Keeping Up With the Kardashians

No other family has reflected our national values or the contemporary celebrity landscape as powerfully as the Kardashian-Jenners. Whether you view them as American royalty or pop-culture caricatures, there’s no denying the impact of reality television’s first family on both the genre they transformed and society at large. Over the course of 20 seasons on E!, viewers laughed, cried, and grimaced along with the family as they evolved from fame-adjacent Calabasas residents to full-fledged celebutantes and business moguls. The most striking foreshadowing of the incredibly lucrative empire they’d construct (see: Kylie Cosmetics, Skims, Good American, Poosh, 818 Tequila, and many, many more brands) arrived in season 6, when Kim Kardashian’s wedding to NBA player Kris Humphries dominated not only the series’ storylines, but also headlines around the globe (a fascination that only grew when they divorced just 72 days later). The ostentatious affair, memorialized in its own E! special, Kim’s Fairytale Wedding, was monetized to the tune of over $3 million—a significant feat at the time, but merely a drop in the bucket by the family’s current standards. —Cady Lang

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