Ryan Seacrest has held a producer credit on Kim Kardashian’s family television franchise since 2007. That is longer than any of Kim’s three marriages lasted, longer than most executives keep any single job in television, and long enough that a theory has spread online claiming the two of them have quietly stopped speaking. The claim does not hold up against what is actually on the record.
He created Keeping Up with the Kardashians in 2007 and still holds an executive producer credit on its Hulu successor, The Kardashians. Along the way, he has shown up for the family’s personal milestones almost as often as their broadcast ones.
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A show that needed him to look like family
The friendliness between Seacrest and the Kardashians usually gets described as a pleasant side effect of a long working relationship. It reads differently once you consider what the show actually needed in order to work. Keeping Up with the Kardashians only functioned as entertainment if viewers believed they were watching an unguarded family rather than a family being managed by a producer who had spotted a commercial opportunity. Seacrest needed to be experienced, by the family and by the audience, as something closer to one of them than a hired producer usually gets to be.
The way both sides tell the origin story backs that up. Seacrest did not own a video camera good enough to film a family for television when Kris Jenner first approached him with the idea in 2006. He and his production partners bought one from a Best Buy in Los Angeles to shoot pitch footage, which became the first material for Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The series premiered on E! in October 2007, with Seacrest credited as its creator and executive producer. Kim was twenty-six. Seacrest, who had hosted American Idol since 2002, was already one of American broadcasting’s more recognisable voices, and the access he got from day one went well beyond what a newly hired producer would normally expect.
Quick facts
| Ryan Seacrest | Kim Kardashian | |
|---|---|---|
| Role on the franchise | Creator and executive producer | Star and executive producer |
| First worked together | 2007 | 2007 |
| Current major project | Wheel of Fortune, American Idol | The Kardashians, All’s Fair |
Showing up when the cameras were not required
The producer credit is the least interesting part of what has actually happened between them. Nineteen years leaves room for smaller, more personal moments that had nothing to do with a broadcast schedule.
In 2009, Seacrest turned up in the family’s Christmas card, taken from a photograph at Khloé Kardashian and Lamar Odom’s wedding. Kim wrote on her own blog at the time that she had not even noticed he was in the picture until the cards had already gone out, and joked that he had finally got the family membership he had always wanted.
The credit itself never lapsed, even at the moments it would have been easiest to let it. When Keeping Up with the Kardashians announced its ending in September 2020, Kim thanked Seacrest by name in the post breaking the news, alongside E! and the production company Bunim/Murray. The series aired its actual finale the following June, after 20 seasons. Ten months later, when the family launched The Kardashians on Hulu instead of cable, Seacrest kept his executive producer title.
Then, in August 2017, Kim filled in as his co-host on Live with Kelly and Ryan while Kelly Ripa was away, her first time sitting next to Seacrest after a solo stint alongside Ripa back in 2012. Five years later, in September 2022, weeks into the fallout from her split with Pete Davidson and in the middle of her divorce from Kanye West, she was back in that same seat, discussing her dating life with him directly rather than through a publicist.
The theory that they had quietly drifted apart
A theory started circulating on Reddit in 2021 that Seacrest and the Kardashians had fallen out, based mainly on the two of them no longer publicly wishing each other happy birthday online. A report in The Sun went further in April 2022, claiming the family had dropped Seacrest as a producer once the show moved to Hulu.
Neither claim survives contact with the production’s own credits, which have listed Seacrest as an executive producer on The Kardashians every season since it began, or with the timing. Kim’s September 2022 interview with Seacrest happened well after the supposed falling out was meant to have taken place.
What actually changed is simpler than a rift. Keeping Up with the Kardashians ran through E!’s own promotional calendar of red carpets, talk show plugs and joint appearances, all built into how a cable network marketed its shows in the 2010s. Streaming platforms promote differently, relying far less on that kind of shared press cycle, which explains most of the gap fans noticed online without requiring anything to have broken between the two of them.
Where things stand in 2026
Seacrest has spent this year hosting Wheel of Fortune, a role he took over from Pat Sajak in September 2024, and closing out American Idol’s 24th season, which ended in May with Hannah Harper crowned the winner.
His record with E! also includes a misconduct investigation that began in November 2017, when a former stylist filed a complaint against him. Variety, which first reported the complaint, said the network’s outside investigation concluded in January 2018 that there was insufficient evidence to support the claims.
Kim spent part of 2025 completing a four-year law apprenticeship and sitting the California Bar exam, which she did not pass. Season 7 of The Kardashians wrapped on Hulu in December 2025, and Season 8 has been delayed with no confirmed date so far. Hulu separately added all 20 original seasons of Keeping Up with the Kardashians to its library in February 2026, putting both eras of the franchise on one platform for the first time.
Season 8 sits without a release date, which means there is nothing pulling either of their names into a headline together this month. Seacrest’s executive producer credit is still there anyway, filed with the rest of the show’s paperwork, whenever the episodes are finally ready to air.
