Kim Kardashian West announced Tuesday that “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” will be ending after 14 years and 20 seasons — at least once its final episodes air in 2021.
This news is sure to be polarizing, given the passion of both fans and critics. But while the series was not for everyone, it unmistakably changed the entire celebrity ecosystem.
And its cancellation is likely not a retirement from the public eye for the Kardashians, but a statement that they no longer need TV.
Kardashian West is enjoying a career renaissance of sorts as she pivots toward political activism.
But for those might have made a point not to know, Kardashian first rose to fame as part of Hollywood’s secondary celebrity class.
The daughter of an elite lawyer father, Robert Kardashian, and a mother, Kris Jenner, who remarried an Olympic has-been from the 1970s, Kim and her sisters, Kourtney and Khloe, grew up surrounded by the children of the impossibly wealthy and famous.
Indeed, Kim got her first real taste of fame as an employee to one of them, the heiress Paris Hilton. Hilton’s reality series “The Simple Life” lasted a mere three years, but it introduced the world to Kim, her “stylist” hanger-on.
As the Kardashians angled to land a series as a replacement for “The Simple Life” in 2006, Kardashian West suddenly starred in her own scandal. In any other instance, a sex tape would have derailed the project.
But instead, the family engineered a $5 million deal that released the tape ahead of the show’s debut, giving new meaning to the phrase “backdoor pilot.”
The show itself has never been all that interesting. Like the “unscripted family sitcoms” that came before it — think “The Osbournes” or “Newlyweds” — it mostly highlighted the mundane problems of the nouveau riche as they flashed their wealth, squabbled over things that didn’t really matter, and then ended the night (or episode) with a hug.
At first, the gatekeepers of celebrity news, from magazines like “People” and “Entertainment Tonight,” mostly ignored the Kardashians.
Even E! TV roundup series like “The Soup” never mentioned “KUWTK” without first explaining it starred a woman famous for “a big ass and a sex tape.”
The Kardashians were technically famous, but they remained cordoned off from the top tiers.
Rather than accept their place in the ecosystem, though, the Kardashians circumvented it. A brand-new social media platform, Twitter, had just launched in 2008, and the whole family joined en masse in March 2009.
But the real sea change began when Instagram launched in 2010. Now, the Kardashians could push their celebrity with glossy photos and later, short video clips.
Moreover, the social media explosion created nonstop content for burgeoning entertainment sites, desperate for access and content.
