Along with once donning Twilight-esque fangs, Kourtney Kardashian shares something else in common with Robert Pattinson. Namely, the 43-year-old mother of three has famously never much liked the mega-project that blasted her into fame, which in her case was Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The reality star even said amidst their family’s talks in the finale that filming it was a “love-hate relationship” for her. And she apparently already has similar complaints about their new show for Hulu subscribers, The Kardashians, to the ones she voiced about their former E! show.
Kourtney Kardashian's Criticisms Of KUWTK
First, let’s back up to the old chestnut itself. For many years on Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Kourtney Kardashian was portrayed as somewhat of a lethargic, annoyed, Daria-type character who just didn’t like filming. Her dissonance with the show seemingly reached its breaking point in Season 18 when she and Kim Kardashian got into a physical fight on-camera. The older sister then quit for a time, citing privacy issues and claiming KUWTK promoted a “toxic environment” for her mental health. Ahead of The Kardashians’ premiere, though, she elaborated to Bustle that it was really the handling of her edit on E! that created the friction. She said,
Shooting our show, it became a really toxic environment at the end for me. I would fight with my sisters. There was, like, just a lot going on. And even for me personally, I wasn’t in the happiest place. I felt like I was being almost a character. This is Kourtney, and she’s in a bad mood, so even though she was laughing really at lunch, we’re going to cut out the laughing and let’s only use the annoying comment that she said.
Kourtney Kardashian ultimately returned to the fold, but her appearances were at her own discretion at that point. In the Keeping Up with the Kardashians final season, fans saw her family pushing for her and Scott Disick to get back together one last time. That obviously didn’t take, seeing as how Kourtney later started dating (and subsequently married) Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker. The drama with the father of her kids, however, apparently plays into her renewed complaints aimed at The Kardashians.
Kourtney Kardashian Isn't Happy With Hulu Edit
It was addressed in the June 8 episode of The Kardashians that the Poosh creator is already bothered about what’s going on behind the scenes. She shared with a friend during a lunch that after the edit of her engagement to Travis Barker came back, she didn’t like how the narrative was being spun around her ex Scott Disick’s feelings on the matter. Kardashian stated:
We like film and have the best time ever, and then we've been watching the edits and we're just so annoyed because they're like swirling us in with this drama. . . . Especially when I saw my engagement episode, editors or whoever is taking it as like, 'Let's take Kourtney. She's the chosen one to be the drama.'
In her view, the edit was enabling an “old narrative” that “doesn’t really exist.” Kardashian added that the engagement episode should’ve been “empowering” in how she left behind toxic relationships and now has a “fairytale love story.”
Kourtney Kardashian noted how the family members are all executive producers on the show, and as such, are able to give notes on what gets filmed. But it wasn’t made clear if her complaints later had an impact leading to storyline change, or if what we eventually saw was the same as what she complained about. They definitely didn't move the discussion about Disick that night (that saw Kendall Jenner catch some flak) to the next episode, as she had hoped. Nevertheless, the show indeed sprinkled some confessionals throughout that reflect the kind of “empowering” vibe Kourtney talked about, even with Disick’s continued presence and point of view.
At the very least, though, it’s a promising sign that Kourtney Kardashian can break the fourth wall and actually speak more about the production side of things on camera now, if that was truly the main issue in this case. Hopefully, the difficulty of Scott Disick’s storyline being married to hers, so to speak, doesn’t force her to bow out of filming once more.
Tune into new episodes of The Kardashians streaming Thursdays on Hulu!
