The end of the family’s small-screen saga is a welcome relief
You should never meet your heroes, unless one of your heroes is the director John Waters, in which case, I can vouch for a pleasing lack of disappointment. I interviewed Waters a few years ago, to talk about the restoration of his 1970 film Multiple Maniacs, in which a marauding gang of attention-seekers causes widespread havoc. I thought of Waters again when I heard the news that the reality television show
Keeping Up With the Kardashians was due to come to an end after 14 years, though for another reason.
I remembered Waters saying that he did not watch television, not because he thought it would be bad but because he loves to read and, he said, you can’t do both. I think about this all the time. Like many people, I have an attention span that is fractured into a thousand different fragments as I attempt to watch and read as much as I can so I can keep up with the cultural conversation. In all the years that Keeping Up With the Kardashians has been on air, I have sidestepped it. The Kardashians are the thing I have had to give up on, for the benefit of something else.