‘RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 11’ puts forth the best bracket ever, thanks to an incredibly charismatic cast

We’ve now seen six brackets in the Tournament of All Stars format across two seasons—and it’s safe to say RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars saved the best for last.

I’ll be honest: I didn’t think much of the purple bracket lineup when All Stars 11 dropped its Meet the Queens videos in late April. While the orange bracket featured some all-time faves of mine in A’keria C. Davenport and Morphine Love Dion, and I was delighted by the old-school returnees in the pink bracket (including and especially Vivacious), the six queens in purple felt the most like a “standard” Tournament of All Stars bracket.

You have a multi-time returner in Kennedy Davenport—even from Season 7 just like last year’s purple bracket legend, Ginger Minj—and a Season 11 competitor in Shuga Cain. You’ve got a couple of early outs in Season 16’s Porkchop, Hershii LiqCour Jeté and Season 13’s self-described “filler queen” Joey Jay. And both Season 14’s Jasmine Kennedie and Season 17’s Sam Star fit the bill perfectly as the kinds of queens you’d expect back for All Stars. (Even though Sam didn’t have much of an interruption between her Season 17 run and All Stars 11, the fact that her season sister Lydia B Kollins already came back for All Stars 10 made Sam’s return feel less sudden.)

While I’ve generally liked all these queens, I wouldn’t number any of them besides Kennedy in my all-time favourites, and I was even more confused as to what they would be like in a collective. None of them are from the same season—in stark contrast to literally every other bracket in the Tournament of All Stars format so far—so we were really going in blind in terms of cast chemistry. And while I do believe seeing queens get their first wins in All Stars is always a thrill (as we just saw with Vivacious and Salina EsTitties in the pink bracket), it’s notable that only Kennedy and Sam had won challenges before. With only two queens advancing, it felt like, once again, the stage was set for a pretty obvious, boring bracket.

Reader, I have never been so happy to be so wrong. All Stars 11’s purple bracket has been a goddamn delight. The cast has proven themselves incredibly charismatic as a group, all of them ready to make good TV and still not take anything too seriously. While their design challenge performances left a bit to be desired—don’t worry, we’ll get into it—they’ve proven themselves more than capable in the Rappin’ Roast and The RuPaul Show lip sync challenges. Most impressively, they’ve built whole new stories and relationships with no previous on-camera connections, making them feel like a fresh cast despite all being returning queens.

In this bracket, Drag Race has found something vital: a blueprint of how to make the Tournament of All Stars format really sing.

Now you may be thinking: hey, that pink bracket was pretty great, too! Is this really the best? Sure, I was perhaps primed to enjoy this bracket after the phenomenal ending to the previous one. And it’s true, I do think nothing in this one hit the high of Episode 6’s final moments. But if that high was an ephemeral hit, a promise of what this format could be, the purple bracket has been such a delight throughout—a consistent pleasure versus a temporary one.

The most significant boon to this bracket has been the cast chemistry. That’s been a real problem in some of these brackets, and was even a real anchor in Season 18, when the queens often felt more like co-workers than competitors. This group has had fun new rivalries (I’ve particularly loved Jasmine and Sam’s love-her-hate-her bond), beautiful new bonds (Hershii and Kennedy’s winning-together moment was a highlight) and has even brought some new sides out of established characters. 

Seeing Shuga get spicy with her fellow queens over feeling used for Most Valuable Queen (MVQ) points in Episode 9, when she’s previously been nothing but sweet, was fascinating. And Joey has, in many ways, been the revelation of the bracket, showing up strongly in the challenges in a way that recalls Salina in the last trio of episodes. (Sadly, unlike Salina, she couldn’t snatch a win—but they both are in the pool with orange bracket rep Morgan McMichaels to get a wildcard spot.) Joey has also been incredibly funny outside of the challenges, particularly delighting Ru. Getting a cackled “Fuck you, man!” from Ru in the walkthrough in Episode 9 demonstrated just how much Joey has surprised the host, who I can imagine had little idea what to expect from Joey in these new episodes.

Interestingly, the common wisdom so far has been that All Stars is best served when it can continue some storylines from previous seasons, so casting queens who competed together before is a good idea. I imagine this mostly comes from All Stars 2, commonly cited as one of the best seasons ever (I heartily agree),— which featured half of its cast from the beloved Season 5. Up until now, the Tournament of All Stars has followed that wisdom, with all three brackets in All Stars 10 featuring two Season 14 queens, and both the orange and pink brackets this go-around featuring two queens from a Logo-era season (Morgan and Mystique Summers from Season 2; Vivacious and April Carrión from Season 6).

But this bracket has turned that maxim on its head, and has proven that, cast well, queens with no previous association beyond a gig or two can build all-new dynamics in All Stars. I can now say with certainty that, despite appearing in just three episodes so far, I will most commonly associate both Jasmine and Sam with each other, more so than any of the queens from their original seasons. In fact, I think for everyone in this bracket except Kennedy, All Stars 11 will become my primary association for them on Drag Race. That speaks to some really smart casting and producing; kudos to the All Stars 11 team for seeing the vision here.

That chemistry has manifested in strategic relationships that have made what would ordinarily be boring MVQ point ceremonies more interesting. True, up until the end, the queens merely traded back and forth. But Kennedy’s monologue scaring the shit out of Shuga in Episode 8, plus Sam’s strategic manipulations throughout—I’m still cackling at her laying it on thick that Shuga is her mom’s “favourite drag queen”—have kept things spicy. The queens are willing to play the game, but not cause real harm, and that balance has worked out well.

Of course, storylines about MVQ points and banter in the werk room—the latter of which has been plentiful—can only go so far. The cast also needs to be able to perform. And in the first episode of the bracket, that was a real concern! The self-made looks made out of athletic gear in the design challenge were by and large dreadful, with Jasmine earning a top two placement mostly for designing as minimal a garment as possible and just looking hot as hell. (Call that the Bosco bump, baby.) Sam is the only one who really made an impressive garment, although Joey didn’t embarrass herself. The same cannot be said for the other three queens, who likely would’ve landed in the bottom two on most design challenges in seasons past.

But the Rappin’ Roast quickly allayed fears that this group wouldn’t be up to the task of All Stars challenges. Every single verse was good, with Hershii demonstrating the best flow of any queen since … Shea Couleé, maybe? Kennedy’s and Joey’s verses were witty, Jasmine’s and Sam’s were solid—hell, even Shuga, who went too nice with it, still performed well! That episode also saw some really gorgeous looks in the Ladies Who Lunch runway category—and Kennedy’s winning lip sync to the Company song of the same name was a barn-burner.

Then, in what might be one of the coolest challenges the show has ever come up with, the queens were tasked with lip syncing to old interviews from VH1’s The RuPaul Show, performing as both RuPaul and his guest. This makes for a great stand-in for Snatch Game, still giving the queens the chance to impersonate a celebrity while a) forcing them to portray an actual celebrity (no Gordana Ramseys or Cupids here), and b) doing something other than an improv comedy challenge. One of my all-time favourite challenges was the Halftime Headliners Rusical from All Stars 6 for much the same reason: it was still celebrity impersonation, but not strictly in a Snatch Game lens.

Moreover, this is kind of a lost era of Ru’s lore! The RuPaul Show is not easily streamable, and while there have been references to it in past Drag Race seasons, we haven’t gotten to see or hear as much of it as we did here. The challenge was a strong one, and the queens by and large succeeded at it.

But like with the last two brackets, much came down to the final MVQ points ceremony—and boy, was this a gaggy one. Right after Kennedy and Sam were declared the top two of the week, earning two more points to take them to six each, Jasmine figured out the math. Whoever won the lip sync (to Rihanna’s “Breakin’ Dishes,” absolutely iconic choice) would hit seven points and be unbeatable. But if all the bottom queens put their points on either her or Hershii, they would tie the loser of the lip sync with six, forcing Ru to break the tie.

Kennedy won the lip sync, and Jasmine’s gambit paid off: Hershii, Joey and Shuga all gave their points to Jasmine. This meant Ru had to break the tie between Jasmine and Sam … except, no he didn’t! In a shock, Ru put them both forward, and still entered Joey as one of the wildcard options. That means, when the merge starts next week, we’ll have a cast of eight: Dawn, A’keria, Crystal Methyd, Silky Nutmeg Ganache, Jasmine, Kennedy, Sam and one of Morgan, Salina or Joey. It seems like Ru just didn’t want the good vibes of this bracket to end—and I can’t blame him for that.

Sure, it kinda sucks that Morgan won two challenges to several mergers’ one (A’keria, Jasmine, Silky) and is left with a 33 percent random chance of making it to the merge. But as has been demonstrated over and over again for nearly two decades, Drag Race isn’t strictly “fair.” It’s a competition, but it’s also a TV show. And this bracket did a phenomenal job of being both.

In stark contrast to where the purple bracket left us in All Stars 10, I’m entering the semifinal episodes of this season with renewed vigour and real interest in seeing who can win it all. The seven already in the merge feel like a truly tight All Stars cast, and I like all three of our wildcard options. I also love that, as opposed to Kerri Colby’s random appearance in the All Stars 10 finale, the wildcard will have to fight her way through the semifinals as well. All signs so far point to a more satisfying ending to this season than last—let’s just hope the purple bracket has brought us the right energy to land the plane.