Originally published in print November 2020.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that 2020 was (or should I say, unfortunately, is) a catastrophic year, as many great things have come to an end: wearing lipstick, coughing in public without having everyone stare at you and, of course, the iconic reality TV show featuring our favourite American family, Keeping Up With The Kardashians. One truly wonders what more anyone can take at this point. After 14 years, hardcore Kardashian-Jenner fans will shed a tear at this awful news, and possibly not only them. Love or hate them, this family has been the true blueprint of reality TV and celebrity drama, and it’s hard to imagine a world where we do not keep up (no pun intended) with all their juicy gossip and exaggerated fights. So, what does the future hold? 

 

Fans of the show had been complaining for a while about a marked lack of interest in the later seasons, claiming that the spin-off Rob and Chyna had been far more entertaining (with just one season!) to watch than the entire run of KUWTK had ever been lately. This is highly indicative of what people like to watch nowadays, or what one expects from reality TV in general: short-lived, petty, highly dramatic outbursts of rage between siblings, other family members and especially between couples. This is probably the general trend of reality TV, which feeds the audience with shallow but entertaining content: a guilty pleasure one cannot get rid of that keeps coming back, despite those publicly claiming to despise it. It’s just like that one last piece of cake before the diet supposedly starts, and it certainly does not help that the majority of reality shows feature endless seasons with  very brief and spicy episodes, making this an extremely binge-watchable genre.

 

But the fizziness and feistiness of the content is not enough to make a good reality show: the secret ingredient is that it needs to be relatable too, at least in some way, to the point that audiences will want to keep up with its main characters. As much as crying because you have lost your diamond earring in the ocean doesn’t seem very relatable now (or ever), it was hard not to sympathise with Kourtney’s affirmation to Kim that, “there’s people that are dying”. We all have that friend who is a little bit overdramatic and bubbly and needs to be brought back to reality at times, and we have all found ourselves crying over stupid things that at first we thought were the end of the world, only to suddenly realise how foolish we have been to do so. In short: being relatable is not necessarily about situations (aka: losing a diamond earring), but about emotions, and having the right to feel them. We laugh at those situations because, admit it or not, we secretly enjoy experiencing them with the Kardashians as they happen. We too want to have the diamond earring to lose, and by participating in the moment as we are watching, it makes us feel as if we too are part of that glamorous, crazy life.

 

What people love about this family is, in truth, their honesty. They live their lives thoroughly and allow themselves to acknowledge their emotional reactions to things. We, the audience, have loved with them, cried with them, held our breaths with them, but mostly laughed with them, because it wouldn’t be reality TV if it wasn’t comedic and enjoyable to watch. The repetition of situations, dramas, plot points and, of course, people, fills the audience watching with a certain comfort. At times, we believe we know them so well we can predict their reactions, and indeed what works best in reality TV is that one gets the sense of knowing the protagonists deeply; because everything about their lives is so public, we feel like we are their best friends. We, too, feel like we are part of the Kardashian family, and we certainly are, for its amazing success must be attributed to the dedication of the fans, who haven’t stopped ‘keeping up’ with them for more than a decade.

 

So, in case any producer is reading this and wondering about how to create another money-making reality TV product as good and enduring as KUWTK, I have the recipe for you. All you need is comedy, comfort, binge-watchable short episodes, but, most importantly, truly human and flawed characters, relatable in their realness, that can make us live and feel things with them at the same time as they do.