Mayor Rob Ford and his brother Doug are becoming the “Kardashians of Canada,” says Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly.

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He made the comment during a television interview when asked for his take on news that the Fords are being courted by reality TV producers and network talk shows. “Everyone from Oprah to Dr. Phil,” Doug Ford told the National Post on Thursday. “You name the person, we’ve got calls from them. There’s a massive market in the U.S.”

That interest, Mr. Kelly suggested, marks a shift in the story of the Fords, who have endured a tumultuous month of scandal and late-night TV mockery.

“Well, it seems the emerging part of it seems to be the celebrity-ness of it — that it’s moving beyond the political realm,” Mr. Kelly told CP24 on Friday. “The Fords are perhaps becoming the Kardashians of Canada.”

Councillor Doug Ford laughed off the deputy mayor’s comparison to the stars of the reality TV show Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

“I disagree, because we aren’t as good looking,” he said Friday.

He insisted that he and his brother aren’t interested in becoming celebrities, and reiterated that they fended off requests for interviews from talk shows across the United States and around the world.

“We just want to get back to work,” he said. But they still have plans for a YouTube show, in the hopes of getting their unfiltered message out.

More appealing, said Councillor Ford, were pitches from videographers suggesting a more do-it-yourself format that would be posted on YouTube on a weekly basis, starting as early as next month. The new show is to be called Ford Nation — which, until recently, was the name of the Fords’ Sun News show, which was abandoned after one episode despite pulling in record ratings for the network.

When the TV show was axed less than 24 hours after the premiere brought around 200,000 viewers and 65,000 video downloads, Sun News vice president Kory Teneycke told the National Post the episode ate up “as many resources as we would usually use for eight hours of daytime programming … the economics of that don’t work well over the long term.”

Councillor Ford said he and his brother will return to their roots with the planned online series. The show will adopt a format similar to their long-running radio show on NewsTalk 1010, which was cancelled after Mayor Ford admitted smoking crack cocaine once, sometime in the past year.

A YouTube premiere is expected to be released before Christmas.

“I want it to look professional, but simple … like Rob and I,” Councillor Ford told the Post on Thursday. “The lovers are going to follow it, and the haters are going to follow it.”

National Post, with files from Jake Edmiston