“Keeping Up With the Kardashians” debuted more than a decade ago as a reality sitcom featuring lighthearted shenanigans, not tonally far-off from a number of other family-oriented shows on celebrity suburbanites. Today, both the show and the clan have metastasized into a lightning rod, a cultural Rorschach test aggressively challenging our opinions on fame, family, aesthetics, and merit.
In 2007, “Kim Kardashian, Superstar” was nothing but a leaked sex tape featuring Paris Hilton’s stylist and her B-list rapper boyfriend. Today, she’s a superstar in earnest, the pioneer of social media-fueled fashion, and married to one of our generation’s most influential rappers and producers. Half-sister Kendall Jenner became the highest-paid supermodel in the world, and Forbes just deemed Kylie Jenner the youngest self-made billionaire in human history.
