Is This Why No One Is Watching Life Of Kylie?

Update 21st August 5:50 p.m.: Despite conflicting reports, E! told Refinery29 that Life of Kylie "is currently averaging about 1 million viewers between the ages of 18 and 49, and 1.5 million viewers total."

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We're three weeks into the Life of Kylie, and I still haven’t learned a single new thing about her. There isn’t a single storyline to follow. Even Kylie Jenner’s sentences are choppy and vague in the confessional interviews. It’s not that the show is boring — I will never not be fascinated by anyone who can buy a Bentley SUV on a whim when I have to save for months to purchase an international flight, in coach — it’s just that nothing really happens. Even though it's focused on the youngest, and most popular, member of a family that found its niche giving fans a behind-the-scenes look at everything that happens to them, it’s pretty dull.

I’m not going to write Kylie off as a boring person. I think there’s a reason for the show’s complete lack of lustre: She obviously wants to maintain a higher level of privacy than her older sisters. The one thing that she has been vocal about is that she doesn’t like fame as much as the rest of the world thinks she should. In Sunday night’s episode, she talked about wanting to keep her relationships private, while forgoing the details of why that may be an issue in the first place.

As a result of moments like this, Life of Kylie feels almost strict in its surface-level content. In their recent profile in The Hollywood Reporter to celebrate 10 years of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Kris Jenner and Kim Kardashian talked about their willingness to bare nearly all their personal and familial drama for the show. Kris said one thing in particular that really stood out. “I sat everyone down and said, ‘If we're going to do this, we have to be all in. We have to really be who we are.’” And it worked. Part of the reason why people are still invested 10 years later is because they can rely on the show to present itself with some form of authenticity beyond the headlines they read online months earlier.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the youngest Jenner sibling is willing to take such a risk with her personal life. And for what it’s worth, I don’t blame her. Kylie has had cameras shoved in her face since she was nine years old. She’s been famous since before she could full comprehend what such exposure would mean for her life. Nearly everything she does goes viral. There is hardly a place she can go in America without special accommodations to control the crowds. I completely understand why the thought of revealing any more than she already would on Snapchat would be cringe-worthy for her.

But however honourable the rationale, viewers have to suffer. And this could be the reason for the show’s reported low ratings after the first episode. Perez Hilton called the show a flop based on numbers from Showbuzz that showed a drastic decline in ratings in the show’s second week. (Refinery29 has reached out to E! for comment.) Anyone familiar with Jenner’s brand knows that they can get a fresher take on the 20-year-old from her own social media. Personally, if you’re going to draw me away from Game of Thrones on Sundays, I need more than a tour of a farm.