Is this the year we reach peak RuPaul's Drag Race fatigue?

RuPaul’s Drag Race is no longer a reality TV competition. Not really. Once a hidden gem on Logo TV, the now Emmy-winning MTV series may have the trappings of a competition—with drag queens battling it out weekly for the coveted title of America’s Next Drag Superstar (16 of which have been crowned over the years)—but it serves now mostly as a banner staple of a cottage industry that runs itself. With global and All Stars editions, conventions, tours, and many a short-form video offshoot, RuPaul’s once groundbreaking ode to the artistry of her specific kind of drag has become a stale version of its former self. It may still be occasionally brilliant, intermittently hilarious, and every once in a while truly gag-worthy, but as season 17 presses on, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the show may never be able to recapture what once made it so original nor revamp itself into something as urgent as it still hopes to be.

Take the opening of season 17 from earlier this month. Unlike most previous seasons, which kicked off with the various new queens entering the pink Werk Room in signature looks designed to wow, audiences this time around were treated to something called “Squirrel Games.” Spoofing Netflix’s Squid Game, the producers of the show had the latest batch of contestants play a round of Ru Light/Green Light: “When the beat drops,” Ru’s off-camera voice explained, “you’ll serve your best moves. When the beat stops, you’ll strike a pose. But if you flop, you will be eliminated.” Despite the suggestion of peril (could a queen really be eliminated before the competition even begins?) it was soon all too clear that this playful sequence was a scripted wink of a prologue. After all, surrounding the new batch of queens was a smattering of familiar faces from past seasons. The likes of Trinity the Tuck, Kerri Colby, Angeria, and even Victoria “Porkchop” Parker, the first queen to ever sashay away from the show in its very first episode, were soon eliminated, taking pies to the face in hilarious slo-mo reaction shots. 

If the slickly produced “Squirrel Games” was meant to offer something new, its execution merely stressed the problems RuPaul’s Drag Race is facing as it struts further into its 17th season. For one, RuPaul remained off-screen for much of it. This is the same host who had made the intro to the first episode of the show’s first season all about her own history. She traced her rise to superstardom and in that first season set herself up as a gracious superstar eager to set newer queens to similar success paths. It was no accident that every part of the winner’s package (the Paper magazine spread, the l.a.Eyeworks campaign, even the MAC Cosmetics prize) were nods to RuPaul’s own trailblazing success. 

Over the years, though, Ru (who at one point was hosting three different versions of the regular show on top of various All Stars ones) has scaled back her own involvement. Her scripted bits and even one-on-ones are rarer, letting the likes of judging mainstay Michelle Visage (who now hosts Drag Race Down Under) and makeup whiz Raven take up more prominent roles in the Werk Room. Even in season 17’s premiere, it was up to Katy Perry to give the queens a pep talk with groan-worthy lines that not even the former American Idol judge could gracefully deliver. It makes sense that, in “Squirrel Games,” RuPaul portrayed herself as a masked mastermind who was pulling levers and manipulating the results. That cheeky image, although perhaps a bit too literal, sends up how often the show’s many arbitrary results rest on her stylish and oft-aloof shoulders.

Moreover, “Squirrel Games” also cribbed from an iconic season-five moment, reminding viewers of the kind of buzzy, off-the-cuff brilliance born out of the humor inherent in drag that seems in short supply these days on the show. The ominous Young-hee doll from the Netflix hit was here replaced by an equally towering vision of Li’l Poundcake, the Alaska/Lineysha Sparx doll creation from that earlier season that’s since become an icon in her own right. For a show that currently struggles to showcase elements that don’t feel rehearsed, overproduced, and/or too polished, the vision of Li’l Poundcake felt like an all too pressing reminder of how so many of the show’s breakout moments have happened almost in spite of the project’s increasingly rigid structure and well-known challenges. Even a look at the bulk of the queens from this season (plenty of whom have literally grown up with the series as a beacon and goal in their varied drag careers) shows that casting performers willing if not outright eager to break out of the readymade reality TV competitor template is becoming harder and harder. Even—or perhaps especially—when its own stable of queens seem to be thriving in shows like The Traitors and in their own ventures (such as Dungeons And Drag Queens, Drag: The Musical, and We’re Here), all while more expansive visions of drag competitions (The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula as well as Revry’s upcoming King Of Drag) continue growing.

Raw talent—or talent that’s not already been sanded down and primed for an Emmy-winning series—is hard to come by. At this point, almost every queen now arrives with catchphrases and signature props, not to mention an all-too-self-conscious understanding of the trappings of reality TV in general and the show in particular. Katy Perry’s pep talk tidily summed up something the show took seasons to perfect: “I think the way to win is to play with your alter ego,” she told the queens. “But don’t be afraid to take the mask off to show the real person in there.” In sum: “Just give us real and give us fantasy.”

Such realness, though, continues to elude them and audiences, too. Heck, even these Drag Queens Got Talent challenges like the one Perry was called to judge find many of the queens showcasing overproduced lip-syncs to dance to, as contestant Acacia Forgot put it when she learned she was the bottom ranking performer of the week. That’s not any particularly exciting kind of talent at all. As Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez, authors of Legendary Children: The First Decade Of RuPaul’s Drag Race And The Last Century Of Queer Life, have long been arguing, the show as it stands right now is less a competition than a variety show. Queens know their appearance on the show is but a stepping stone; they’re there to show their wares, their talents—and yes, even their songs—so as to establish the brand many of them will leverage when the show airs. Decisions in recent seasons to avoid axing queens too soon—front-loading either multiple runways or these talent shows early in the run—seem less designed for gameplay than for giving all the competitors a chance to showcase as much of their looks and skills as possible before one of them eventually heads home. 

But above all, what was clearest in opening a new season with “Squirrel Games” was that the entire premise of what once would’ve made for a fun mini-challenge in itself was mostly a carefully orchestrated bit that sidelined the very queens it was supposed to be teeing up for success. Ru may have eventually chosen a winner of what we were told was an impromptu/secret photo challenge (it’s a pity viewers didn’t get to see everyone’s entries), but it was obvious that queens like Trinity and Kerri were there as pie-filled fodder. Oh what fun would it have been to see these fresh-faced queens getting that treatment. Instead, “Squirrel Games” and its pies merely nodded (in a rather antiseptic way) to the show’s messier past.

In its early years, this was a show, after all, that forced queens to take photos while doing a car wash or underwater. It gleefully had them play musical chairs and do each other’s makeup while in handcuffs. It even created mini challenges involving fried chicken and cow brains (yes, really), duct tape, trampolines, and a dunk tank. These days, the return of the Badonkadonk Dunk Tank is kept safely away from queens and Ru alike. As we learned in this season’s second episode, RuPaul’s Drag Race is once again trifling with its many arcane and arbitrary rules: After a queen loses a Lip Sync For Your Life, a.k.a. the final chance they have to stay in the competition, they are given, uh, well, another final chance to stay—but only if they pull the right lever in front of them and, in turn, dunk Michelle Visage into the cheekily named water tank below her. With the failed attempt to make the Wonka-riffing “golden chocolate bars” a key part of the competition in season 14 and this year’s revival of “Rate-A-Queen,” it feels as if the show is openly acknowledging its own stale structure.

To bemoan that staleness—or to point out the way Drag Race has, perhaps, overexposed itself in recent years—is nothing new. Even as the show has grown in popularity and amassed an enviable awards hardware (it boasts 27 Primetime Emmys), there has been a sense among longtime fans that the crafty, edgy, and outright exciting parts of what made Ru’s reality competition such must-see television has been waning in that very same time frame. There have still been stellar episodes, welcome surprises, and no shortage of brilliant queens walking through that pink Werk Room. But there’s no denying that the inability of the show to truly innovate or reinvent itself (at this point, fans and queens alike know exactly what challenges to expect and that this is a slick, well-oiled production now) is starting to show—even, as the “Squirrel Games” segment underlines, in the moments when the series is very much trying something new. Many of us may continue to watch as the show sleepwalks its way through another season, crowning no doubt another deserving queen, but it’s hard not to wish that it would shake off its tightly controlled production.

In the very first episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race season one, Ru aped a well-worn catchphrase from one of the most influential reality TV shows of all time when introducing the series. As a montage of the many jaw-dropping moments from what would become an iconic (if, for years, hard to watch) season, the veteran queen told her viewers that “RuPaul’s Drag Race is about to get real.” As we all watch season 17 (and ideally root for the queens whose drag perhaps neither begins nor ends with Drag Race, whose dresses and talents may not be immediately tailor-made for this competition, and whose personality will eventually outgrow their time on the show), it’d be great if the show lived up to that nod to The Real World. What a joy it would be to see, once more, a series where we find out what happens when drag queens stop being polite…and start getting real.