Closure With The Kardashians

Back in 2007, the Kardashians were making their first small steps toward the monumental heights of fame they would ultimately reach. They were working reality-TV personalities documenting their quest for fame, and that documentation quickly resulted in their outsize influence on the culture. But that influence wasn’t born of flashy fights or massive scandals so much as the more mundane, day-to-day moments and quirks that they shared with viewers: The way they shook their Health Nut salads, said “Bible” instead of “promise,” or explained how to hack into their boyfriend’s voice-mails were all intimate windows into their lives. For 20 seasons, their talent was the ability to be accessible to us, even as their Calabasas lifestyles became less and less so. It was proof that good reality TV is found in the details, not the broad strokes, and E!’s Keeping Up With the Kardashians used those details to the show’s, and the family’s, great benefit.

The 2022 introduction of Keeping Up’s successor, Hulu’s The Kardashians, may have initially seemed like they were simply slapping a shiny new label on the same product as a way to score a better deal with a new network. But over the last five seasons, The Kardashians has proved to be a different kind of show altogether, one tailored to the level of fame the family has since achieved. There are certain things that they may no longer want to, nor have to, expose in front of the entire world, and The Kardashians is built to accommodate that evolving relationship with the medium that made them famous. While Keeping Up was largely focused on the family’s scrappy interpersonal drama and relationships as they shamelessly pursued fame, The Kardashians has kept things comparatively polished and couth. Rather than being structured narratively, like most reality shows, The Kardashians feels more like an Instagram post sharing their career moves and exciting life updates. It’s all broad strokes, formatted like a monthly photo dump where we swipe from one flashy highlight to the next: a big vacation, the behind-the-scenes of a magazine cover shoot, a birthday party, a visit to the White House and meeting Kamala Harris, the Met Gala, or, most recently, a headline-making reunion with an ex.

Since The Kardashians is now largely about the family making calculated business and PR moves, it’s hard not to view all of the show’s choices through that lens, including the one to kick off season six with a reunion between Khloé and her ex-husband, Lamar Odom. It’s an attention-grabbing move that harkens back to the days of Sweeps Week, if that were a thing for streamers: The pair’s seven-year marriage, which was heavily featured on Keeping Up and their spinoff Khloé & Lamar, officially dissolved after Odom’s overdose at a brothel in 2015, and this episode marks their first meeting in nine years.

Bringing back Lamar for this scene feels like a Hail Mary from production to remind viewers why they started watching in the first place, an idea that came from a brainstorming session that was in turn pitched to Khloé by production as a nostalgia play. It’s inorganic and sweaty, and not only because Lamar was quite literally sweating profusely. The show barely makes an effort to even pretend that this meeting came about organically; we’re told that Khloé has a few items of Lamar’s (again, from NINE years ago) that she’d like to return. But as the moment gets closer, Khloé even admits that she wished she didn’t have to have this face-to-face meeting, which makes this all feel particularly odd, because she doesn’t have to do any of this! Send the stuff back in the mail! None of this had to happen and there’s no real reason that it is, other than a desperate attempt to rekindle the spark — not between Khloé and Lamar, but between viewers and the show.

What makes it even clearer that this little reunion is about us and not Khloé is her insistence that she feels absolutely nothing toward Lamar, a sentiment that’s bizarrely juxtaposed with production dialing up the schmaltz to a ten. They even go so far as to pull footage from E! of the pair on Keeping Up and Khloé & Lamar, complete with sentimental music, to remind us of our own investment in this story. These moments aren’t just highlights from their relationship, they’re also highlights from the family’s reality-television oeuvre, showing us real and vulnerable moments of an actual relationship that began and blossomed in front of the cameras.

But by showing us these highlights, they’re really reminding us of what we no longer get from the Kardashians, who are now far more resistant to the idea of sharing their romantic relationships with the cameras like this. It doesn’t seem like Kylie’s bringing Timothée Chalamet on a cast trip anytime soon, and Kim similarly continues to play coy as long as possible about anybody she’s dating. It’s a change that’s completely understandable, but nonetheless antithetical to how openly they used to film. That openness not only won us over and made us invested in their lives, it was also the source of the Kardashians’ cultural currency. It’s only natural that as that openness has waned, so has their influence — so in a desperate attempt to jump-start our interest, The Kardashians defrosted a story line from ten years ago that they knew the audience was already invested in. And while that pandering did exactly what they’d hoped — here we are talking about it, after all — it’s telling that the show assumed its audience is more interested in what this family was up to ten years ago than what they’re up to right now.

The conversation that ended up playing out between Khloé and Lamar, stilted and awkwardly staged though it may have been, wasn’t uninteresting. The brick wall Khloé had up the entire time was the most authentic part, and thus the most compelling, and it was admittedly fascinating to hear her talk through the traumatic end of that relationship, even though she did so apathetically. But the question hanging over the entire exchange continued to be why are we even doing this? It’s presented as some attempt for long-awaited closure, but for who? Khloé didn’t seem to have any need or desire for closure, and a hopeful Lamar seemed to view this more as an opening. At best, it’s closure for the audience, finally tying up the loose ends of a marriage that we were given unique access to as we watched it play out in our living rooms for years. This odd trip down memory lane was a confirmation to the audience that the Kardashians we fell in love with have moved on to bigger, if not necessarily better, things.