From Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” to Mary McCarthy’s “The Group,” from “Valley of the Dolls” to “The Golden Girls,” from “Sex and the City,” to, simply, “Girls”—is there anything more interesting than a narrative that follows the intricate dynamics taking place among a group of women? Whether in the form of comedy or drama, these stories come with their stakes already built in. We have love and support and sisterhood, yes, but also tension and competition and jealousy, all working together to help us puzzle out that ultimate question: how should a woman be?
One genre that has excelled in the format is reality television. In Bravo’s incredibly fecund and long-running “Real Housewives” franchise, or in more recent additions, such as Netflix’s “Selling Sunset” and Hulu’s “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” reality TV has recognized the seemingly endless dramatic possibilities that a gaggle of gals can generate on camera. And no one has been savvier about capitalizing on these possibilities than the Kardashian family.
Starting, astoundingly, nearly twenty years ago, and led by the hard-nosed matriarch Kris Jenner, Kourtney, Kim, and Khloé Kardashian and their younger half-sisters Kendall and Kylie Jenner have indefatigably unfurled their lives in front of the gaping eyes and slack jaws of the American public, first on “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” on the E! network, and, more recently, on Hulu’s “The Kardashians.” Along the way, the family’s reality show has become the seed from which a panoply of other projects, opportunities, and attachments have sprouted.
Whether hawking shapewear or tequila, makeup or wellness supplements, the sisters’ business acumen has made them powerful moguls, who run billion-dollar companies, an ascent that has been covered closely on their shows, alongside their growing broods and tumultuous love lives (which, in the past couple of decades, have included boldface-named paramours like Kanye West and Timothée Chalamet, Jacob Elordi and Pete Davidson, Travis Barker and Travis Scott). But even as the lives presented on the show have become more and more high flying, at the foundation of it were always the girls. Their sculpted bodies clad in espresso- and latte-colored athleisure, their impeccably painted visages increasingly made blank by the mounting intervention of needles and scalpels, they kept on convening in their various immaculately white Hidden Hills kitchens, in shuffled and reshuffled duos or trios. Year after year, there they were, munching on Health Nut salads in enormous plastic bowls as they fought and made up, wiped each other’s tears and talked shit behind each other’s backs.
The Kardashians’ smooth-brained, smooth-faced mercenariness has always struck me as dispiriting, and yet it’s also true that they’ve been masters at their game, second to none at transforming their lives into a never-ending content and revenue stream that seems, at this point, almost as natural as the air we breathe. Even if you find the Kardashians’ doings mundane or their values repulsive, there is something undeniably magnetic, and surprisingly difficult to replicate, about their enduring kerfuffles. Partly, it’s their sheer number. (As the reality star and recent Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt said when I profiled him some years ago, of the Kardashians’ ability to generate multiple gripping story lines, “There’s, like, twenty of these people. They are legitimately like a Viking clan.”) Partly, too, it’s their easy willingness to bare much if not exactly all onscreen, almost as if they’ve taken to heart Warren Beatty’s testy comment to his then girlfriend Madonna, in her 1991 tour documentary “Truth or Dare,” “Why would you say something if it’s off camera? What point is there in existing?”
I had the opportunity to mull all of this over as I sat down to watch “The Girls: a Khloé Kardashian Project,” a new six-part reality show on Hulu, and the latest entry in the “Kardashians” universe. Over the years, some of the sisters have tried to launch their own spinoffs. There was the one-season wonder “Life of Kylie,” and “Kourtney & Kim Take New York” (not to mention “Kim & Kourtney Take Miami.”) But the worst offender might be Khloé, the youngest Kardashian daughter, who has given us not only “Kourtney & Khloé Take the Hamptons,” but also “Khloé & Lamar,” “Kocktails with Khloé,” and “Revenge Body with Khloé Kardashian.” In her most recent attempt, Khloé, now forty-two and a mother of two, brings together her “incredible real-life circle of besties” to provide us with another dose of Kardashian-coded glamour and drama. Starting with the theme song, the show promises the same high-femme-business-bitch energy familiar from the sisters’ origin series. (Among the gorgeous lyrical highlights: “High heels, diamond rings, success! Limousines, boss moves, good sex!”) But as I continued to push through the episodes—and “push through” is unfortunately the correct term here—I was struck by the near-complete, print-to-order deadness of “The Girls.” Watching the show, I truly felt as if it was created by Khloé throwing the terms “reality show,” “Kardashian,” “women,” “BBL,” and “money” into Claude and hitting Enter.
“The Girls” stars six L.A.-area influencer-businesswomen types, who, Khloé tells us, have been “part of me and my sisters’ lives for years.” There are Natalie and Olivia, cousins who starred in the twenty-tens reality show “WAGS LA,” when they were both dating professional athletes, and who are now promoting a hair-extension line; there’s Nicole, a Sports Illustrated model and mother of one, also a “WAGS LA” veteran, and now married to a former N.F.L. player; there’s Yris, a mom-of-two lash-extension-and-children’s-deodorant entrepreneur (“no one’s talking about musty kids!”) who’s engaged to a former N.B.A. player; and, finally, Malika and Kadijah, identical twins, both single mothers, who are longtime B.F.F.s of Khloé’s and have appeared often as a kind of Greek chorus on “K.U.W.T.K.” and “The Kardashians.” As for Khloé herself, she checks in mostly over FaceTime here and there, as if grabbing a moment while on bathroom breaks from more important meetings, to coax the girls to tell her “all the tea,” while also providing the platitude-heavy narration that’s supposed to tie the show together. (“I’ll Carrie Bradshaw this thing and break all this drama down for you,” she says, following up with lines like “The thing about expectations is that they’re basically just pre-planned disappointments.”)
The relationships among the cast members, like the narration, feel stiff and false, and the performances on camera have a clocking-in-at-an-office-job vibe. Over the years, shows like “Real Housewives”—and in fact, “The Kardashians,” as well—have increasingly begun breaking the fourth wall, with cast members occasionally admitting that they’re following the requirements of a show rather than, say, hanging out with one another organically. This is fine, and even refreshing, as long as the relationships that develop on camera have the heat and texture of real life. On “The Girls,” the women speak openly of filming-day schedules, and attend Hulu-related events like a promo shoot and a showcase party for advertisers. So much airtime is given over to such gatherings that, in effect, making and promoting the show become the beats of the show.
This could be tolerable, interesting, even, if it weren’t highly doubtful that, were it not for the Hulu paycheck, these women—with the (possible!) exception of the ones who are related—would ever see each other again. Made to be together, the cast members go through the motions weakly: Natalie has too many “boundaries” and is hurt by Yris, who tells her she doesn’t “put [herself] out there”; Nicole and her husband are experiencing a “dry spell” and the other girls bring over “dildos” so their friend can spice up her love life; Malika forms a connection with a TikTok-famous dentist; later, she enjoys a “Botox party” along with her sister and some of the other girls; Olivia is set up on a rollerblading date with Yris’s ex-husband but ultimately decides that they’re better “as friends” (a.k.a. utter strangers); and so on.
With no real chemistry and no real drama, all that’s left to ponder is the kind of depressing ideological messaging that the Kardashians themselves have consistently endorsed, in which one must prize one’s body and one’s money to the near-exclusion of all else. Yris is considering using a surrogate for her third child, but when she learns of the process’s two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar price tag, she decides that it would be better to carry a baby herself, because then she’d need to spend only “fifty K for my titties,” ending up ahead. And, when Malika’s dentist beau sends her flowers, Khloé opines (over FaceTime, naturally) that the bouquet is too small and therefore cheap. “Want my undies to be wet? ’Cause that’s not moisturizing,” Khloé says, with Malika agreeing that the bouquet “didn’t turn on the faucet at all.” By the time I hit Play on the show’s sixth and final episode, I felt myself identifying with Nicole, who, on entering the Hulu Get Real reality-TV showcase event, can be heard muttering, to seemingly no one in particular, “I’m trying to figure out, do I feel dead inside?” Same, girl. ♦
