The kids who want to be Kardashians
“I think the three things I like most about Emma are, you know, she’s hot. She’s easy to look at. She had her drama. I had mine. We could relate. Can’t go wrong.”
The romance flows pure and true in Calabasas Confidential, the new reality TV series on Netflix about rich kids in Los Angeles. I would point out to Dylan, the leery voice behind that unimprovable opening sentence, that that’s two things at most, not three. But, while I think he probably can count that high, this is a world in which people talk in so much drawling filler (“Hiiiii”, “What up!”, “Right on…”) that I can imagine complex sentences making use of lists are rather challenging. Fried by fame, blinded by sunshine and brought up to believe the best thing they can be is a beautiful little fool, these are young minds both empty and diseased.
Calabasas is home to the disease’s patient zero, Kimberly Noel Kardashian, and, like lepers to a colony, several other victims have clustered nearby (the neighbouring Jenner family branch, the YouTuber Jake Paul). Viewers will therefore be familiar with the territory, a scrub of ex-desert now carpeted Miracle-Gro green, and full of so many vile mansions you wonder if even the servants get their own turreted monstrosity. These landscapes are home to a particular genre of reality TV that appears to consume some millions of hours of human attention a day: watching rich people bitch and argue (I have known family members who spend time following housewives in Atlanta called Drew and Porsha). The innovation of Calabasas Confidential is to trap its prey when they’re young. The cast knew each other at high school and have reunited after college graduation. Perhaps the producers are hoping for something more like lamb than mutton. But the only difference with the middle-aged version of these programmes is a decline in mystery: of course these kids behave like spoilt brats because that’s what they are.
Bechdel Test non-compliant, the plotlines of Calabasa Confidential are motored by conversations about, and competition over, young men. Jemma used to date Dylan who cheated on her with Emma but now he’s talking to “Suede”, a name that doesn’t come with quotation marks, but demands them. Meanwhile, Hercy (a boy’s name; short for Hercules) used to date Kimora but now he’s messaging Emilie, Kimora’s “best friend”, another phrase that, in this world, demands inverted commas. The rest of the group – there are loads of them, and their names helpfully flash up on the screen when they appear – take sides in each of these feuds, forming up, dispersing and then changing sides like flocks of starlings. That is, they meet for cups of green coffee and call each other sluts.
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There’s an exoticism to these habits of life that is at least zoologically fascinating. Everyone wears sunglasses all the time, presumably to hide their wall-eyed stares. People have amazing names (Hercy’s dad is the rapper Master P). No one is especially self-aware – coming across an old high school yearbook, Jemima trills, “Senior Superlatives! Oh my God, I won biggest ego!” And they have an insatiable demand for floorspace. (“I also need, like, three bedrooms to myself,” says Nicole.) Perhaps relating to the proximity of Hollywood, no one is at all camera-shy, and they can all cry on command. Everyone’s very rich, everyone’s very stupid, and everyone’s very rude.
But it’s that camera-confidence that might be their most perturbing quality. The novelist David Foster Wallace used to worry that Americans were watching so much television that they were becoming ironically self-conscious; they were behaving like they too were being filmed and watched. Calabasas Confidential is about a smaller and more futuristic human type. This is the next generation of reality TV stars, and it grew up in the genre’s capital. You can imagine Keeping Up with the Kardashians playing in their nurseries.
To embrace a career of having your lifestyle filmed for entertainment is, for them, like a Sheffield lad following his father down the pit. They are whatever comes after “famous for being famous” – famous for being famous for being famous? To live for television like this, and to have always known that was your fate and your industry – what does that do to people? No rush, though: we’re all going to find out. Calabasas Confidential, season 27 – stream all episodes now.
Calabasas ConfidentialNetflix
[Further reading: Steven Spielberg goes home]
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