Over-sharers a sign of the times

Rich Juzwiak

Kim Kardashian didn’t become Kim Kardashian because of her brain, but it’s amazing how sharp the thing can be: Nearly four years ago on the series premiere of Keeping Up With The Kardashians, she said of her family: “There’s a lot of baggage that comes with us. But it’s like Louis Vuitton baggage – you always want it.” And how!

In its currently airing sixth season, the show documenting the lives of the California-residing, blended Jenner-Kardashian family has averaged close to 3 million viewers per episode.

Along with its three spin-offs, it has redefined its network E! from star-watcher to star-maker. E! figures viewers’ appetite for the Kardashians is so voracious that the network will turn Kim’s recent wedding to basketball player Kris Humphries into a four-hour programming block that will air over two nights in October.

Then there’s the intense amount of Kardashian merchandising saturating the market (Silly Bandz! A Sears line! Diet pills! Even a deal with Vegas’s Mirage to put the sisters’ photos on room keys and carry their products in the hotel’s mini bars). If the Kardashians had a line of actual baggage, it’d probably outsell Louis Vuitton – and have better-placed ads.

But there is something about the Kardashians’ brand of celebrity that disgruntles those who aren’t riding their train.

Kim’s pre- Keeping Up claims to fame consisted mainly of occasionally appearing in public with Paris Hilton and a leaked sex tape. As Kris Jenner, the family matriarch who is credited with starting and maintaining her family’s career, told ABC’s Nightline this year: “We’re not actors, we’re not singers, we don’t have musical talent, I can’t dance to save my life. So some people will say ‘You’re famous for being famous.’ And I’ll say ‘Well, no we’re not: we’re famous because we have four television shows’.” Yeah, and Picasso was famous for his canvases.

Imagining a world without the Kardashians isn’t difficult. Because so much of what the family shares is none of our business in the first place, we’d have one less distraction.

The Kardashians don’t merely adopt a too-much-information aesthetic, they present it as a lifestyle. The smut that the show was founded on (Kim’s sex tape with R&B singer and fellow reality star Ray J “leaked” about eight months before Keeping Up began its run) has proved pervasive. All of the show’s four principal of-age women – Kris and her daughters Kim, Khloe and Kourtney – have had story lines involving nude photos of them. Nearly all of them have relieved themselves on camera.

Kris’s facelift was documented, as was Kim’s cellulite-lasering and Botox injections, and the colonoscopy of Kris’s husband, Olympic gold medal decathlete Bruce Jenner. Kris’s youngest daughters, Kylie and Kendall, once played Girls Gone Wild by lifting up their shirts and yelling “Woo!” while their half-brother Brody Jenner’s manager filmed them. At the time they were nine and 11, respectively.

The Kardashians are just one clan in a nation of over-sharers. They are a symptom of their time, not a disease. – Washington Post