There’s nothing quite like original recipe RuPaul’s Drag Race. While I will always be most drawn to the pleasures of Canada’s Drag Race, and I have to give my 10s to the best Ru-hosted show that aired last year, RuPaul’s Drag Race UK Season 6, the flagship series is the one that the community really comes together for. Gone are the days of fans being able to keep up with the various international series; even All Stars seasons, now relegated to 3 a.m. ET releases on Paramount+ and other streamers, have struggled to keep the greater audience’s attention.
But OG RuPaul’s Drag Race can still pack the bars, drive a ton of online conversation and make gay group chats light up like it’s Oscar nomination morning. So it’s with joy that we return to MTV for Season 17 as we kick off with another split premiere, talent show maxi-challenge and the return of a big twist to shake up the game.
Yes, Rate-a-Queen is back for the premiere, but there’s an added wrinkle to make things interesting. Instead of the seven queens who perform in this week’s talent show being able to rate each other, it’s the seven who don’t perform this week who do the ranking. The two queens with the highest scores are given the chance to Lip Sync for the Win, while the lowest-ranking queen will be made to lip sync against next week’s lowest-ranked queen. One of them will have to sashay away, and we’ll move into Episode 3 with a merged, 13-queen cast.
Were that not enough to keep this episode lively, we also start with a touch of camp: a Squid Game “Red Light, Green Light” parody called Squirrel Games. Among the 14 queens of this season are a collection of LA-local performers and notable Drag Race alumni. Some bold-faced names I spotted in the crowd: first-ever eliminee Victoria “Porkchop” Parker; winners like Trinity the Tuck, Angeria Paris VanMicheals and Kylie Sonique Love; and All Stars contestants like Morgan McMichaels, Mayhem Miller, Jujubee and Jaymes Mansfield. There’s also Kerri Colby, who winds up with one of the more iconic eliminations of the mini-game, with a pie directly to her face.
As it turns out, that mini-game is actually a mini-challenge, with the queen who poses the best upon being stopped by the Lil Poundcake doll’s red light call earning the victory and $2,500. But before we can learn who that is, we have to actually see the queens enter! It’s a bit out-of-order, since the queens will have all seen each other during Squirrel Games, but the energy is the same as ever. First up is Lexi Love, a 13-year veteran performer who calls her style of drag “avant-stoopid.” That’s a winning combination on this show in the modern day, I gotta say. She is followed by Joella, “the slay-sian diva of Los Angeles” and Kori King, “the Black Barbie from Boston.” (Moving forward, please refer to me only as Kevin O’Keeffe, the Scintillating Scribe of Xtra.)
We then get a rush of young queens, in what is a sign that this is overall a very young cast. Lydia B Kollins (“the B stands for butthole”) is a spooky gal inspired by the works of Tim Burton, John Waters and David Lynch. Arrietty is an eccentric and conceptual Seattle queen who can claim Season 15 first-boot Irene “The Alien” Dubois as her drag mother. Jewels Sparkles, hailing from Tampa, cites Priscilla Presley as an inspiration, and declares herself not just a bitch but “that bitch.”
Arrietty isn’t the only queen related to Drag Race alumni: Lana Ja’Rae, whose name pun I didn’t understand until this very episode, is Luxx Noir London’s drag daughter. (She is also our surprise mini-challenge winner!) Sam Star, the self-described “supermodel of the south,” is Trinity the Tuck’s drag daughter. But only Hormona Lisa can lay claim to being pushed to do this show by Ru himself, as he invited her onto the cast during one of his memoir book tour stops. She is clearly very proud of this fact, and the other queens are clearly very annoyed by it.
Five more! God, 14 queens is a lot, isn’t it? Onya Nurve walks into the room giving ’70s vibes, and I am instantly drawn to her energy. She’s giving best confessional queen of the season. Suzie Toot calls herself a “cross-section between Betty Boop and Lucille Ball,” and got to open for Chappell Roan at one of her tour stops. Crystal Envy from Asbury Park, New Jersey is absolutely gorgeous—both in and out of drag. Acacia Forgot, a “country diva” who plays the guitar and other instruments, is the Amanda Tori Meating of this season, coming in for criticisms for her makeup and look the second she walks in. Finally, there’s Lucky Starzzz, who comes in looking like no one else in an ultra-creative paint look.
My overall impression of this cast is: we’ll see! I have some instant favourites, like Lexi, Onya and, after we see her performance later in the episode, Suzie. But a lot of them are blending together a bit for me. It doesn’t help that we have a Jewels Sparkles, a Lucky Starzzz and a Sam Star. Even Crystal Envy’s generic name gets mixed up in that pile in my mind. It also doesn’t help that, after Kori leads the queens in splitting into two groups—a task put on them to take care of by Ru himself—most of the lower-key queens wind up performing in this premiere. A lot of the biggest personalities (Lexi, Kori, Onya, Hormona) wind up in premiere #2, so I think I’ll wait to make any major judgments about the cast until then.
After a Masked4Masked Singer runway, we get to the newly redesigned main stage (it looks a great deal like the Season 16 finale and Secret Celebrity Drag Race Season 2 stages) for the maxi-challenge talent show. Immediately, of course, the common complaint arises: why do none or few of the queens do real talent performances anymore, the rest defaulting to lip syncs? To this I say to you whilst holding your hand to bring comfort: it’s because those performances win. I was loudly rooting for Ra’Jah O’Hara’s one-minute dress act to beat Yara Sofia’s performance in the All Stars 6 talent show, but that episode should’ve been a warning that the well-branded and just-stupid-enough lip syncs would always win out moving forward. Season 14, which saw Kornbread “The Snack” Jeté and Angeria Paris VanMichaels win with original song lip syncs and Willow Pill’s surreal, fascinating “self-care routine” lose, was the death knell.
More to the point, there seems to be some revisionist history happening around what kind of performances used to win at the talent shows. You’ll never find a bigger fan of “The Same Parts” than me, but a spoken-word piece about genitals is much closer to the kinds of acts that win now than, say, an earnest musical performance. Those never won, and in fact were pretty routinely punished with bottom placements. (Remember how close Silky Nutmeg Ganache got to the bottom two of that All Stars 6 talent show for her piano rendition of “This Little Light of Mine”?)
So while I can empathize with Acacia’s frustrations as she is named the week’s worst performer, I can’t quite co-sign her belief that she should’ve been safe for performing an actual talent instead of a lip sync. Not only is the current “metagame” of Drag Race that you need to do a lip sync, something the judges could imagine seeing on a Werq the World tour or at RuPaul’s Drag Race Live!, but even in the old days, her guitar-and-vocal performance would’ve been called safe at best. Her melting snowman look for the runway doesn’t help matters, either.
We don’t know exactly how the rest of the queens place—though I have lots of thoughts to share in the power ranking this week—but Arrietty, Lydia, Lucky and Joella are all called safe. Arrietty owes a pretty big debt to Lana on this one: the two made a deal to rank each other #1, and I bet it’s that placement that keeps Arrietty out of the bottom slot. That leaves Suzie and Jewels as our top two, and they both give solid performances. Suzie’s routine is best-in-show for me, a tap number that’s witty (the Gettysburg Address in Morse code!) but not too smart for the show. Jewels’ milk number is silly and fun, although it does share a lot of spirit in common with recent winning performances, like Anetra’s and Plane Jane’s.
The same could be said for Lucky Starzzz’s lemon performance, but of the two, it’s my preferred choice for the top two. I do think the runway plays a factor here, though: Lucky’s pizza box look is fun, but the makeup isn’t my favourite. It’s close between them—I wouldn’t be surprised if Suzie was #1 by a pretty clear margin, with others closely bunched a ways after her.
Suzie and Jewels get to lip sync for the win. Unfortunately for them, they have to do it to Katy Perry’s “Woman’s World.” At first, this looks like a clear win for Jewels, since she’s dressed the part and is excited by the high-energy song. But Suzie pulls off something impressive here, twisting the song to fit her style instead of trying to match what Jewels is doing. At one point, she taps along to a verse instead of lip syncing to it (if that’s a style of protest against lip-syncing “Woman’s World,” I support it), and later fully breaks out into the Charleston. She seizes control of this one about halfway through and runs it home, and earns a deserved victory.
Overall, this premiere is solid. It does a good job of introducing us to the queens, it breaks up the talent shows nicely and it’s just twisty enough to keep things interesting. Were these legendary talent show performances? Not particularly. Do I think the runway featured any real jaw-droppers? Nah. But this season has plenty of time to ramp up. I’m okay with a soft launch.