Hulu has ordered a new reality series based around TikTok’s royal family — Charli, Dixie, Marc, and Heidi D’Amelio — seemingly hoping to capture a little bit of what Keeping Up with the Kardashians did for E! back in 2007.
The D’Amelio Show is an eight-part documentary series that will follow the four family members as they go about their day-to-day lives. Expect TikTok dancing, TikTok drama, meetings with executives all over Hollywood, and the types of goofs that worked for other reality shows that followed popular families. It will debut sometime in 2021.
For the D’Amelio family, this is just another project they’re adding to their list, which includes podcasts, a YouTube channel, commercials, television specials, and more. Like the Kardashians before them, the D’Amelios see an opportunity to create an empire out of the fame they’ve recently entered into. Charli, for example, has more than 100 million followers on TikTok — the most of anyone on the app. For Hulu, however, The D’Amelio Show is a necessary addition for its lineup of reality shows and documentary series that the streamer is banking on.
“The D’Amelio Show joins our growing slate of docuseries about the human experience and we’re incredibly excited to partner with the D’Amelio family to offer viewers an authentic look at the complicated lives of these two relatable young women thrust to the top of the social media algorithm,” Belisa Balaban, vice president of documentaries at Hulu, said in a press release.
Just recently, Hulu announced that it signed a massive deal with the Kardashian family for new content (not Keeping Up, which the family announced was ending). Hulu also has reality shows like Taste The Nation with Padma Lakshmi, Eater’s Guide To The World, and the upcoming series The Next Thing You Eat from David Chang and Planet Sex with Cara Delevingne.
(Disclosure: Eater is a Vox Media brand and sister site to The Verge.)
Having the most popular TikTok family also available in a series exclusive to Hulu helps with that growing content arm; an area that Netflix has also invested heavily in over the last couple of years as the genre successfully grows. With Discovery Plus launching in just a few weeks, it’ll also give Hulu some space to compete in the docuseries and reality TV realm, which Discovery (TLC, Food Network, HGTV) owns.
Whether or not The D’Amelio Show winds up being the cultural success that Keeping Up with the Kardashians was in its earlier seasons depends on if people want to see the D’Amelio family in a longer, more narrative-driven space instead of just 60 seconds at a time on their phone.