Is "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" Getting Kancelled?

The Kardashians. That family name is just so known now, so present in the thick greasy air of America, that it's easy to forget that they are famous for something in particular. Meaning, they do still have that reality show, Keeping Up with the Kardashians. That is still the original source of their fame, though it is perhaps no longer what they are most known for. Like, the Kanye thing for Kim is pretty big, and Kris and Bruce Jenner have their big public divorce. And the other ones, Krandall and Khrysanthemum and Kegel and Kronos or whoever they are, they've got their own shows and modeling gigs and famous boyfriends I guess.

But, yes, that original show, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, is where it all started. And that show, now in its ninth season, is starting to show signs of age. The ninth season premiere was on Sunday night, and the ratings, while enough to finish at number two among all cable shows, were down more than 20 percent from last year's premiere. Not even the big Kris/Bruce divorce drama could draw people in! So it is very possible, and we should start preparing for this, that soon there will be noKeeping Up with the Kardashians.

Which means that Korbin and Khaleesi and Kaptcha and all the rest will soon be unmoored, floating free-form around the cultural Oort cloud. Which could be a good thing-maybe eventually they'll just float away and disappear-but it could also mean disaster, Kardashians bumping into other spheres and arenas in which they don't belong, Kardashians muddling other celebrity equations, Kardashians willy-nilly all over the place, burrowing into things with their tanned leather claws.

It'd be nice to know that the show finally wore out its welcome, but the first law of Kardashidynamics states that their energy cannot be destroyed, it simply transfers, it becomes something else. What will that something else be? It is that unknown that should keep us up at night. Fear the future. But fight the future, too.