A Taste of Beverly Hills Life Through the Kardashians

Unless you’ve been staying on a different planet lately, you must have heard of or watched an episode or commercial clips of the reality TV show Keeping Up With The Kardashians. This joint venture of Bunim-Murray Productions and Ryan Seacrest Productions follows the day-to-day lives of the children and former wife (Kris Jenner) of the late Robert Kardashian, a marketing executive who was popularly known for being the defense counsel of OJ Simpson, and Kris’ husband Bruce Jenner, decathlon and Olympic medalist, and the kids of Kris and Bruce.

Some household, you might say. In fact, it’s easy to be mistaken as a show for adults because of too much skin, too much cursing, and too much partying in it. It’s your typical Beverly Hills family, whose members have too much dough in their pocket and have too many spare time on their hands, that it makes you sort of wonder why there is a TV show about them to begin with. But then again, one might argue, not every family in this fashionable town has a Playboy model in their brood. Kim Kardashian, former BFF of Paris Hilton, sex tape star, tabloid headliner, and socialite extraordinaire, is the central figure in this show. She has two other Kardashian sisters, Kourtney and Khloe, brother Rob, and two pre-teen Jenner half-sisters, Kendall and Kylie. Kourtney is the eldest Kardashian and co-owns the boutique Dash with her mother and sisters. Her boyfriend is also featured in the show. Khloe is the youngest of the three sisters, the least goodlooking, and claims to be the Lisa Simpson of the family, supposedly the voice of reason. Robert is the youngest among the four, studying at University of Southern California but wanted to drop out at some point to pursue modeling. Kendall is 12 while Kylie is 10, but this early, they look like the proteges of their big sisters. Give them a few more years and they can dethrone any Gossip Girl mean girls.

The parents are parents only in name, because they barely exercise any parental authority. It’s one thing to be cool by being friends with your children, but in this family, discipline takes a backseat. Kris is more like the big sister running the family boutique and managing Kim’s career, but other than that you don’t perceive her much as a mother. She doesn’t want to be outshined by her daughter Kim, which explains her need to hog the spotlight at times. And Bruce? His presence is hardly ever felt. For an Olympic medalist who has the only respectable achievement, he seems to be too hushed and unimportant, when he ought to be the true voice of reason in this family.

Although Keeping Up With The Kardashians offers nothing new in terms of content and presentation, it’s still likely to stay on air for a while. It enjoys a fair share of viewership, and since it has Ryan Seacrest as its executive producer, E! will continue to indulge the whims, caprices, and hunger for attention of these celebrities. Nowadays, all you need to be is to be famous for just being famous.

Perhaps the appeal of this show is that it is a world open only to the few and, naturally, it’s of great interest to the many. It’s not difficult to imagine why most women and even men across the US, and in other countries where it is aired on cable, would want to catch a glimpse of this tantalizing world, because they’re never going to experience anything like it in real life. They are indulging themselves in this because it is the guilty pleasure they can afford at the moment.

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