After 20 seasons, our time with America’s first family of reality TV will be over. Maybe we’re overthinking it
The Kardashians were in the news this week.
You could, of course, say this of just about any week for the past 10 years or so: the Kardashians are constantly getting up to all sorts of well-publicised adventures, generating this kind of low droning background hum of information and analysis, overlaid on which are people’s dim protestations that they have never watched an episode of
Keeping Up With the Kardashians, and actually, who are the Kardashians, and then on top of that are pious admonishments about being obliged to take the Kardashians seriously “as a phenomenon”, seeing as how they are so, so famous and have changed the culture in so, so many ways whether you like it or not, and by God you should like it, because this is the 21st century and we have an ethical duty as media consumers to care about and notice the Kardashians day in and day out, and then on top of that are a few spurious arguments about feminism that diminish everyone involved.