The new Kardashians? TikTok titans Charli and Dixie D’Amelio set to conquer TV
Unless you are old enough to have followed the OJ Simpson trial in real-time, chances are that you did not hear the Kardashian name before the mid-2000s. Today, it’s hard to find anyone who hasn’t heard of either Kim or Kourtney or Khloe or Kylie and Kendall Jenner, even if they have never seen a single episode of ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians’. Are Dixie and Charli D'Amelio looking for the same fame, notoriety, or pop-cultural ubiquity? Are they trying to be the Kardashian equivalent of Gen-Z?
The D’Amelio sisters, 20 and 17, are TikTok giants. With more than 180 million combined followers across social media, they are a force to be reckoned with. The sisters’ parents, Marc and Heidi D'Amelio are now social-media influencers, too, with approximately 10 million TikTok followers each. While Charli is focusing on her TikTok presence, Dixie is branching off into music, she signed a record deal with HitCo Entertainment in 2020 and has since released six singles. Yet, so far, their fame has yet to reach the Kardashian heights. But the young content creators are soon going to change that.
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Last month, it was announced that along with their parents Mark and Heidi, Dixie and Charli will star in ‘The D’Amelio Show’ on Hulu, which premieres on September 3. The series will chronicle how the family has learned to navigated fame with two teenagers in the spotlight.
“We’ve seen some of it,” Charli said of the series back in August. “I think the way that the story is being told is just -- it’s so awesome. And this is another thing where, anyone can say whatever they want, but we’re just so proud of how this story is being told and how we’re really getting to speak our minds, that we’re just so happy and so excited for everyone to see it.”
As per a new Wall Street Journal report by John Jurgensen, in the show, mental health will be a focus. Reportedly, in one scene, then-16-year-old Charli slumps on the kitchen floor, scanning messages stirred up by an online rumor predicting her death. “Now, everyone’s just like, ‘Kill yourself’,” she is seen telling her sister.
The eight-episode documentary series will follow the family as they navigate viral fame both as a business and “a surreal group experience.” Marc said, “We realized quickly that people really don’t know who we are from these 15-second videos on TikTok and photographs on Instagram.” Heidi, a former personal trainer, said, “There was a lot of hate that the girls were getting. People were making a narrative of who they thought we were.” Marc also said, “Look, if people aren’t going to like us, they might as well get to know us first.”
But will Hulu -- or for that matter, television, serve as a good medium to elevate their already considerable fame? As per the Journal, between 2018 and 2020, the total use of TV by teens fell 17 percent. “If you look at the demographic who follows the girls,” Marc said, “it’s a lot of teenage kids, and a show like this gives us the opportunity to get our brand out to a bunch more people who probably aren’t on TikTok or even YouTube or Instagram for that matter.”
“At the moment I joined [the family] there seemed to be this kind of silent agreement among their followers that it was time to turn on them,” said Sara Reddy, the showrunner of ‘The D’Amelio Show’. The producer recalled watching a backlash in real-time while getting to know the D’Amelios in 2020 when they posted a 16-minute video on their family YouTube channel of a dinner prepared by a private chef. Dixie retched on a snail in her paella, and Charli asked for chicken nuggets. Online, the sisters were dubbed rude and spoiled.
“They got to put the cameras down for this and think about their story from a different perspective,” said Belisa Balaban, senior vice president of documentaries at Hulu. “It was probably a relief for them to turn to collaborators, and allow themselves to be subject, and not solely creators, of their own content.”
This is, in a way, different from how the Kardashians went about the process. As per a New York Times report, in 2007, Kris Jenner marched into Ryan Seacrest’s office to discuss an idea for a reality show based on her family. “Like, there’s the little girls, and there’s the older girls, and then there’s my son,” she told the Times. “Everybody thinks that they could create a bunch of drama in their lives, but it’s something that I felt I didn’t even have to think about. It would be natural.”
When Seacrest sent a producer to their house to shoot a short reel at a family barbecue, he was blown away. “On the way home,” Seacrest told the Times, the producer called and said: “‘We have a show. This is going to be amazing.’ Watch the tape, and you know, you see the craziness that is their family.”
‘The D’Amelio Show’, per the Journal, tracks Charli and Dixie’s lives, but shows “surprisingly little of the activity that helped them become famous in the first place: making stuff for social media.” As per their mother, the sisters are reluctant to make a spontaneous, trial-and-error process public. “It was odd to them to have cameras and people watching them when they make content,” Heidi said. “They get shy about it.”
As fans of ‘KUWTK’ would know, this thought process seems almost conspicuously absent in the Kardashian model of family drama. They try, they fail, and they try again. Sure, they are rich and famous. But the Kardashian-Jenner clan is anything but shy about stumbling through life. Or maybe that’s just how Seacrest and the family choose to portray themselves. Either way, the D’Amelios are just starting out. If the Hulu reality show has a 20-season run, perhaps a decade and a half later, one would look at the next generation of media personalities and wonder if they’re trying to go the D’Amelio way, right?