Die hard

“Oh, just this Danish series I found on Walter Presents”, or “a French one about a serial killer in the Alps” or “a BBC 4 miniseries from 2007” — believe me, I' ...

Want to treat it as a socio-anthropological study of modern relationships (Love Island) or an observation of familial relationships in an upper-middle-class LA family in pre-Trump and post-Trump America (Keeping Up With The Kardashians)? Watching a reality TV show is only as intellectually intense as you want it to be. Reality TV, as a genre, remains unpretentious and entertaining, and it serves as a means of escapism. Keeping Up With The Kardashians may be nothing more than a showcase of people famous for doing nothing except stir up drama for our entertainment, and that same description might easily be applied to thousands of other reality TV shows that flood an oversaturated market. It actually didn’t take much for me to undergo a remarkably swift transition from reality TV hater to Kourtney Kardashian’s newest fan. All it took to transform me was sitting down with some friends one afternoon earlier this summer; with the TV glaring at us, we had no option other than to (strictly ironically) watch an episode from the mother of all reality TV shows: Keeping Up With The Kardashians.