CHAPTER NINE 

There are as many different versions about how Keeping Up with the Kardashians came to happen as there are Kardashians. According to Kris Jenner, the idea germinated with Deena Katz, the casting director of the reality show I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here, on which Bruce Jenner had appeared as a contestant in 2003. The story Kris tells is that Deena was over at the house one day and observed the everyday chaos. Kris was booking speeches for Bruce while simultaneously answering the phones and talking to the intercom to inform the various kids that they had calls. When Katz saw Kris intercom ten-year-old Kylie, she was flabbergasted. “This is the craziest house I have ever been in,” she purportedly said. “You really need a reality show.” It was Katz who suggested that Kris contact Ryan Seacrest’s people.

Seacrest had exploded to fame as the host of the immensely popular American Idol show and had recently formed a production company, looking for projects. Katz set up the meeting and Kris raced right over to pitch the concept.

In Kardashian Konfidential, the girls credit another family friend with the idea:

One of our mom’s best friends is Kathie Lee Gifford. She’s on the Today show and she’s also the godmother of our little sisters. . . . She’s very religious, and unlike most of our mom’s friends, she likes to talk about religion. We usually only see her a couple of times a year, but we see her now more often because we go on her show. Whenever Kathie Lee would visit us, she’d say, “You are such a crazy family! Where are the cameras? We need cameras in here!” She thought our family would make a really funny show. . . . And literally a week later we had all these people with cameras in our house filming, and it was on the air really soon after that.

Whoever came up with the idea first, Seacrest was open to the idea. The Osbournes, which aired from 2002 to 2005 on MTV, had followed the antics of a famously dysfunctional family, Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne and their kids, and had proved ratings gold for the music network, garnering its highest ratings. It happened to be one of Seacrest’s favorite shows. A year before Kris pitched the show about her family, A&E had debuted a show about rocker Gene Simmons’s family, and it too had proved an immediate success. Seacrest, like most of America, had been observing the meteoric rise of Kim Kardashian following her sex tape and wondered if her family was as colorful as she was.

He dispatched one of his employees to film a Kardashian family barbecue and get a sense of the dynamic. “I remember perfectly,” he told Haute Living magazine. “[The cameraman] called me from their house and said, ‘It’s absolutely golden; you’re going to die when you see this tape. They’re so funny, they’re so fun, there is so much love in this family, and they’re so chaotic—they throw each other in the pool!’ We watched it and rushed the tape to E! immediately, and that was the beginning.”

But according to E!’s vice president of original programming, Lisa Berger, she was not immediately sold on the idea. “The family had been around town with the sister idea [for a series],” she told the Hollywood Reporter. “When we got a call from Ryan Seacrest Productions asking if we had met with the Kardashian sisters, I said, ‘Honest to God, I’m not sure if there’s a show there.’ ” But Seacrest wasn’t about to take no for an answer. If Berger saw what he had seen on the tape, he was sure she would change her mind. He also heavily played up Bruce Jenner’s participation to convince her that they weren’t complete unknowns. Finally she sat down to meet the whole family, and Berger was sold.

“The addition of Kris and Bruce made the show what it is,” she recalled. “What was most noticeable was Kris’s sense of business. She wasn’t a typical overbearing showbiz mom, but she knows how far she can push her kids and how far she can push the show.”

Seacrest enlisted Bunim/Murray Productions, which had produced The Simple Life, and now all that was missing was a title. That fell into place when the Bunim/Murray showrunner, Farnaz Farjam, arrived out of breath for a meeting a few days into production and announced, “I’m sorry I’m late. I’m just having a really hard time keeping up with the Kardashians.”

As filming began, the producers sensed that they had struck gold. “This family is sort of a ready-made sitcom,” Kris’s fellow executive producer Jonathan Murray later observed. “You’ve got Bruce as the conservative dad, you’ve got Kris as the crazy mom and you’ve got Kim the beautiful daughter and Khloé the crazy wisecracking sister. It’s like a producer’s dream.”

When the first episode finally aired on October 14, 2007—only months after getting the green light—Americans didn’t really know what to expect. It’s hard to believe today, but nobody knew anything about the family other than the fact that one of the daughters had starred in a notorious sex tape.

“At the heart of the series—despite the catfights and endless sarcasm—is a family that truly loves and supports one another,” announced Seacrest before the first episode aired. “The familiar dynamics of this family make them one Hollywood bunch that is sure to entertain.”

Bruce Jenner was a name familiar to older Americans, but those who remembered him weren’t really the target demographic. That may be one of the reasons why his name was not featured in the advance hype, nor indeed in the show’s title, even though, as the New York Times would observe, “he is the only person in his household to have actually accomplished anything.”

It is instructive to hear Kris Jenner discuss the family meeting she called before shooting began. Gathering Bruce and the clan together, she reports that she informed them that there was only one formula for the show’s success. “I think the only way to make this show successful is to really be real about it,” she allegedly told them. It’s entirely possible that she meant it at the time.

In the very first scene, before the opening credits roll, the viewer is introduced for the first time to Kim’s ass, as Kris observes her bending to retrieve something from the fridge and disparagingly refers to her “junk in the trunk.” It was an inauspicious start, but also entirely appropriate. Because, before too long, it seemed that Kim’s ass would have an empire all its own. And like virtually everything in the ensuing ten seasons, this was not an accident. Minutes later, viewers meet Kris Jenner for the first time and learn that she is not only the mother but also the manager of her clan.

The significance of Kris’s central role would become apparent early in the episode, when we see Kim on her way to an interview with Tyra Banks, in which the topic of her sex tape would inevitably come up. “When I first heard about the tape, as her mother I wanted to kill her but as her manager I knew that I had a job to do,” Kris confesses. In her review the next day, Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times cynically translates this scene for her readers.

“As a parent, Ms. Kardashian’s mother, Kris Jenner, was concerned for her daughter, she explains. But as her manager, she thought, well, hot-diggity,” writes Bellafante.

Indeed, Kris would eventually concede as much when she admitted to the Hollywood Reporter that she had essentially decided to capitalize on the tape. “I would never think I knew enough to care for a situation like that. What’s that Kenny Rogers line? ‘You got to know when to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em.’ All I knew was that I had to make some lemonade out of these lemons fast. Real fast. . . . My job was trying to take my kids’ 15 minutes and turn it into 30.”

Although the term momager—which she would trademark in 2012—would not come until later, it became apparent to both writers as early as that first episode that Kris was the heart and soul of the family. They might have tuned in to watch Kim, but it was Kris and her antics that would keep viewers riveted, even if the media could not at first see the appeal. Indeed, the critics savaged the show right off the bat. The Times compared it unfavorably to what they called the “gold standard” of the genre, Gene Simmons’s Family Jewels.

Unlike that show, writes Ginia Bellafante, “The Kardashian show is not about an eccentric family living conventionally; it is purely about some desperate women climbing to the margins of fame, and that feels a lot creepier.” Amaya Rivera of Popmatters agreed, laying out the basic premise of the show at the same time.

“As far as plot goes, it’s hard to imagine anything more boring,” she writes.

Kim, Khloé, and Kourtney, all in their late 20s, pal around, argue and fight with one another, and occasionally with their brother Rob—and that’s about it. They take care of and probably negatively influence their 12-year-old half sisters Kylie and Kendall, while their mother Kris (notice all the K’S!) plays best friend to all of them, living it up with the three older girls in Vegas for example, while Bruce Jenner plays the straight man, continually befuddled by the wackiness around him. . . . There is something disturbing about the Kardashians’ intense hunger for fame. But even worse—it is downright boring to watch this family live out their tedious lives.

When the ratings rolled in, however, it was quickly apparent that viewers disagreed. The first episode garnered just under one million viewers, and within a month the show was the highest-rated Sunday-night cable show in the all-important eighteen-to-thirty-four female demographic, garnering a total viewership of 1.3 million.

The viewers had apparently spotted something that the critics had not. It was not so much the dysfunctional family that kept eyeballs glued to the screen. On that score, the Kardashians and Jenners hardly measured up to the wacky Osbourne clan. But they had clearly never seen a mother like Kris, and that hit home during episode 4, when the show appeared to really hit its stride.

It’s not that the first three episodes had any shortage of risqué scenes. In the very first episode, for example, Kim is showing her friend Robin Antin, creator of the Pussycat Dolls, her sixteenth-anniversary gift for Kris and Bruce—a stripper pole installed in their bedroom. Kylie, nine years old and wearing three-inch heels, marches in and announces, “Look what I can do,” before gyrating and performing a suggestive routine on the pole, to the delight of her older sister. In the middle of the routine, Bruce happens to walk in with a stern expression and admonishes his daughter, saying, “I just don’t think that’s appropriate. It’s not funny,” before slinging her over his shoulder and carrying her out of the room. In the same episode, Khloé conducts a mock interview with Kim to prepare for her upcoming Tyra Banks appearance.

“Why did you make a sex tape?” she asks her older sister.

“Because I was horny and felt like it,” Kim replies.

In the second episode, Kris hires a nanny named Bree to look after Kylie and Kendall while she is working at the store. Sure enough, while she is gone, the nanny ends up sunbathing topless by the pool and parading through the house in front of Bruce wearing a bra top.

But that pales in comparison to the premise of episode 3, which has Joe Francis—the sleazy producer behind the Girls Gone Wild topless spring-break videos—calling Kris from jail, where he has been serving time for racketeering and subsequently keeping contraband in his cell. He wants the Kardashian girls to fly to Mexico to be spokesmodels for his new Girls Gone Wild bikini line. While they are off cavorting south of the border, Kris hires Bruce’s son Brody Jenner to babysit for Kylie and Kendall. Brody invites his friend and manager Frankie over, and we see the girls cavorting around the stripper pole, lifting their shirts and mimicking Girls Gone Wild while Frankie videos their antics, offers to be their manager, and says he plans to post the videos on “YouTube or something.”

In its episode review the next day, the Buddy TV blog called the whole episode “rather sad” and asked a pointed question: “The fact that the parents would allow these incidents into the show . . . makes me wonder just exactly what Kris Kardashian is willing to do to get ‘exposure’ for her family.”

It only took one more episode to find out.

Episode 4 starts off with Kris receiving a call from Playboy asking if Kim will pose for their celebrity issue in December. Surely anybody who released a sex tape would have no problem posing for the tamer-in-comparison men’s magazine. Kim’s mother—who had claimed to be mortified by her daughter’s raunchy tape—heads down to the store to share the news. “They really, really, really, really want you to do it,” she tells Kim. “Wouldn’t it be fun?”

Kim is less than enamored of the idea. She shares her thoughts with the viewers. “Ever since the sex-tape scandal, I have to be very careful about how I’m perceived,” she confides. Cut to Kris in the store saying, “I think it would be an awesome experience for you, if nothing else. On top of all of that, it’s a ton of money.”

Kim protests, wondering if she will be seen only as the girl who takes her clothes off. “Can she do anything else?” she wonders if her public will be asking. Soon enough, the family gets in on the act, and we see Kim sitting down and debating the merits. “It’s the December cover, it’s a really big deal,” she says, revealing that she’s been assured Playboy will keep it classy. They worry that Bruce will not approve. “We know what Bruce will think. He’s very conservative,” Kris says. The girls point out that he was once on the cover of Playgirl, so he’s one to judge.

Asked what she thinks Kim should do, Kris is unequivocal. “I think she should do it; it will be really great.”

For the first time, we get a glimpse of the business side of the burgeoning empire. “Of course you want her to do it, with your ten percent commission,” says Kourtney. When Bruce enters the room and finds out what’s going on, he tells Kim that she would be taking a big risk, at which point the girls tease her and suggest she pose instead for Penthouse. “Do it with class and undress that ass.”

Later, we hear Bruce telling Kris that he’s the only one who voted no. “I mean, she’s got a sex tape out and now she’s doing Playboy. Please, this is your daughter,” he says in disgust. Kris assures him that Kim doesn’t have to pose completely undressed. “Okay, she doesn’t have to show nipple,” he retorts. “She’s showing everything else.”

Cut to the Playboy photo shoot, where we see Kim posing in lingerie. The creative director approaches her to suggest she take her top off, as Kris looks on. “I just don’t want to be so exposed for any of the shots,” she says, looking genuinely uncomfortable. In the dressing room, she tells her mother that she is not comfortable posing topless. Kris reassures her that they simply want her to take her clothes off so that they can cover her with something else. We then see a Playboy employee telling them that he has been talking to Hef, who wants to see the shoot “pumped up.” Kim continues to resist being shot topless, even though she already had been in her first ad campaign months earlier, for the Christopher Brian apparel collection, where she posed topless wearing just jeans. Anybody who had seen that campaign—shot before Kim was well known—would suspect that her reluctance was feigned for the cameras, but for those who knew her only as a sex-tape star, it was likely mission accomplished.

Days later, we see the family looking over the finished results, with Kim telling her sisters how Kris had tried to get her to show more skin. “All you have to do is lay there and look gorgeous,” her mother replies.

To this, Kim challenges Kris, “Mom, why don’t you do it?” Kris feigns astonishment. “A naked photo shoot? I would let somebody see me naked, like a photographer?” Next thing you know, Kris has agreed to the idea. Kim tells the viewers that she has decided to play manager for a day and give Kris “a taste of her own medicine.” We then see Kris in a photo studio, naked except for an American flag wrapped around her, and wearing Bruce’s gold medal around her neck. “Can we just do one with her boobs exposed?” Kim asks.

It ends with Kim telling the camera that she can’t believe how comfortable her mom is being naked. Eventually Kris presents the photos to Bruce as a present. If one had to pinpoint the moment that the Kardashians became a cultural phenomenon, it is this episode. It launched them into the zeitgeist, in which they would soon become lodged in a love-them-or-loathe-them place in the American psyche.

Suddenly, people were buzzing about the crazy mom who tried to convince her reluctant daughter to pose nude for Playboy and “Oh, by the way, you may have heard that Kim Kardashian is a slut but she is actually very shy and didn’t want to pose nude until her mother forced her.” Suddenly, people wanted to see more.