Celebrities were a harmless, shiny distraction in the Before time, when showing off was still cool.

They were lifestyle deities gorging the Instagram beast on images of their private jets, lavish vacations and endless wardrobes. Then came the pandemic and celebrities in lockdown were suddenly just like us — albeit with more square footage and luxury amenities.

At first, that made the stars feel closer, more relatable. We watched the real-time dissolve of the Vaseline lens through which celebrities have presented themselves and their carefully branded images. We got to peek at their living rooms and visible roots, as sweats and masks became the new OOTD (outfit of the day, of course). Celebrity quarantine couples Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, and Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello seemed to have the paparazzi on speed dial to capture all the mundane coffee-run and dog-walking domesticity. Gigi Hadid’s and Zayn Malik’s lockdown pregnancy reveal qualified as major news, wiping the cringey Gal Gadot “Imagine” video off the radar.

“What happened to the reality stars? Well, every single major star in the world became a reality star,” says Roz Weston, co-host of Global’s “ET Canada” and morning co-host on Kiss 92.5, about the effect of the pandemic on celebrity newsgathering. “People were only used to seeing high-budget stars fake the ‘quote-unquote’ reality.”

The socially distanced celeb interviews Weston has been getting, he says, are “unfiltered, breaking rules that were never meant to be broken. Nobody would ever get to sit ‘alone’ with Sam Smith in his kitchen, talking about his nan. These are fantastic moments with people and I’ve been really shocked at the openness.”

That said, the Zoom cameras are carefully pointed away from the gold faucets, he adds: “Nobody wants you to know how rich they really are.”

Time and belief were suspended at first, in a blur punctuated by snippets of adorableness: Ina Garten posing with a giant martini for breakfast; Stanley Tucci’s viral Negroni tutorials; and fun celebrity moms Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Garner reading stories to children. Rihanna was in early with major giving through her family foundation and, to the delight of everyone, she enthusiastically joined in on virtual dance parties. Influencers, including Kylie Jenner at the behest of the U.S. Surgeon General, talked up public health responsibility with their followers.

But then, as the weeks dragged on, and our own financial worries and creeping unease grew, things began to rankle.

Madonna’s “COVID is the great equalizer” bathtub videos went clunk. We started to resent the sliver of pool cabana in the background and the exclusive retreats, such as the one in Wyoming where Kanye West, who made a surprise announcement of a 2020 presidential run, has a compound. Tucked away from the rising virus tide in L.A., his wife, Kim Kardashian-West, posted a tone-deaf pic last week bragging about her herd of 14 Friesian horses: you know, the ones with the extra long, extra silky manes. The post was greeted with a flurry of “People are dying, Kim” and “Please, Kim, I’m LITERALLY poor.”

Without the usual insulated layers of handlers and entourage, stars can and do get it wrong. The system had already been changing, Weston says. “Shows like ours used to be the only place for celebrities to promote their projects or to address their scandals. Now social media is a direct pipeline. That said, they are giving us lots of content that way right now, by both making mistakes and getting it right.”

To follow the whiplash, it is first necessary to decode the confusing climate of call-out and cancel culture fomented by social media. In looking at the effects the COVID-19 pandemic will have on celebrity culture, it’s necessary to consider also the long-term, mood-altering effect of the Black Lives Matter movement on the entertainment industry.

The protests following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis highlighted the economic and social inequities laid bare by the quarantine. The pandemic will end, but the BLM movement is a turning point. Thus we have an entertainment universe that had to make two sharp pivots in a row.

Sonia Beeksma moved from Vancouver in January to take up a post as an entertainment reporter on CTV’s “eTalk.” She says everyone is watching which celebrities are using their platforms to speak up politically, especially throughout the Black Lives Matter movement. “There is a change in the way people operate now, people are choosing a completely different path; something happened within their core: it is very powerful right now.”

Elaine “Lainey” Lui is a co-host on “eTalk,” as well as a host on CTV’s “The Social” and founder of the popular website Lainey Gossip, launched in 2003. “ I do agree that especially during this time where we are collectively protesting injustice and anti-Black racism, there is space to be candid in terms of self-reflection,” she said. “When it is done right and well, it can be very effective and necessary. Allyship is not perfect. But in those mistakes, we are exposing vulnerability and humanity.”

The pundits are not immune to the whiplash of call-out culture: Lui’s colleague at “eTalk,” Ben Mulroney, stepped aside from co-hosting to make room for more diverse voices in the aftermath of his wife Jessica’s white-privilege scandal. Lui herself made her own amends for decades-old Lainey Gossip posts from the early 2000s (including one about Janet Jackson calling her outfit “ghetto”). In her blog and on “The Social,” she stated: “Those posts were racist, they were misogynistic, they were homophobic, they were transphobic, they were shameful. I am so sorry.”

The online mood has sharply shifted and social media is no longer a celebrity playground for inducing envy or pitching products mindlessly. Lesser mortals have been eaten alive by the fires of social media, but the Kardashians have until now created an impermeable shield around themselves. They are still relevant in the business world: Kim Kardashian-West inked a recent deal with Coty to take her makeup empire to billion-dollar valuation, moments after husband West announced a 10-year megadeal with the Gap for a Yeezy collaboration.

The Kardashian way has been the opposite of vulnerability. The reality royal family had been notably quiet in the first three months of quarantine and revolution, tooling down their massive promotional machines to a tread-water setting, a.k.a. a smattering of thirst-trap bikini shots by the pool. There was a brief scandal around Kylie Jenner’s downgrade from billionaire by Forbes. Then there was Khloe Kardashian’s perplexingly “changed” face; her face did look dramatically different, launching a flurry of speculation by plastic surgery pundits.

The Kardashian-Jenner machine invented the prevailing modalities of modern fame: bod-revealing, made-for-Instagram photo shoots; attention-grabbing romantic sagas, sex tapes and cheating scandals; fluffed-up feuds within the family and with other celebrities. The clan created an entire aspirational beauty and fashion esthetic (and the products to get the look at home). One day, we will look back at the decade from 2010 till the start of the pandemic and a Kardashian-bot will come up on Google.

But won’t we somehow be essentially changed by this moment? Post-pandemic, after so much death and fear and reckoning, with the economic fallout and the lasting effects of prolonged isolation, amid the clamour for social justice: if we are different on the inside, won’t we want to look different on the outside, too?

The backlash may have started to reflect this. Actress and activist Jameela Jamil called out Kardashian-West recently over another throwback the personality posted of herself in an extreme waist-training corset by couturier Mr Pearl that she had worn to the 2019 Met Gala. A year later, the unnatural ideal it represented feels hopelessly out of sync.

Jamil, who heads an anti-body-shaming campaign called @i_weigh, has been all over the Kardashians for years for their promotion of an “impossible” body image and the negative effects that has on regular women and girls. Jamil switched advocacy tactics this time, saying that Kardashian-West was “just so harmed and deluded into thinking this is what SHE needs to look like to be special and beautiful and she’s spilling it out onto her following.”

By bringing in sympathy for Kardashian, Jamil wisely tried to change the timbre of the conversation, but until Kardashian-West and her sisters accept the responsibility of their outsized influence on their followers, the effort may fall on tone-deaf ears.

As other stars heed collective pressure to be more thoughtful in this time of all-around reckoning, will the Kardashian fame-shield hold? Resistance is futile, says Weston. “From certain people, we accept the esthetics are fixed. For Kim Kardashian-West, the esthetics are her entire world,” he says. “I don’t think she needed to show up ‘undone’ on social (during the pandemic) to prove, ‘Oh my God I’m just like you!’”

Beeksma says it’s all about business for the famous family. “We all know they are not in this business to change the world for the better. The train the Kardashians are on, they are businesswomen, they are their brand.” She is practical about their reach, though. “Their esthetic seems to be waning … But let’s be honest, they have millions and millions of followers, so someone wants that content.”

Weston thinks some of the flashier lifestyles of the rich and famous will come back sooner, rather than later. “It’s all about escapism. Guilty pleasures are important: we can’t worry all the time.”

“As for reality stars, I can’t say (the phenomenon) is ever gonna go away,” says Lui. “Nor do I want it to! When lockdown ends and red carpets can be walked again and premieres attended again, I don’t know that we can say the trend of flaunt is over.

“I will say — and this is not a defence of celebrity — the illusion of Hollywood, the lure from the very beginning, the reason superstars exist, is that they live in our imaginations in a world of fantasy, a land of dreams and fairy tales.”

We want them to live there, says Lui. “I’m in the business because I never want them to go away, not only because I think art and culture is necessary but because, through celebrities, we learn about ourselves.”

Athleisure and sneaker culture are appealing, especially while we are all at home, but “red carpets will absolutely happen again. And if it takes too long, celebrities will start wearing cocktail gowns to the grocery store,” she says.

The show, after all, must go on.