Keeping Up With the Kardashians has been on air for ten years, and through it all the famous family has documented every aspect of their lives.
In honor of the reality show’s 10th anniversary, Khloe Kardashian penned a first-person essay for Glamour, which details her highs and lows as a reality TV personality.
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Kardashian, 33, revealed that she and Kourtney, 37, resisted the idea of their reality show at first.
“At my mom’s house, we’d always have these big family dinners,” she said. “Ryan Seacrest came to one and was like, ‘You guys are crazy. You need to be on TV.’ My mom [Kris Jenner] and my sister Kim wanted to do the show, but Kourtney and I were really against it.”
“We were like, ‘No — we love our little life. We love what we’re doing,’ ” she continued. “But Ryan said, ‘We need the whole family or nobody at all.’ So my mom kind of sold it to us as a great commercial for our stores. We were like, ‘Ugh, fine.’ I remember we found two girls who worked across the street from us and asked them to run Dash and Smooch for three days while we shot.”
Since then, their lives have completely evolved on camera for the world to see. “We film six days a week, 12 to 18 hours a day, every single day,” Kardashian said. “When you compile that much footage into 13 or 14 44-minute episodes, you can find a lot of drama.”
“Not every episode is juicy to us; it’s only juicy to the audience,” she continued, admitting that her sister Kim‘s Paris robbery and Caitlyn Jenner‘s transition was something the KUWTK cameras didn’t need to film.
“Things like Kim’s robbery or Caitlyn’s transition? That’s the kind of stuff we wish we had never filmed,” she said. “We aren’t ever like, ‘Oooh! Let’s do this for season nine.’ “
“That’s the sad thing,” she added. “We can’t deal with things in a normal period, like normal people. We have to kind of brush ourselves off and move on.”
“This is our life, and these are the things that happen,” she went on. “And it’s funny — when we decide not to shoot things, people feel slighted. But when we film too much, they’re like, ‘Oh, you never should have filmed that.’ It’s a catch-22.”
Kardashian also revealed a moment she wasn’t too proud of that was caught on film, her 2007 DUI.
“That’s one of those times you wish you didn’t have cameras on you,” she admitted. “It was more embarrassing than anything else. I mean, I could have hurt or killed someone. But, you know, that happened. And I dealt with it. And it will never happen again.”
The E! personality says the first time she received negative attention was during her divorce from Lamar Odom in 2014.
“That was a really, really hard time for me,” she recalled. “It was the first time I had received really negative attention. I’ve never been a party girl, but [drinking] is something I turned to. I was probably drunk while we were filming season 9.”
The Kardashian clan is preparing for the premiere of their 14th season, and still “never could have fathomed the longevity of the show.”
“When it comes to our drama, we are a large, blended family,” she said. “If you put a microscope over any family for 10 years, you’re bound to find cracks in the foundation. That’s just the name of the game, and we’re strong enough to endure it.”
The Keeping Up With the Kardashians season 14 premieres on Oct. 1 at 9 p.m. ET on E!