Because one entertainment channel – E! – is now apparently not enough to cover the merry adventures and misadventures of America’s royalty, The Kardashians (and their latest doings on Keeping Up With the Kardashians Season 7), now Oprah Winfrey has decided to interview them on Oprah’s Next Chapter: The Kardashians – Part 1 on her Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), a network that started off with great promise and now is instead programmed with Dr. Phil re-runs, 48 Hour re-treads and rom-com movies starring Kate Hudson. Oh Oprah, please, just admit you made a mistake with the network and go back to your old show. Or, better yet, resurrect All My Children and One Life to Live and see how many viewers you’ll get then!
I think we know that we’re in for an interview filled with easy to answer, non-confrontational questions when Oprah starts out with calling the Kardashians the “reigning royal family of reality TV”. In the first segment of the Oprah Kardashians interview, we learn that, among the clan, the Kardashians/Jenners have a stake in over 30 products and that, according to Khloe Kardashian Odom, all they ever really “wanted (was) to be successful”. Fame, apparently, has nothing to do with the constant stream of paid appearances and nightclub parties. Kourtney Kardashian claims she’s “not comfortable with being famous”. Sure.
Kim Kardashian tells us that everything we see is a real situation and we hear that they don’t play “characters of ourselves at all”. (Kind of like the wig-wearing characters Kim portrayed in one of the recent episodes of Keeping Up With the Kardashians Season 7). When talking about their parents’ divorce, Kourtney weighs in on how she’s scared of marriage (and wouldn’t you be if your potential husband was Scott Disick?) but that she’s just as committed as someone who’s married. (Or maybe she said she should be committed before she marries Scott. I’ll have to check my DVR and get back to you on that).
The four Kardashian siblings are questioned during the Oprah Kardashians interview about if “your mother is pimping out her children”. Naturally, they all jump to Kris Jenner’s defense and say they’ve never felt exploited. They turn to their mother for everything and say they can tell her anything. Oh boy, here comes a confession we didn’t need to hear.
Kim tells us she started dating when she was about 12 years old and that, by the time she was “almost 15”, she was ready to have sex with her “long-term” boyfriend. So what did she do but go to her savvy Mom and tell her this and what did Momager do but get Kim on birth control to make sure everything would be OK. I’m sure that’s what every mother in America would do for her 15-year-old daughter (as opposed to telling them to wait to grow up or become more mature or realize that this is a bad decision for someone so young or even say “go to your room”) so there’s no need for me to make some snarky comment about this. I’ll leave that up to you.
The next segment was Oprah’s one-on-one sit-down with Kris Jenner. Oprah points out that Keeping Up With the Kardashians hits a nerve with the American realty TV-watching public; you either love them or hate them. (Thank you for that news flash, Oprah). We learn that Kris was inspired to pursue a television show by watching The Osbournes. (Oh, Ozzy and Sharon, now we have to blame you for our Kardashian-saturated culture). And, besides a rehashing of her affair when she was married to Robert Kardashian, the only really new thing we learned during this portion of the Oprah Kardashians interview was that the Kardashian kids called OJ Simpson “Uncle OJ” and that, when Robert Kardashian represented OJ in his trial for murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, Kris Jenner was not angry at him but “disappointed and confused”. (An interesting sidebar here was a clip from a Barbara Walters interview with Robert Kardashian in which he admits that, after the fact, he had doubts about OJ’s innocence. I’m not sure how many people – including Oprah – still think that OJ didn’t do it).
In the final segment of part 1 of the Oprah Kardashians interview, Oprah asks Kim Kardashian (she of the incomparable beauty, according to Oprah) about her ill-fated marriage to he-who-shall-not-be-named. When Oprah asks her if the marriage was a stunt, Kim says – with a completely straight face – that “we don’t do anything for ratings”. Oprah, to her credit, calls her out on this and says that getting married on national television would naturally get the Kardashians big ratings but Kim claims she would have had the huge, over-the-top wedding whether it was televised or not. It’s up to you whether you believe this or not. She admits she didn’t think the marriage through, that they really hadn’t spent more than a few days in a row together before the marriage and that “once we moved in, I knew he was not the one”. She also says that everyone around her knew it was the wrong decision, including Kris Jenner who asked Kim the night before the wedding if she wanted out. I’m thinking Kim might have wanted to listen to her Mom on that advice
And then the question we all know we wanted Oprah to ask. Oprah asks Kim if she’d be famous if there hadn’t been a sex tape featuring Kim and her former boyfriend. Kim acknowledges that the sex tape was how she “was introduced to the world” but says that she’s worked 10 times harder to have people see the real her and that the fallout from the sex tape was the impact it had on her family. She says she’s learned a valuable lesson. We’ll see.
In part 2 of the Oprah Kardashians interview, we’re promised more discussions with Kim about her future, a sit-down with Khloe and Lamar Odom about babies and what’s more important (their relationship or the show) and a talk with Scott and Kourtney in which Scott admits he’s an a**hole. Finally, something Scott and I can agree on.