Bianca Del Rio is the most popular RuPaul’s Drag Race winner, with the most Instagram followers of any queen to appear on the show. She is one of only four to have more than two million followers on the platform despite being a comedy queen (queens who focus on aesthetics are usually more popular on Instagram). Bianca played a pretty unimpeachable game in Season 6, never falling into the bottom three during her entire run. That’s a feat no winner could reproduce until Envy Peru pulled it off this year during the significantly shorter Drag Race Holland.
Despite her sizable platform, Bianca has felt a bit distant from Drag Race in recent years. She hasn’t physically appeared on the show since the Season 8 finale, and a video message in All Stars 2 is her only other appearance since. That’s especially notable because the show has brought back so many of its alumni in recent years: for mini-challenges in Seasons 10 and 11, for coaching sessions with the girls (like Season 5 winner Jinkx Monsoon for a Snatch Game episode) and even as participants in Secret Celebrity Drag Race, helping to make over celebs for their chance on the main stage.
That has left Bianca with only her commentary, usually delivered in jokes on social media, as a way to connect back to the show. For some, Bianca’s Don Rickles-esque lacerations cut to the bone in the right ways, exposing some of the faker elements of the franchise. For others, the jokes cut too deep, like when she claimed Blair St. Clair only opened up about being raped to avoid elimination in Season 10. But defenders of the Season 6 winner would argue that such harsh jokes are part of the Bianca Del Rio package—for better or for worse.
The jokes are certainly part of Hateful Hags Network, a new Vimeo special starring Bianca and New York City drag legend Lady Bunny. Bianca has been remarkably entrepreneurial when it comes to her post-Drag Race filmed work, working only in limited capacity with Drag Race producers World of Wonder, instead opting into projects like the two Hurricane Bianca movies produced by Cranium Entertainment. There’s a homemade feel to this new special, with the two physically distanced hosts recording separately and being green-screened together onto a newscast set. Bianca’s audio is rougher, and she’s reading from her phone throughout—which is arguably the point. The credits include the line “Directed by: No one, obviously.”
Somewhat surprisingly to me, though is that almost all of the material is about Drag Race, including quick, curt reviews of Season 12, All Stars 5, Canada’s Drag Race and more. (There are plenty of AJ and the Queen jokes, for example, for Bianca and Bunny to mine.) The special proves that, despite her recent distance from the show, Bianca is very caught up on her Drag Race, and she has plenty to say.
Most of the special is structured around quick takes on the 2020 Drag Race seasons. It’s very setup-punchline heavy, since Bianca and Bunny not being in the same room doesn’t allow for much fluid banter. Most of the takes are things you’d expect: All Stars 5 didn’t have All Stars-caliber queens, Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman was disappointing as a Canada’s Drag Race judge and so on. Most unexpected to me was the amount of time spent on Sherry Pie, the queen disqualified and all but edited out of Season 11 after a scandal erupted at the start of the season when it was revealed she had catfished as a casting agent to gain access to inappropriate videos and photos of young actors. VH1 and World of Wonder tried their damndest to sweep Sherry under the rug, not even discussing her disqualification at the Season 11 reunion.
Bianca and Bunny have no such desire to avoid touchy subjects. They go all in on Sherry, both in early punchlines and a segment dedicated to the scandal later in the show. The jokes stand out mostly because they feel fresh, especially among some lazier ones (like one about the “hated Season 7”). But the Sherry Pie jokes feel like small potatoes by the time Bianca and Bunny start in on Ru about the fracking happening on his Wyoming ranch. “RuPaul hates the environment” is the punchline of one joke; a reference to “natural gas” is another.
Though Ru fracking jokes have been all over the internet this year, they’ve remained something of a comment non grata among Drag Race alumni, so much so that Season 10 Aquaria mentioning the fracking in a video she tweeted this summer was shocking. In an Instagram Live with Season 9 runner-up Peppermint, Bianca’s fellow winner and New Yorker Bob the Drag Queen accidentally referred to “the fracking,” leading to a much-memed moment of Pepp and Bob cackling over their failed attempt to avoid the subject.
But most of the special is filled with jokes at the expense of Drag Race queens. Early on, Lady Bunny makes clear that they aren’t directing hate at any queens in particular: “We hate them all equally,” she explains. That certainly comes across in the special. Bianca and Bunny have a joke about nearly everyone. They come across as dismissive: They cut the girls so swiftly, with such easy punchlines, that it feels less like a roast and more like a collection of complaints about the kind of queens Drag Race casts nowadays.
Throughout All Stars 5, Bob the Drag Queen enthusiastically started discussions about an all-winners season on the recap web series The Pit Stop. She got quite a few former winners to bite on coming back, including Jinkx and All Stars 2 winner Alaska. But Bianca has demurred, saying she hasn’t been asked back and likely wouldn’t be interested. I get it: Bianca smashed her season, is still the most popular winner and would only stand to lose if she went back. Even if she won again, anything less than a sterling performance might threaten her position in the Drag Race pantheon.
But colour me intrigued to see how she’d do if she did return—and truth be told, I wouldn’t have said that before Hateful Hags Network. Would her particularly harsh brand of humour still work on modern Drag Race? Would she still be able to play ball with the crafted storylines, as she did by playing drag mother to Adore Delano and Trinity K. Bonet in Season 6? Would her fellow queens target her for being a threat or even for jokes she’s made at their expense since? Would Ru remain as enthralled with her despite the jokes about AJ and the Queen and fracking?
Hateful Hags Network will likely be both a hoot for those who love Bianca’s comedy, and yet another mark against her among detractors who think she’s too cruel. Certainly, her jokes about Asian people alone—which she predicts backlash for in the special—will draw plenty of raised eyebrows, and I’d guess even ire. And there will be some more compelled by the Lady Bunny of it all, watching one of Ru’s oldest friends rip into him over his pro-fracking position.
For me, this special is all about Bianca’s relationship with Drag Race. “Remember when Drag Race was good?” she laments. While it’s a setup for a punchline that Season 6—the one she won—is her favourite, there’s a ring of truth to it. The franchise’s most popular winner seems dissatisfied with what the show has become, and who is valued among its cast. If an all-winners season ever gets off the ground, I hope Bianca considers returning for it; she may be able to give the show the shot in the arm she thinks it needs.
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