Welcome to the MTV era, folks. After six years on VH1, RuPaul’s Drag Race has levelled up once again, to what could fairly be described as one of the most iconic cable networks in America. With the change has come a high-budget, rather impressive season promo, as well as an increased cash prize and, somewhat controversially, a reduced episode length. We don’t quite see the effects of the latter this week, though, as for this premiere, Drag Race has opted to go with a two-parter.
We’ve had split premieres for the past few seasons on Drag Race, seemingly as a way to give even the first-out queens plenty of time to introduce themselves to the audience (as well as pad out the network’s 16-episode order). But there have been diminishing returns to this format, to say the least, as Season 13 started with three non-elimination episodes in a row, while Season 14 fake-eliminated two queens for no reason and set a precedent for not sending girls home that really chafed at the fan base all season long.
Drag Race, to its credit, seems to have internalized those critiques and come up with their best solution yet. Both episodes—each a bit longer than the standard will be this season, with the first airing without commercial interruption on MTV—air in one night, and the queens’ two entrances are only split up by a mini-challenge and some minor choreography drama. By the time Episode 1 ends, we’ve already met all the queens, and we’ve gotten enough to satisfy us before the actual maxi-challenge in Episode 2.
I give the show a lot of props for continuing to work to find the best possible premiere format, and I hope this becomes the standard moving forward. These two episodes make for an absolute firecracker of a debut, one that instantly makes all 16 members of its cast notable for something or another, gives us a sense of how the cast will interact (spoiler: they’re coming for blood!) and actually features an elimination. What a concept!
Credit: Courtesy MTV
There is simply no way to give you all a sense of all 16 queens in this recap and have it come in under 5,000 words, so I’ll be sticking to the most notable performers and personalities. (We’ll have thoughts on all the queens in this week’s power ranking.) Of course, the queen who turns the most heads when she walks in is Sasha Colby, a literal titan of drag. The former Miss Continental, who just so happens to be Season 14 alumna Kerri Colby’s drag mother, instantly stuns the room when she walks in. Someone even asks, “Should we go home?” It is amazing to see a queen of this calibre competing, but what I love most is that Sasha doesn’t for one second act like she’s above it. She reminds me of Cheddar Gorgeous on Drag Race UK: both legends, but also fully committed to the process.
Sasha is the gag final entrance of her group, while Sugar and Spice arriving together is the twist for the second crew. Yes, like America’s Next Top Model and Project Runway before them, the Drag Race producers have cast a pair of identical twins. These two are TikTok-famous, and as social media girls, have an intense awareness of their brand. Sugar is in pinks and pastels with blonde hair—even highlighted out of drag compared to her sister’s brunette locks—while Spice is all blacks and dark hues. (If you want a sense of how strong their branding is, they even wear matching spiked Speedos in their signature colours out of drag.)
These two couldn’t be further away from someone like Sasha in terms of drag origins, and they aren’t alone. Mistress Isabelle Brooks, who dominates the episode with her confessionals and an energy that can only be described as “a potential mother,” is initially quite resistant to the twins. She’s joined by queens like Irene Dubois and Malaysia Babydoll Foxx, who see the twins’ lack of performance experience as a glaring flaw in their drag. Meanwhile, Luxx Noir London backs the twins up, noting that younger queens often only have social media as an outlet to really grow their art and brand.
We’ve seen conflicts like “Social Media Queens vs. Performer Queens” before. The first and most notable was “Comedy Queens vs. Pageant Queens” in Season 5, a debate that was quite handily decided for the former because of Jinkx Monsoon’s win at season’s end. Season 7’s “Old School Queens vs. New School Queens” debate was even more similar to this one, and the show stayed fairly neutral on the subject until the season’s final episode of Untucked, when Kennedy Davenport and Ginger Minj fought with Pearl and eventual season winner Violet Chachki.
If there’s anything that makes this conflict different, I’d say it’s that before the two groups even merge, Isabelle is already coming around on Sugar and Spice. She enjoys their wacky—or, as Spice would say, “goofy”—energy, and when the queens ultimately perform, they exceed the other queens’ expectations. We’re in a period of Drag Race that emphasizes a well-rounded edit for all the queens, and though I am skeptical of how much that will continue with the shorter episodes, it seems at least for now that the show doesn’t want to flatten these characters into stereotypes for this conflict.
Credit: Courtesy MTV
More broadly, there’s a sense in this premiere that Drag Race wants to shake off some of its more recent habits. Season 14 was a big ol’ lovefest between its contestants, and no number of shady Daya Betty confessionals could change that tone. Here, you see queens not only being bitchy to each other, but actually wanting that same energy back. Irene explicitly tells the other queens she wants that level of banter, and she and Isabelle instantly hit it off because of that natural bond. They’re shocked when the younger queens later assume they hate one another—it’s just the opposite, in fact. They’re bickering because they respect one another.
That idea of respect and love not coming easy to just anyone is underlined by Isabelle herself, when one of her competitors insists that they’re in a sisterhood just by being on this show. She says sisterhood is earned—and considering she’s now calling the queens her sisters in interviews, we can enjoy the growth and journey this season while knowing it has a happy ending. Still, I do wonder how the fan base, which has increasingly grown to expect Drag Race to emphasize family bonds above all else, will respond to the distinctly shadier energy this season.
Another change from the recent status quo is who wins this week. Not only do we get modern redos of the first two seasons’ premiere mini-challenges—a car-wash and wind-machine photo shoot, respectively—but the fashion girls don’t walk to wins on either. Instead, it’s self-described alien Irene who wins the first, and campy comedy queen Loosey LaDuca who takes the second. This is a premiere that generally has a lot of reverence for what came before it; there are references galore. But it’s nice to see that, even while respecting the past, the show is pushing itself forward.
Nowhere is this more notable to me than in Anetra’s win in the maxi-challenge. Honestly, all three top queens do well: Marcia Marcia Marcia’s ballet routine set to Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You” (in tribute to The Hilarious Ross Mathews!) is both clever and technically impressive, while Jax jumping rope with her own hair is a gag. But Anetra is, in my opinion, on another level. Yes, she’s got an original track, one of many this week. Her track isn’t really a “song” per se, though; it’s a performance accompaniment in which the lip syncing is among the least important parts. Instead, she duck-walks while commanding, “You better walk that fucking duck!” She breaks two wooden boards using her taekwondo skills. She pulls out stunt after stunt after stunt. It is an incredible performance, on the level of such greats as Tatianna’s “Same Parts,” Aja’s box jump and Monét X Change’s opera performance.
The remarkable thing is how little foreshadowing there is for an Anetra win through the rest of the episodes. She demonstrates herself to be a funny, quotable queen (her entrance line is just a puzzled “What?”), and she’s got enough confessionals to establish that she’ll be a presence this season. But Sasha, Isabelle, Sugar, Spice, Luxx and Irene are all much more dominant characters, to the point where it seems obvious one will win. Kudos to the show for zigging when we assume they’ll zag, and giving us a genuinely unexpected first-episode champion.
Credit: Courtesy MTV
On the lower end of the scorecard, we have Loosey, Amethyst and Irene. The former skates to safety, but not before crying over critiques in the very first week. It’s giving Eve 6000. She does pivot out of the tears into a good joke about padding—something Amethyst had just gotten critiqued for—but still. There are a minimum of 14 episodes to go, Loosey; strap in. Amethyst also guarantees herself another episode thanks to a decent (if unspectacular) lip sync to “7 Rings,” which keeps the Connecticut queen (one of many who hail from the Nutmeg State this season) in contention for another week.
Which means that, in a pretty shocking development, Irene Dubois is our first out of the season. I’ve already heard her called the best first-out ever, and while I think you have to rule first-out returnees like Shangela and Vanessa Vanjie Mateo out to make that distinction, I understand the instinct. Not only is Irene clearly quite good at drag, but she is one of the biggest characters in this episode. She is a major narrative driver, and were the rest of the cast not so engaging, I’d be worried about what losing her here means. If anything, I think it puts Isabelle in an interesting spot: the queen she spent all of this first week kiki-ing with is now out, leaving her a bit more on her own island of performers. (I would guess this draws her and Malaysia closer, since the latter shared a lot of the same opinions about the social media girls.)
In terms of whether Irene deserved to go at all: I’ll admit that it’s frustrating to see queens who do something different in the talent shows consistently punished. Irene’s satirical act about making a glass of ice water is probably quite funny at full length! But as she herself noted, her choices in how to edit it down were wildly off-course. And her lip sync was not at the level she needed to stay. No, much as it’s unbelievable she’s first out, it’s also totally understandable.
I’m exiting this premiere really excited about this new era of Drag Race. Season 14 was a joy to watch in many ways, but it also wasn’t quite what I look for in this show. Hell, almost all the 2022 seasons I watched were disappointing in one way or another. But what’s nice about a network move is that everything old is new once more. The series feels refreshed and ready for a roller-coaster ride—and I love roller coasters.
Untucking our final thoughts
✨ If you haven’t yet had the chance, I got together with my former The Kiki co-host Mathew Rodriguez to come up with a list of 12 of the definitive queens of the VH1 era of Drag Race. Give it a read as we leave that network behind for MTV!
✨ Ariana Grande makes for a fantastic guest judge, for a few different reasons. Purely based on her critiques, she’s smart and incisive, praising the queens for what they do well, but also actually offering constructive feedback. (After a season of Drag Race UK in which it felt the guest judges wouldn’t say anything negative, this is deeply appreciated.) But she also mirrors the show’s own glow-up in a way: when she was on Season 7, she admits she wasn’t able to just sit back and enjoy, owing to having just gotten off the set of the “Bang Bang” video the previous day. This time around, she’s relaxed, refreshed and having a blast—and so is the show around her.
✨ As fun as I find Ariana’s entrance while wearing Ornacia, the ornate headpiece from Season 6, I’m immediately ecstatic to see the actual Vivacious in the second group’s entrance. Mother walks among us once again!
✨ The queens are positively gagged by the $200,000 cash prize, and for good reason: up to this point, only All Stars 7 had such a major grand prize, and that was for an all-winners season. Glad to see the show is finally recognizing that the winnings pot should be larger, especially with how much the queens spend just to compete.
✨ Sasha’s confessionals are already gold. When the other queens are bickering over who should do choreography, she provides some wisdom: “Mother has had to deal with a lot of children in her life, and what I’ve learned is that you let the kids play, and then you clean ’em up later.”
✨ More and more, the show is allowing queens to get more metatextual in their confessionals. We saw the start of this last season, with the framing of Willow Pill as a strategist (like her gambit to get the song she wanted in the LaLaPaRuZa tournament). Luxx takes it a step further in her confessional about Irene’s ice-water act, noting that after Willow’s Enya-scored bathtub act last season, it’s understandable why queens would want to go weird.
✨ The main stage segment of the show gets some major sprucing up, with a new intro (including a makeup brush!), a new backdrop behind the panel and no Plexiglas. Just more signs of this new era.
✨ There are two Untucked episodes this week, one that’s in the traditional post-critiques format, and another that shows footage of all the queens getting ready before they go in. They’re aired in what feels like the wrong order, but considering how snoozy the pre-entrances episode is, I can understand why they flipped them.
✨ I will be thinking about Sugar’s assertion that everyone is “either a bike-ride person or a porch person”—followed with her admission that “I’m both”—for the rest of the week.
✨ We’re doing something a little different this season for Wig!, Xtra’s weekly drag newsletter! I’ll be diving deep on a particular topic in an exclusive essay—sometimes related to what’s happened in that week’s episode, sometimes indulging an unexpected whim. I’ll talk in this Tuesday’s edition at length about the decision for Drag Race to air only hour-long episodes now that it’s on MTV, so, if that tickles your fancy, use the link below to sign up!
The next episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race will air Friday, Jan. 13, at 8 p.m. EST on MTV in the U.S. and on Crave in Canada. Check back every Monday after new episodes for our recaps and power rankings, and subscribe to our drag newsletter Wig! for exclusive Drag Race content delivered straight to your inbox every Tuesday afternoon.
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