RuPaul's Drag Race - RuPaul
Season One & Three & Four
This is part of my unedited thoughts series.
Season One
Going into this, I didn’t know much about the show. All I knew was the vibe – it was about drag queens. Yes, I know I must be living under a rock.
I’ve never been a huge fan of the drag scene. Just didn’t interest me. So because of all of this, I wasn’t expecting much.
It was much more interesting than I expected.
The challenges were exciting to watch and were varried. Rather than just dress up in a different outfit.
There is one episode where the challenge is to read the news and then do an interview. It is brilliant. Fantastic tv!
The end of every episode ends with the bottom two contestants competing in a lipstick battle.
This is just hilarious some of the stuff that happens during these battles. What I think is great about these battles and the rest of the show is how RuPaul runs it.
She doesn’t take it too seriously. She takes it just seriously enough. This tone is so important because I think the show would be farcical if taken too seriously.
I agree with the winner. She was just next level compared to the rest of the contestants. As the judges kept saying from very early on she could take up RuPaul’s mantle immediately.
Now that I have experienced what drag race is they will have to do something different next season to keep me interested.
Season Three
Lots of firsts this season. First return of a previous contestant with Shangela coming back.
We also saw the first lip sink for your life result in no elimination.
Then if that wasn’t enough the judges were given the chance to bring back an eliminated contestant.
There were some returning challenges but they were the really fun ones like impersonating a celebrity. Just great stuff really funny Alicia Keys.
There were two really hard challenges where the contestants had to create three outfits for the same runway.
You could just see them stressing to breaking point.
The team challenges brought out the bitchiness – these were fantastic this season.
From the first challenge, I was certain Raja was going to win. She was just so much better than all the others from the word go. They did try to play up her weaknesses in the final episode but that felt false. She was the best contestant we have seen by far.
This season also had the infamous Mimi Imfurst incident where she picked up another contestant during the lip sink.
Ru Paul was a fantastic in his instant elimination “Drag is not a contact sport.”
While this was entertaining there was nothing that really grabbed me this season but it is still very binge-worthy and I would recommend it.
Season Four
This was another interesting season that saw the show start to settle into what would become some common challenges. We saw the return of Snatch Game.
We also saw the return of the drag up a nondrag queen. I can see why these challenges are set to return now season after season.
Snatch Game is just hilarious. Great impersonators don’t just win because this is not a look-a-like competition. You have to be funny.
We again saw some truly horrible performances of people who looked like celebrities but were not funny. Chad Michaels as Cher was brilliant.
There was an episode where the contestants needed to do stump speeches in a fake election/debate. Sharyn was brilliant in this.
I felt from fairly early on that Sharyn deserved to win. Not stand out hands down like Raja but was just doing some really interesting drag. Once again the show played up her downfalls in the final episodes but thankfully she did go on to win.
This was the first season to have the final episode filmed in front of a live audience. I wasn’t a huge fan of having to wait for the announcement of the winner but I can see why they did it.
Huge draw card for fans to see the queens and Ru in the flesh. The episode felt very long.
