The first episode of the all-new Kardashians (Disney Plus) is entitled Burn them All to the F*cking Ground and I applaud the family for going there. Someone has clearly been reading their Lenin. And so we return to Kardashia much like the Pevensie family return to Narnia and find it subtly changed. When the streamers rework legacy reality television, they replace the shaky cameras and poor sound quality with sweeping cinematography and auteurish split-screen affects. It's a statement of worth. No more apologies. The Kardashians are monuments of the 21st century and here they are with their retainers, attendants and camera folk, encrusted in artisanal television realness.
It all starts with a sweeping drone shot that moves across important geographical locations in the Kardashian universe, much like the credit sequence in Game of Thrones. It sweeps through the cavernous halls of Kourtney’s home where she frolics with her children and her consort Travis from Blink-182. Then the drone crosses the California hills where Khloe stands by a pool in a huge construction site. She talks into her phone about her wonderful new home while labourers consider seizing the means of production nearby. The drone ascends.
We find Kendall (played by Jeremy Strong?) transcending materialism by playing some Tibetan singing bowls in the garden of her vast estate. All of their houses basically look the same because rich people's houses are all based on the fanciest hotel they ever stayed in and all hotels basically look the same. The drone retreats.
At the offices of Kylie Cosmetics we find Kris being magisterial at a big desk and Kylie looking bored while overseeing a photoshoot. Various attendants are seen nearby toiling in the cosmetic mines while surreptitiously reading seditious literature and planning consciousness-raising events. The drone departs.
Patrick Freyne: It’s about time toddlers were set to work
Patrick Freyne: Anyone living in a cult or Ranelagh will know how oppressive conformity can be
Patrick Freyne: Britain has four armed forces – army, navy, air force and Ross Kemp
Patrick Freyne: Where did a Star Trek space person learn to say ‘Sláinte’?
Finally, we reach the ur-Kardashian – Kim – from whose Zeus-like skull the others sprang. Yes, technically Kris is the mother, but pop culturally speaking it’s Kim who originated this dynasty. When we meet her, she’s also overseeing one of her businesses, much like a northern English industrialist or 19th-century robber baron. Militant entrepreneurialism is seen as liberational in the world of the Kardashians and they’re pushing this message hard. As I’ve said, they’ve been reading political theory (specifically Karl Marx’s Girl Boss).
The intro concludes with the major Kardashian arcana walking towards us all dressed in white. Our screens shatter. Don’t worry. It’s just a special effect but I’ve no doubt they could do this for real if they wished. They’ve not only smashed through the glass ceiling but through the fourth wall and into our miserable, godforsaken lives.
Iconic woman geniuses
These women are iconic geniuses. Just as a bell rings when an angel gets their wings, a famous woman officially becomes an icon when a pompous, middle-aged man wearing a tweed jacket or cosplaying as his favourite footballer says: "Well I've never heard of her. Why don't young women engage with something serious instead of [insert name of iconic woman genius here]?"
Things have changed. Everyone has heard of them now. Kim is divorcing Kanye and studying for the bar. Khloe is grappling with anxiety and house renovations. Kourtney spends her time kanoodling with Travis from Blink-182 in the presence of family and employees who pretend to find it delightful. Meanwhile, Kris boasts about overseeing an empire and complains when people don't answer their phones at seven in the morning. Kylie, about whom I am less interested, is pregnant. Kendall is also present.
They each have their own primary mode. Kris oversees all with industrial enthusiasm. It’s surprising there isn’t a bigger male Kardashian fanbase really, because having a mother intrinsically involved in one’s life should be relatable to Irish men of a certain age.
Khloe and Kourtney do everything with a self-aware raised eyebrow. Kim operates with an intense sincerity that’s endearing when you’re not contemplating how her house could be requisitioned by a workers’ collective made up of her employees. (Kylie and Kendall are creatures of social media, not television, so unlike their older sisters they struggle to exist in motion).
None of them exhibits great boundaries with their staff, who hover eternally at the edges of the screen. Kris, channelling Lucille from Arrested Development, orders them about. Kim discusses her least relatable problems with them – her anxiety about hosting Saturday Night Live, for example. And, at one point, Kourtney straddles and snogs Travis from Blink-182 (his surname) while an uncomfortable estate agent hovers nearby. Kourtney basically treats Travis from Blink-182 like a jungle gym and all onlookers as major fans of jungle-gym-contortions.
The genius of the Kardashians is how naturally they go from bizarre rich person cluelessness to strangely relatable family banter and how smoothly they combine ersatz reality schtick with real emotional stakes. Like literary memoirists they know when to hold back and when to put some blood in the water. They drop heartbreaking sentences casually. “I was nine months pregnant when you cheated on me,” says Khloe to her ex, in the middle of a conversation about co-parenting.
In the first episode, when Kim’s son sees an ad for her stolen sex tape in a game of Roblox, it’s genuinely upsetting (unless you’re a misogynist who thinks sex is something women should be ashamed of and selling intimate videos without consent is fine). Trying to stop the release of reportedly unseen footage from that tape becomes a theme of the first few episodes and Kim’s distress is real.
The Kardashians are also often properly funny. In the first episode Khloe starts a sisterly conversation about clothes with: “You know you guys make fun of me for having a bigger vagina than most?” I am saying now, for the record, that that’s as good an opener as any line in The Sopranos.
At another point Khloe and her friend Malika wander one of the Kardashian’s endless gardens which are paradise. “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” Malika asks.
“It’s a mindf**k isn’t it?” says Khloe.
“I think it was the chicken . . .”
“How did it get here?”
“God. God made humans and humans produce eggs. I think God made chickens and then chickens produce eggs.”
Philosophers have been making a huge meal of this argument, when they could have been making a simple omelette, like Malika. And yes, Khloe is my favourite Kardashian.
Don’t get me wrong. This show has issues. The format the Kardashians pioneered is often shapeless. Tensionless plot points are sometimes extended to such mind-numbing effect, I worry that whole generations will grow up with no sense of narrative structure. It’s also an unapologetic celebration of grotesque wealth accumulation. It features some of the world’s richest humans burning fecklessly through the last of our planet’s resources while leaning into the lie that they have a rags-to-riches origin story.
Great business folk they may be, but the Kardashians were never poor. This is a riches-to-sickening-riches story. It's also the tale of how, in the early 21st century, the greatest dream of millions was to turbo-charge their consumption. Mark my words, when alien archaeologists are picking through the wreckage of our civilization, they will find this show and watch it, initially for "research", but eventually just because they like it. And even then, an alien in a tweed jacket will say: "I've never even seen this 'Kim Kardashian'" but he'll probably say it in alien and on Space Twitter.
