![]() ![]() It was an intriguing idea, and fans certainly got to see their faves throughout the season. There are rumors that All Stars Season 9 will have the same format. There would be no eliminations, with the queens instead accruing points (we're not getting into "legendary legend stars" terminology here, sorry) over the season, with a lip-sync tournament at the end to determine the winner. Combine that with the All Star queens being more wary about returning to the show and possibly doing damage to their brand, and the solution in recent years is to just let everyone win on some level.Īll Stars Season 7 was the long-awaited all-winners season, and since attracting a group of eight former champions back to the show where seven of them would be guaranteed to do worse than they'd done the first time was a tall order, the show's producers changed format. As with any fandom, no one likes to see their faves eliminated. The fanbase also tends to be younger, with a hair trigger for outrage, and the show has in recent years seemed especially sensitive to that. Queens can receive the most enthusiastic praise and also the most vile attacks, often racist, size-ist, and colorist in nature. The Drag Race fandom, over the years, has become aggressive and often been called toxic. That can happen to stars of any reality show, but Drag Race backlash can lead to queens not getting as many bookings for live appearances after the show is over, so it's of particular concern. The queens are still combative backstage, though often there's the sense that queens are holding back so as not to incur fan backlash. On Drag Race, this has been a particularly intentional evolution. Shows like The Great British Baking Show are revered expressly because they're a kinder, gentler version of the cutthroat reality competitions that used to dominate the genre. Survivor contestants are all so game-savvy now that hardly anyone takes the game too personally anymore. Top Chef evolved away from volatile chefs having kitchen meltdowns. In general, the genre has gotten, for lack of a better term, nicer. The double-shantay tactic seems to have opened Pandora's box on Drag Race, but it also reveals a paradox at the center of modern-day reality competition shows. ![]() This is because the double shantay has essentially been baked into the season's episode order - the double save is now needed for the show to have enough episodes for the season. More often, the double shantay has felt perfunctory and unnecessary. This has happened more or less every season since Season 3, but only on rare occasions - like the Alyssa Edwards-Roxxxy Andrews wig-reveal lip sync in Season 5 - has it ever felt like a genuinely spontaneous decision that both queens had simply performed too well to eliminate. ![]() That season also featured one of the show's now-customary "double shantay" episodes, where both of the queens lip-syncing for their lives are declared safe to return to the game. Season 13 featured the "Porkchop Loading Dock" twist, which kicked off the season with a series of lip syncs, separating the cast into lip-sync winners and losers, then going forward with a two-part premiere, all of which led to no queen being eliminated until Episode 4, a full month into the season. The producers of All Stars 8 were clearly conscious of this when they designed the Fame Games twist, which allowed the eliminated queens to return at the end of the season for a fan-voted consolation prize.Ĭonsolation prizes and efforts to keep the eliminated queens have been in the works for several seasons now. This shift seems to be in response to the Drag Race industrial complex: or, what it costs a queen to appear on Drag Race, how the subsequent fame drives a queen's economic prospects after the show, and the ways that fan response to the show can affect the queens in good and bad ways. And even if that wasn't the expressed intention, it fits with an overall trend in Drag Race in recent years to make sure everyone wins, in one way or another.Īll Stars Season 8 has been at the center of a few recent trends in reality competition, but this "everyone's a winner" ethos feels particularly pertinent to how the show is poised to function going forward. While Jimbo may have taken the $200,000 cash prize as the season's winner, this tandem announcement of shows for both Jimbo and runner-up Kandy, just three days after All Stars ended, feels like a hasty make-up prize to placate Kandy, her fans, or some combination thereof. The news that World of Wonder will produce two new RuPaul's Drag Race spin-offs starring Jimbo and Kandy Muse has given the recently concluded All Stars Season 8 even more of a feel-good ending. ![]()
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