The Pandemic Clarified Who the Kardashians Really Are

The first time the Kardashian family discusses the coronavirus on Keeping Up With the Kardashians, it’s during an early 2020 dinner at Nobu, the famous sushi restaurant offering $80 truffle-lobster plates and a bottles-in-the-club vibe. Kim and her sister Kylie Jenner first negotiate who will get a lychee martini and who will get a mango martini. Kim then proposes that the family all go to Paris Fashion Week to see Kanye West’s runway show. There’s general acclamation for the idea, but Kris, the matriarch of the family, has a question: “Wait, have you guys heard about this new virus?”

Keeping Up With the Kardashian’s 19th season unfolds from there as a perfectly dopey document of the pandemic seeping into the lives of the rich and famous. Most of the Kardashians do go to Paris, but as their family friend Fajer Fahad puts it, “the vibe” is “off,” thanks to the global pandemic. At home in Calabasas, Kourtney Kardashian’s ex, Scott Disick, starts to feel fatigued and worries that the virus is to blame. After a six-hour wellness treatment and consultations with specialists, the diagnosis is that he’s just low on testosterone and should eat more pumpkin seeds. Two episodes later, Kris is disturbed to see Khloé walking around in a face mask. “What is happening with our family?”  Kris says. “We’re falling apart!” Khloé shoots back, “It’s not our family; it’s the world!”

Indeed, the show does seem somewhat committed to the idea that the Kardashians are Just Like Us when it comes to quarantine.“This is going to be tough for a lot of people,” Disick says after reading through some pandemic news coverage, causing Kim to flick her eyes to the side in an expression of either fear or distraction. The show’s timeline eventually catches up to mid-March, when California implemented a mandatory stay-at-home order, and E!’s camera people disappear, as do any visible cooks or maids. The Kardashians are left to film their life with iPhones, and the vibe becomes tepid. They peer listlessly into video calls and get confused about the Zoom interface. They run low on hand sanitizer and Cheetos. They take coronavirus tests and are horrified that the results may not arrive for 10 days.

Lockdown, in a way, suits the modern Kardashian aesthetic. In the show’s early days, the family’s closets and decor flaunted the logo-encrusted, ticky-tacky trends of the late Bush era. Plotwise, the show thrived on the chaos of breakups, makeups, drinking, cheating, and fights. But by Season 19, many of the principal characters have settled into parenthood, the family’s fashions have trended toward maximum minimalism, and the producers seem to want to leave the hunt for juiciness and humiliation to the Real Housewives franchises. Keeping Up With the Kardashians now plays as a sparsely populated fish tank you can enjoy with one eye on your phone. The Kardashians fritter away a huge amount of time, in fact, playing harmless pranks on one another. “If we all got quarantined, we would have a lot of fun,” Kris says in the Nobu episode. Disick replies that they’re basically quarantined already.