Competitive reality TV, as much as it is supposedly nonfictional, is as much about competition and reality as it is about narratives and entertainment. Whether it’s muscular ninjas swinging from unstable beams, or sweaty chefs steaming it up in warehouses decked out like industrial kitchens, the vibrant world of reality TV is underpinned by the need for entertainment.
Some of this looks like hyper-realistic stories of survival and perseverance like in Alone, or soapy scandals of love and lust like in any Netflix dating show. Regardless, from the casting to filming to editing of these shows, producers, and showrunners work hard to take these ‘truths’ and spin them into a consumable story.
Reality TV is therefore bound in this meta-narrative of how to create a show that honours the life and experience of its contestants, whilst also squeezing their truth out for entertainment like an orange being pulped for juice. What better world to absorb this dissonance than that of RuPaul’s Drag Race? Now on its seventeenth season, Drag Race began as a parody of the fashion and design reality shows of the 2000s (think Project Runway or America’s Next Top Model) with a reverence for camp, stupidity, and genuine awe at the art of drag.
What Drag Race does wonderfully is navigate the messiness of ‘reality’, whilst maintaining a fundamental belief in platforming and legitimising queer community and queer art.
If you’ve ever wandered into the world of reality TV analysis, you’ll be familiar with terms like ‘villain edit’ or ‘rattlesnakes’. The idea is that, whilst the footage used for the show is clearly real, the way it is stitched together (often using snippets or quotes from multiple days of filming) can create narratives that simplify the story of each contestant. This is necessary for a show with a set amount of air time, sure, but also fundamentally a convenient way to steer towards the plot the producers aim to craft.
This ambiguity is built into key metrics Drag Race uses for contestants: Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve, and Talent (CUNT). It’s a funny euphemism for that it factor which is so indescribable but so clear when you look at a line-up of the queens who find success after the show. It’s also a great way for Drag Race to blur the lines of what a queen needs to do to be “good” according to the rules of the show.
Apart from the relatively straightforward expectations of design challenges (make a garment which looks good, is technically interesting, and honours the often unconventional materials used), the most fundamental part of every challenge is ‘make RuPaul laugh’.
Whether it’s performing a scripted scene, directing a fake commercial, or delivering a roast, almost all challenges are bound up in whether a contestant can make RuPaul laugh. It’s why queens like Jimbo charge their way to the end of the show: her looks on All Stars 8 were exquisite and conceptually aligned with her drag persona, but she also made Ru cackle ferociously every scene she was in, beginning with her talent show performance where she threw “Mama Ru” slices of ham while wearing head-to-toe white latex with a pregnancy belly. The queens who win are the ones who serve “CUNT” and understand this unspoken rule.
Whilst this camp stupidity is a beloved aspect of the show, there is of course myriad serious critique to be had of Drag Race. For every conversation like season 10’s beautifully navigated discussion of the Orlando Pulse shooting, the show often mishandles traumatic and sensitive stories for the sake of the narrative. Further, the institutionalisation of an artform borne from survival, local strength, and scrappy can-do sensibilities will inherently bring to question its true value.
The greater problem for the audience, though, is when this tension between the produced narrative and the ‘true’ narrative becomes concrete. Stories like that of Yvie Oddly and Sasha Velour, kooky underdogs with incredibly conceptual drag and astonishing last-minute triumphs in the show’s lip sync format, are only successful because they’re plausible. We see enough of them and their journey to understand why they deserve to win. It’s an uncomfortable viewing experience when the decisions made by the show do not map the emotional journey we’ve taken as viewers, watching these episodic tales of heroes and villains unfold. Fans only start to cry ‘robbery!’ when the show spoon-feeds us a narrative which is clearly not true with clear authorial intent.
A recent egregious example of this is the lip sync between Kerri Colby and Alyssa Hunter in season 14. The second I saw Alyssa Hunter I fell in love. I fell in love with her drag, with her personality, and with her looks out of drag too. When she was in the bottom two with Kerri in episode four, and her money gun malfunctioned, and the screen dramatically slowed to justify sending her home, I knew the writing was on the wall. Do we, the audience, believe Alyssa would’ve made more entertaining TV than Kerri? Probably not. Do we believe she objectively won the lip sync? Absolutely.
So what do we do in this paradox? We can start movements online seeking righteous justice for the queens who we believe were ‘robbed’. This, of course, should only be directed at the show itself, and not at, as is often the case, the queens who were inadvertently favoured. We can choose to ignore these slight narrative bumps like you would the slightly bitter taste of milk just past its best before. As much as there’s prize money on the line, and while people may seek ‘purity’ from the show, it is still a fundamental good in our society that we have a platform as recognised and funded as Drag Race to uplift drag queens and tell queer stories. Is it worth bringing it down to fulfill this sense of ‘justice’ for a reality show?
Maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t always trust that the story we’re told about the people in wigs is the true one. Maybe it’s enough that it’s an entertaining one.
