“The Kardashians,” Hulu’s reality docusoap about Kim, Khloé, Kourtney and family, treads an uneasy line — aiming to be a warts-and-all portrait of family life that is also, in the end, as frictionless as a Cybertruck ride through Calabasas. Big issues are raised and then fade into the gloss; that’s how it’s been since the show’s inception, when “The Kardashians” succeeded “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” which aired on E! until 2021, having begun more goofily as a would-be family sitcom. In the past, I’ve criticized these shows for soft-pedaling what’s going on with what’s going on with the Kardashians in their real lives. But it turns out sometimes avoidance is better TV.
Somehow already in its sixth season on Hulu, the Feb. 6 premiere featured the start of a two-part reunion of Khloé Kardashian and her ex-husband Lamar Odom, and pushed the show to its limit. It was at once as real and unresolved as reality TV gets, and something that this viewer regretted having been privy to. In the Season 6 premiere, Khloé informs the camera that she is looking to shed past baggage before her 40th birthday. Part of that process includes closure with Odom, the former Los Angeles Laker whose marriage to Khloé, after a monthlong courtship, was featured on “Keeping Up,” and formed the backbone of the E! spinoff “Khloé & Lamar.” Speaking in a controlled monotone directly to the audience, Khloé informs us that “Lamar was and is someone that was the love of my life.”
After their 2009 wedding, Odom was distinctive on screen for his warm and pleasant presence amidst a sometimes chilly landscape; he brought out the best in Khloé’s often camera-shy brother Rob, too. After they split in 2013, Odom’s path later came to include a DUI and a 2015 hospitalization for a life-threatening medical incident after he overdosed at a Las Vegas brothel. Since that time, Odom has appeared on “Dancing With the Stars,” but has been an otherwise elusive presence. Khloé’s on-camera declaration, to longtime friend (and scene partner) Malika Haqq, that she wants to see Odom to pass on various personal items of his she’d ended up with speaks to a certain strength of character, and to an enduring bond. That the transfer of property must happen on camera speaks to a sense that, for Khloé’s family, that which does not happen on camera is somehow less than real.
The former athlete’s appearance is treated as cause for grand suspense in the season premiere, with Khloé recounting her ministrations in the confessional as she waits for him to show up to their rendezvous at Malika’s house. (He’s half an hour, and counting, late when she recalls seeing him “doing things that he, in my opinion, shouldn’t have been doing” in the midst of his recovery from the overdose, just before she cut ties.) It doesn’t impugn Odom’s character and is not meant to suggest he’s been doing anything but recovering since that time to say that when he finally arrives, Odom is shaky. Plainly nervous to be on camera, Odom gazes into the middle distance until Khloé declares “I’m not going to do or say anything that’s scary”; she asks him why he’s nervous and then needles him, perhaps justifiably, about the last time they met being a final break. “He’s visibly uncomfortable, he’s nervous, he’s sweating,” Khloé observes to camera, before wondering if Odom thinks she will yell at him.
Which might well be a fair response! Khloé legitimately went through marital hell. She can have her say. But something about the dangling of Odom, returned to the Kardashians’ world so that narrative tension can be wrung out of how Khloé will respond to him, feels less than kind. He’s at once the object of the scene — there to absorb Khloé’s frustration and quietly expressed scorn, as she recalls the end of their marriage and vents about him showing up late — and its quiet subject, as the viewers are invited to do a wellness check on a TV personality we remember in a bit steadier condition. He’s never, though, quite as human as Khloé is allowed to be. But then, it’s not his show.
In gratitude for his belongings being returned, Odom declared “my wife is the shit” to Khloé as the season opener ended, to which she responded with an understandably impassive “calm down.” And in the season’s second episode, Odom became increasingly affectionate, in an apparent bid to, like a sort of NBA Gatsby, relive his past. At least that’s how it looks from the outside, as he’s shown tearily explaining to Khloé that he “can’t fathom” his past deeds before telling her that he hopes to prove that he’s “a changed man.” He seems more comfortable; he also seems to want a benediction, or a reconnection, that’s just short of being there. “This has been very awkward,” Khloé says, just before Odom says that he expected awkwardness, though he’d hoped “his wife” might have kissed him. Khloé is compelled to correct him; in a reality Odom won’t acknowledge, they’re no longer married.
Say this much: Khloé and Odom seem to part as friends, even despite Odom serving a cake with a frosted message that commemorates their wedding anniversary. (She claims to find it “sweet” but is otherwise emotionally unmoved.) But the whole drama is an oscillation to the far end of disclosure on a show that has tended to struggle to find its own sweet spot. In the early going of “The Kardashians,” the series was a fairly bland infomercial for its central family’s fashion- and entertainment-industry concerns.
My 2022 review of “The Kardashians,” later misleadingly paraphrased on-air by Kim to suggest that I solely felt Khloé ought to have discussed her surrogacy journey more, was followed by a change, or maybe it was just a happy coincidence that the plotting improved. In 2023’s Season 3, a season-long feud between Kim and Kourtney over who truly had the rights to the concept of vacationing in Italy was both juicily intimate and appropriately low-stakes. After all, it’s become increasingly clear that Kim — for instance — can never actually address the ongoing nightmare of sharing four children with Kanye West because… well, because she shares four children with him. Besides, that drama would be more than this show could bear.
But this show also is not quite flexible enough to not crack under the strain of bringing a diminished Odom back in order to place a benchmark on Khloé’s personal growth. Their relationship, and Khloé’s hurt around its ending, was real — that much seems clear from Khloé’s closed-off, self-protective reaction to Odom. But Odom is real too. And the kinder form of love would have been to allow him to make whatever steps forward in their respective processes of this divorce — one he won’t or can’t acknowledge happened — off camera.
