House of Kardashian review – this exhaustive show turns Kim and co’s circus into a meaningful story
The Guardian says House of Kardashian is put together in such a way that it may well act as a Rorschach test. You might come away from this three-hour documentary series thinking that the Kardashian-Jenner family is a pioneering model of female-led entrepreneurship and empowerment – or that they are a late-stage capitalist nightmare, changing society for the worse, atop their gilded mountains of cash.
At the end of each instalment, there is a note to say that the Kardashian-Jenners (and later, Kanye West) declined to be interviewed. Mostly, it features peripheral friends – intriguingly, one particularly strident contributor, Rachel Sterling, is referred to as a “former friend” of Kim’s, though sadly they don’t explain why – and colleagues from over the years, though Caitlyn Jenner is interviewed at length, and has been as close to the inner workings of this many-headed beast as anyone is likely to get.
It works as a potted history of the family’s rise to fame, notoriety and wealth, suggesting that their current value, as an empire, stands at roughly $2bn (£1.65bn). It also works as an analysis of how they came from, fitted into and even shaped the cultural and social climate of the modern age. Each episode focuses on a different Kardashian – Kris, the mother, then two of the three sisters, Kim and Kylie – as representative of a different era, though each attempts to wrangle the entire circus into a coherent and chronological narrative.