kick,” she said in the premiere of E!’s Keeping Up With the Kardashians, the reality TV show dedicated to chronicling the lives of the eight Kardashian-Jenners.
Of course, the finale of KUWTK does not mean the Kardashians are going anywhere.
The show catapulted the Kardashian-Jenners to unthinkable levels of fame and spawned several fortunately short-lived spinoffs, like Kourtney and Kim Take New York or Kourtney and Khloé Take the Hamptons, that followed the siblings’ adventures in different cities.
Seeing the Kardashian-Jenners grasp for a world that did not necessarily want them made it easier to accept their often silly, histrionic behavior — and at times even feel sorry for them.
They wantonly lifted their aesthetics from Black women, and became cool without acknowledging the source of their inspiration — as many white Americans inside pop culture and out have done, and continue to do.
Kendall seemed to distance herself from the clan, started modeling and gave off easygoing, chill-girl vibes, while somehow never letting us forget that she was the family member with a “real” career.
The truth behind these narratives was slippery and decidedly not the point.
They preached sisterhood in the same breath as bullying Jordyn Woods after her alleged dalliance with Khloe’s on-and-off boyfriend Thompson.
The series finale, which aired in two parts, seemed to nod at the direction in which the family’s public image has been slipping, and peddled a different kind of aspiration — one rooted in saccharine, unpersuasive gratitude.
Their gratefulness has a perfunctory sheen to it, the product of people forced to recognize their vast wealth and celebrity for the good of the brand.
In the finale’s closing moments, Khloe asked the family to put memorabilia into a time capsule that they will unearth in a decade or two.
Most of these objects, you may note, are tied to the women’s ability to generate capital, implicitly acknowledging the entire point of not just the series, but the empire.