First things first. The Kardashians are not the Cardassians from Star Trek. One group is a bunch of imperial expansionists with unusual foreheads who reign over a vast and terrifying empire, the other are fictional space aliens from the television show Star Trek. (Put a badum tish here, please, editor.) Much like the Cardassians on Star Trek, however, the Kardashians on The Kardashians (Disney+) are from the olden days and thus function as a nostalgic throwback to when television shows still had vast power.
Reality TV is an old-fashioned format now, like epic poetry, grime music and frescos, and the principal Kardashians – Kourtney, Khloé and Kim – are in their 40s and so are practically dead, pop-culturally speaking. That means that all the snobs who once gleefully cried, “Kim Kardashian? Well, I’ve never heard of her,” several times a month are long dead. So the Kardashians won the culture, basically.
That said, for youngsters more accustomed to TikTok clips and static memes, watching the Kardashians on TV must be like seeing a Pathé newsreel or reading ancient papyrus scrolls or subscribing to a newspaper. In contrast, for millennials, now in their twilight years, it’s their Last of the Summer Wine, their Golden Girls and their Live at 3 all in one. Whisht, children, Granny wants to sit in her high-waisted jeans, drinking her flat white and watching her shows. Kim Kardashian is the Dame Vera Lynn of the Harry Potter generation.
Reality TV is still a very verbal medium, and thankfully the original trio and their progenitor Kris Jenner, the evil scientist, are very chatty, quippy people. The sisters’ younger siblings Kylie and Kendall, in contrast, are children of the Instagram post and the emoji and so largely exist on television in a sort of apathetic, low-energy slouch. They are temporally and temperamentally unsuited to the medium. They are so slow-moving they are unfilmable, and even when they’re standing up they look to me like they are lying down.
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Yes, Kylie is currently the consort of beloved celebrity twink and seafront Dylan impersonator Timothée Chalamet. So that may add value to the brand. (This is also how I talk about my own family members now. Does he add value to the brand, I think, whenever I see my most apathetic nephew demolishing a choc ice.)
But, in this Kardashian production, the younger two must cede the floor to their more verbose and energetic elders as the whole family sit around quaffing expensive wine as they name-drop famous acquaintances, like Diane von Fürstenberg (Kim) and the Menendez brothers (Kris; seriously).
It’s a strange life that the Kardashians lead. The clan have Truman Show-ed their existence to the extent that all significant events in their lives have occurred on camera. I imagine they call the time between television appearances “the darkness” and that they spend it suspended in an empty void, a data centre or a vat of amniotic fluid.
It also means that whenever they recall something from the past, like when Khloé reminisces about her wedding to her troubled ex-husband, Lamar Odom, an editor can summon the footage forth from the archive.
That must be nice. I think about what my world would be like if it featured an exciting you-go-girl musical soundtrack, some shapewear and occasional flashbacks to previous seasons of my life. I can’t help concluding that in those circumstances I too would be an iconic girlboss. Can people get editors for their actual lives? My wife tells me that that’s called “counselling”.
Here are some themes in the first episode of the sixth series.
Being momaged by Kris Jenner
Khloé and Kim are a bit taken aback when it is revealed that Kris is hoping to appear in her own travel series on Prime Video. Kim starts griping to camera about the 10 per cent of her income that Kris still takes as her manager. (I would like to take this moment to promise my nephews that I will never abandon them to appear on a travel series on Prime Video and will faithfully continue to take 10 per cent of their income.) The business of being a Kardashian has always been very much to the fore of the Kardashians’ whole shtick. They speak of brand “collabs” frequently. “I feel very strongly that you should have a podcast,” Kris says to Khloé, which is something my mother has never said to me even though I am fascinating.
Boob management
“My boobs are flopping out,” Khloé says at one point before adding, with great existential sadness, “I don’t understand this top any more!”
“It’s boobing out!” Kim cries when she’s on the way to meet her pal Kamala Harris before an actual trained lawyer is asked to fetch her a sports bra. “Boobing out”, our readers will of course recognise, is a reference to the Seamus Heaney poem of the same name.
Hedging bets politically
When Kim goes to see Kamala Harris about a social enterprise she is working with, she is pictured first climbing out of one of Elon Musk’s Cybertrucks. This feels like a sly act of fealty to the new US presidential administration lest it put a tariff on the Kardashian brand. When Kamala first appears on screen, the words “Vice-president of the United States 2021 to 2025” appear hovering before her, slightly passive-aggressively. “You just want to make change and you want to get shit done and make things better in the world,” Kim says, explaining her vague political ethos. As ideologies go, Kardashianism is ingeniously malleable.
Reconciliation
Khloé meets her troubled ex-husband, Lamar, for the first time in nine years on camera. (She knows no other way.) “I have no bad blood,” she tells her friend Malika, before adding, terrifyingly, “I don’t have any blood.” This confirms for most of us what we have long suspected of the Kardashians, that they are solid the whole way through, like trees or mannequins or the 1980s sitcom star Alf.
Saying “Thenk yew”
This is a polite Pavlovian response all Kardashians utter when stuff appears on front of them as though by magic but actually through a complex sociohistorical process that goes: agrarianism, the age of enlightenment, the digital revolution, the Kardashian-industrial complex, end-times lolz.
I suspect the Kardashians don’t fully perceive the minions who service their needs or their supply chains or who frequently have to hoist them into corsets – being hoisted into a corset is a frequent occurrence in Kardashian World – but they have learned to be “grateful” and “blessed”, and so they say “Thenk yew” frequently. It starts with a musical “Thenk”, followed by a drop of exactly one even-tempered tone to “yew”. It’s an autonomic physical reaction, like breathing or being unreasonably rich or, indeed, binge-watching The Kardashians. “And thenk yew, the Kardashians,” we all say in response.
