If July was all about Amazon Prime trapping me in the sticky web of Lost’s whodunit and whydunit and howdunit plots, I’m in danger of being trapped again, this time in the morass of RuPaul’s Drag Race now that Crave has all the episodes. ALL. THE. EPISODES. That’s eleven regular seasons, plus four seasons of All Stars, which is a lot of screentime, especially if you want to stay relevant. If you stay relevant you don’t got to get relevant, and it’s nice to be on the pulse, although at this point being relevant doesn’t seem to hold as much attraction as it used to, given the speed at which our world spins, powered by a 24/7 news cycle that never seems to leave any room for respite.
Still, RuPaul’s Drag Race has always been enter-taint-ing for me, even in the days before it became the juggernaut it is today. So Crave getting all the episodes is a good return on investment, methinks. Luckily for me, I’d seen a good chunk of RPDR already back when Netflix and I were still on good terms. But Netflix didn’t have Season 1 of RPDR, or all the All Star episodes, so this has been a good chance for me to catch up on everything that I’ve missed, to the detriment of everything else, but hey. Choices!
Two weeks later …
I finally got through everything I’d missed, and I don’t think I missed very much, if at all. All Stars 3 went out with a whimper, All Stars 4 tried to please everyone, and Seasons 10-11 made me realize that the drag queens being featured were younger and a helluva lot less well-read than the relatively brainier ones that went before. I mean this is a show that gave us the rapier sharp wit of Bianca del Rio and her Rolodex of hate (“Beauty fades, dumb is forever!”) and the less pointed, but no less entertaining mind of Katya Zamolodchikova (“Adore Delano, giving you smell-my-punani, Poetic Justice realness.”), my top two all-time favourite queens.
Let the record show that for me the flame sputtered when they gave too much airtime to Eureka, a queen who spent a lot of her time being jealous and insecure and being unable to own up to her own bullshit in Season 10. It officially flickered out and died in Season 11, when Silky Nutmeg Ganache couldn’t read or recognize the word “colonel” on the teleprompter in a mini-challenge, a queen who spent her time hogging the camera, bragging about her a masters degree. It just got dumber. It’s also too calculating, overproduced and a lot faker interaction-wise, than it used to be.
All the op-eds about how it’s become more work than fun to watch RPDR have merit (and you can read them here, here and here.) I don’t know if I can even summon the energy for Drag Race UK. The bestie says he’ll still watch it, so I guess I’ll have the experience by osmosis.
So, do I feel like I wasted all that time? Maybe a little. But again, hey. Choices.
Saving for Botox 