Khloé Kardashian has revealed that she was initially against joining Keeping Up With the Kardashians, saying her mother Kris Jenner “conned” her into participating.
Speaking on The Morgan Stewart Show podcast, Khloé shared that she and her sister Kourtney Kardashian were reluctant to let cameras into their lives in the early 2000s.
“I never was like, ‘Gosh, I gotta be famous. I need to be on TV,’” Khloé said. “Kourt and I, when we were approached to do the show by my mom and Kim [Kardashian], we said, ‘No, we’re not doing this show.’”
At the time, the sisters were focused on running their boutique, Dash, in Calabasas, handling everything themselves without staff.
Explaining how their stance changed, Khloé said, “How my mom conned us into doing it was, she said, ‘Think of it as a commercial for the store,’” adding, “Cause all we wanted to do [was focus on the store].”
She also reflected on how hands-on their work was before reality TV fame. “We had no employees. It was just me and Kourt,” the 41-year-old continued. “We had a kids’ store and the women’s store. And she was at the kids’ store; I was at the women’s store. We did everything—the cleaning, the taxes, the steaming of the clothes. We had not one employee. We didn’t know what the f–k we were doing.”
Despite their initial hesitation, the show went on to become a major success. Keeping Up With the Kardashians premiered in 2007 and ran for 20 seasons, spawning multiple spinoffs and turning the Kardashian-Jenner family into global reality TV stars.
After the original series ended in 2021, the family returned to television with The Kardashians, which continues to follow their lives.
Reflecting on the franchise’s long-running success, Kris Jenner recently shared her perspective during an interview at an Oscars event.
“We’re filming, right now, season 28, if you add them all up,” she said. “The best one was the first one, and the other best one is the one we’re doing right now. Everything in the middle is just a blessing.”
She added, “I have the best home movies in the world. We thought we would do it and see what happens and before we even finished half of the first season, they picked up for season two, so we got so lucky and we loved doing it.”
Kris also dismissed the idea of a personal spinoff, saying, “I’ll leave that to the kids at this point. I love doing what I’m doing. We love doing the show, but I’ll leave that to the rest of them for a bit.”