RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars

Welcome to my recap of the tenth episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7 – The Kennedy Davenport Center Honors Hall of Shade, a roast where the comedy barbs are directed at the rest of the cast, plus an unusual light-up runway.

One of the first things I ever wanted to be as a child was a comedian, long before I ever set foot on stage to discover my love of performing.

Mostly I think I appreciated it when adults were laughing with me instead of laughing at me because I loved watching stand-up specials from all-time greats like Robin Williams and George Carlin.

Later, I realized that being intentionally funny is an incredibly hard task – much too difficult and unpredictable to pin career aspirations upon.

Many drag queens have a similar realization during their runs on Drag Race.

While a sense of humor is essential for almost any queen to survive her early days performing for tips in local bars, that off-the-cuff self-deprecation isn’t the same as the improv and roasting required to make it through a season of Drag Race. We’ve seen many a queen arrive on the show assuming they are hilarious who then fall flat in comedy challenges.

If you’ve ever thought that queens tend to be funnier when they return for All Stars, that’s because they are cheating. It’s an open secret that while queens are prepping outfits for their return runs, they are also turning to their funnier peers and to actual career comedians to supply them with a stock of jokes about other queens most-likely to return to the show. Many queens who have cleaned up in an All Stars library session or roast challenge were working entirely from pre-written material.

That’s why I’m not surprised that this challenge is not about roasting a random honoree, like Lady Bunny or even the titular Kennedy Davenport. This season has taken every opportunity to let its winners be well-prepared for the challenges, and this is no exception. Even if the queens didn’t have a single back-channel source on which other winners to expect, the pool of possible queens was small and mostly full of friendly faces.

Did Monét workshop her set with Bob? Absolutely. Did Shea ring up Peppermint or Miss Cracker? I wouldn’t be surprised. Even a powerhouse like Jinkx might’ve ran some lines with Ben de la Creme.

That means I went into this episode with incredibly high expectations. An All-Winners roast should be all hits, and no Farrah Moans. Did every queen rise to the challenge? Find out in my full-episode recap, below. Plus, at the end of the recap I have a deep game theory update to my Episode 9 rankings to explain who can make it into the finale and how. (Want to skip right to the power rankings? Go for it!)

Readers, start your engines! And, may the best drag queen… win! [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7, Episode 10 –The Kennedy Davenport Center Honors Hall of Shade recap & power ranking!

Welcome to my recap of the ninth episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7 – Dance Like a Drag Queen, a combination branding challenge and dancing challenge to create viral social media videos.

I overlap in several skills and talents with the typical cast of Drag Race, but this challenges hits on a pair of areas where I am sorely lacking: choreography and brief, viral videos.

Sure, I love to hit the dancefloor and I’ve taken my fair share of dance fitness classes, but I haven’t tried my hand at making up coherent choreography since I was 10 years old on my grandmother’s front stoop dancing to “Pump Up The Jam” by Technotronic!

And, despite several forays into video over the past few years, I simply don’t understand what makes a video viral. I’m not sure I’ve ever shared one, and as the video formats grow shorter and shorter I care less and less.

I point this out not to outline how bad I’d be at Drag Race, but to point out who this challenge is targeting: youths. It’s not that no one older than 30 has ever shared a viral video or done a dance challenge, but this week’s concept is clearly aimed at a TikTok generation who racks up tens of millions of views on brief snippets of endlessly loopable video.

This is a cast of seasoned all-winners who trend at least half a decade older than the typical early-20s queens that are being cast on recent seasons. To be RuPaul’s Queen of Queens, our winner needs to be able to connect with every portion of the audience – especially the rising one who loves brevity combined with absurdity.

Were all of our queens able to keep up with the times in this challenge where brevity is the soul of wit? Find out in my full-episode recap, below. Plus, at the end of the recap I have an extensively mathematic update to my Episode 8 rankings to explain who can make it into the finale and how. (Want to skip right to the power rankings? Go for it!)

Readers, start your engines! And, may the best drag queen… win! [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7, Episode 9 – Dance Like a Drag Queen: recap & power ranking!

Welcome to my recap of the eighth episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7 – Santa’s School For Girls, an acting challenge that’s part holiday movie, part Mean Girls, part slasher flick.

Of all the many types of challenges on RuPaul’s Drag Race, acting challenges are consistently the lowest quality but with the highest meme-ability. It’s much easier to pay a songwriter to write a song that captures the essence of “He Had It Coming” or “Bye Bye Bye” than it is to hire a screenwriter to write a script that has the vibe of Scream but with the references of Mean Girls.

In earlier seasons, these challenges were about memorizing lines and being ridiculous. As the years have pressed on, Drag Race has begun to treat them as actual challenges of acting that require characterization and melodrama. Yet, they still tend to receive the same lackadaisical direction from Ru, a regular judge, or a sitcom-starring guest judge – all of whom are there more to flummox the queens as they are to create a great final product.

This week’s challenge is different because it is directed by Janicza Bravo. She’s not a household name, but she’s an actual director of movies. I’ll get into the results of that below, but the thing that leapt out at me was that these queens were getting the experience of actually being directed. Bravo’s comments were not just about slamming the punchlines and playing to cameras, but establishing the pace and embodying the characters.

Could the show pull off this same high-calibre direction with the uneven skill levels of queens on a regular season? I would argue that it ought to try. If we view Drag Race less as a reality competition and more as “RuPaul’s Finishing School for Drag Queens,” then the ability to take direction on set from someone with a singular vision is a huge part of what will make these competitors employable after the show.

Drag Race brings in star choreographers for dance challenges, real music producers for their girl groups, and fashion industry figures to judge the queen’s workroom creations. I’d say it’s time to level up their acting challenges an equal amount … even if the scripts still come off like a Mad Lib assembled over the weekend by an intern on a bender.

That’s a lot of build-up of this challenge from me, but did the queens pay it off in their performance? Find out in my full-episode recap, below. Plus, at the end of the recap I’ll update my Episode 7 power rankings to show where the queens stand with just three more challenges of Legendary Legend stars left to earn. (Want to skip right to the power rankings? Go for it!)

Readers, start your engines! And, may the best drag queen… win! [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7, Episode 8 – Santa’s School For Girls: recap & power ranking!