The Kardashians Are in Their Flop Era

Twenty-first-century pop culture can be divided into two halves: Before Kim, and Anno Kardashiani. These roughly correspond to the period between 2000 and 2006 (B.K.), and 2007 onward—the year that budding socialite premiering to instantly diminishing returns—in large part owed to the sisters’ own clear disinterest in continuing—the internet has declared again and again and again that the family is so over.

Here is one more proclamation, for the people in the back: The Kardashians are boring now.

It’s become especially obvious over the last year how much this once-gilded family’s shine has dimmed, even among those that excused the irony of their popularity in the first place. (Can any of these people even, like, play an instrument? A sport? Draw? What talents do they have other than business acumen?) Take Kylie, for instance: Sales of Kylie Cosmetics, which controversially earned the youngest Jenner a spot on the Forbes Billionaires List, have declined year-over-year since their highs in the late 2010s. Her attempt at broadening out into swimwear was phased out after leaving nary a mark, and Khy, her recently launched fashion brand, is similarly unimpressive. If anything, the 26 year old is best known right now for her relationship with Timothée Chalamet, which has generated more backlash than I care to link to.

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Khloé’s inclusive clothing line Good American, whose jeans I’ve heard are very good, is doing well for itself. (Cosmo says she’s making an “absurd amount of money,” in fact.) But while she was often heralded as the most fun of the bunch, the issues within her relationship with Tristan Thompson have understandably zapped her of much of her humor, at least on screen. Meanwhile, Kourtney, whose dynamic with Khloé provided a lot of Keeping Up’s energy, is focusing on her new marriage to Travis Barker and stepping away from the limelight. A contributing factor to her diminished presence in the Kardashian family’s public sphere was also a dramatic moment from Season 4, perhaps the only one to generate any news. Kim and Kourtney got into an explosive fight in which Kim effectively told Kourtney that no one liked her. That doesn’t exactly inspire one to stick around, especially when she has a new baby and husband to attend to.

Meanwhile, Kendall’s tequila brand is performing well. But Kendall will hardly save the family from falling into irrelevancy. She is exceedingly boring, the most exciting thing about her being her on-again, off-again relationship with Bad Bunny. (This take has transcended the subjective into fact; in The Kardashians’ Season 5 premiere, Kendall literally refers to herself as “the most boring sister.”)

Kim, however, is an interesting case—relatively speaking, of course, for none of them is particularly interesting. Skims, her shapewear company, is successful, and Kim continues to make the requisite random public appearances. Why was she at Netflix’s Tom Brady roast earlier this month? What was she giving a talk about at a conference in Germany? Unclear on both ends, but she took a big L on the former. Kim was booed heavily at the roast before she even started, a moment that the family reportedly pressured Netflix, which hosted the event live, to remove from its recording several days later. It’s spoilsport behavior that makes you look insecure, a bad look for someone who once “broke the internet.”

Following that event up with a strange outfit at this year’s Met Gala, compounded by an ill-advised dye job, did Kim no further favors. She also allegedly gave up on her much-mocked dreams of becoming a lawyer, which generated a bit of buzz. But even if we mostly talked about her haute couture cardi and bad LSAT scores to mock them, at least we were talking about them, right? Therein lies the power of Kim.

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But we used to talk about Kim for other, frankly more engrossing reasons. A bad outfit and minor comedy show controversy just doesn’t compare to Kim’s whirlwind love affair with Pete Davidson, for example. That gossip page-ready relationship began when she hosted Saturday Night Live in October 2021. Some of her sketches, by the way, still rank among the show’s most-viewed on YouTube—something that I just don’t think would happen today, were she to somehow be asked to host again. Just as Pete’s love life was all the rage in 2021, so was that of the newly divorced Kim. A large part of that was due to, yes, the fresh break-up, especially since her ex-husband is the combustible and outrageous Kanye “Ye” West. No one should wish to return to the days of Ye’s antisemitic rants, horrible comments about Kim’s parenting, and “Skete” jokes. But they certainly kept Kim and the rest of the Kardashians as the kind of pop culture figures that we have always expected them to be.

Perhaps the family’s more muted public presence is intentional. Just as they once made efforts to be hyper-present, maybe they no longer want their personal lives held up to such extreme scrutiny. They could be perfectly content with their uncontroversial, unassailable level of ubiquity, the kind that involves only showing up to places where they are paid to show up.

Even if that’s not the case: If the family’s relative silence, stability, and/or forgettable drama means the Kardashians are flopping, is flopping really such a bad thing? It’s not like their bottom line is really hurting, even if their personal brands aren’t as ubiquitous as they once were. And, ultimately, they probably won’t ever go away. It’s hard to imagine, though, that we’ll ever be analyzing the Kardashian’s cultural power in the same way as we once so breathlessly did. But we’ll certainly keep decrying their dullness for as long as they continue to be dull—and that very well could be forever.

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