RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars 10 Review - Part One
All Stars is good again, let's celebrate that!
Just over a year ago, I wrote a review of RuPaul’s Drag Race season 16, because I was surprised at how exciting and engaging that season ended up being. A few months ago I considered writing a review for season 17 as well, but felt I didn’t have much to say about it beyond “liked it!”1 Still, 17 was a blast, and after two great mainline seasons it felt like Drag Race was hitting a new imperial period and finding new ways to iterate on its nearly two-decade old formula.
But on the flipside of mainline Drag Race reaching new heights is All Stars, a version of the show that I think many longtime fans have been approaching as a chore more than anything else. There are plenty of reasons why I feel All Stars has become so musty and dusty. A big one is the dismal, end-times signifying gambit of putting it on Paramount+, a decision that completely takes away the communal element which made Drag Race a staple of queer nightlife and benefits literally no one except for Paramount shareholders. But the downfall of All Stars has been brewing for a while, when Paramount+ was but a glimmer in ViacomCBS’ eye. I’ve long held the idea that All Stars needs to be spread out more, that the good people at World of Wonder should take a few years between seasons to replenish the well of prospective all stars and generate even more excitement for when those seasons do come back around. The reason why All Stars 2 is still the gold standard is because it was produced within an inch of its life, and every queen on the cast was a heavy hitter, a result of it being produced four years after All Stars 1. But for nearly ten years now, we’ve had a new All Stars season every year, rendering it significantly less novel, less distinguished, and less enticing to big-name queens.
All Stars fatigue seemed to rear its ugly head in season 8 and 9, with multiple contestants trying to tap out of the former, and a non-elimination format rendering the competition completely inert in the latter (at least from what I’ve seen—I didn’t actually watch 8 or 9). I thought I was checked out of All Stars indefinitely. I’d wake up for the next all winners season, but otherwise I was good. Still, something about this new season intrigued me. For one, there was the inclusion of queens who I was genuinely excited to see again. Queens like Bosco, Aja, Denali, Mistress Isabelle Brooks, Nicole Paige Brooks.
But there was also this word. A word so intriguing, so multiplicitous in meaning. A word I’ve always known yet felt like I was learning for the first time because of how thoroughly it was being recontextualized. “Bracket.” Harsh and plosive. It sounded like a threshold. It sounded like a great mystery. It sounded like a word that would get you into a secret masked orgy at a castle in the woods. It sounded like a word that would be ominously uttered by a notorious newspaper magnate on his deathbed. Bracket. I know this word. And yet, I wondered, what could it possibly mean?
In this case, it was a key. A key that unlocked the potential of All Stars. Or, rather, the potential of the Drag Race producers’ most hare-brained, high-falutin machinations for All Stars. I tuned into this season because this “bracket” format was so confusing and ill-defined in the runup to the premiere that I was sure it was going to be a mess. But to my surprise, it has really worked out, and I feel pretty confident in saying that All Stars 10 is the most fresh and entertaining outing in years2.
Seeing as the initial “bracket” round has wrapped up and we’re now gearing up for the “merge,” (another load-bearing word in this season’s lexicon), I wanted to take stock of the past nine weeks. I knew I wanted to write about this season early on, thinking I would wait until the end when a winner was crowned. But there is simply too much to talk about within these first nine episodes and there’s no time like the present. If the rest of the season flops maybe I’ll abandon part two, but for now, here is part one of my thoughts on All Stars 10.
I’ll talk about each bracket in-depth, but first I want to discuss the pros and cons of this formula.
Pros of the Brackets
Non eliminations
For years it feels like the producers have been trying to crack a non-elimination formula. The impression I get is that well-established queens are less incentivized to come back to Drag Race if there’s a possibility that they may be eliminated early on and thus have their talents and statuses undermined3. Introducing non-eliminations makes sense in theory, but that necessitates another way of determining the hierarchy of the competition. How will we know who’s ahead? Whittling six queens down to three per bracket seems like a happy medium, and guaranteeing every queen at least three episodes allows the producers to have it both ways. But still, there’s the question of how that final three is determined, which brings us to points.
Drag Race has flirted with points in the past, and I’ve never really felt like it worked. It is a competition show, yes, but crucially, so much of the outcome of any given season is determined by producers. They have their favorites, they have results they’re banking on, and in order to deliver those results there needs to be some room for error, some plausible deniability. Applying something so black-and-white like points to Drag Race, a competition that is determined so much by those fickle, nebulous factors like what makes RuPaul laugh and what the hell “family resemblance” means is risky. It risks making the production hand too obvious. Like, for example, when Shea Coulee was randomly awarded three extra points in the final challenge of All Stars 7.
All of this is to say, for the most part, I think the points have been handled well this time around. I really like the twist where the bottom four queens have to give out points to each other and the strategy that introduces. That brings us to the next pro.
Strategy actually being consequential
In the past, All Stars twists and dramatic shake-ups to the format have not yielded much consequence beyond intra-werkroom drama. This has always been my biggest issue with All Stars twists. It makes for fun conflict amongst contestants but rarely has consequences that span season-long. Now I don’t know if this twist is inherently better or if the queens themselves (*cough* Mistress *cough*) have just willed more drama into existence, but the points system has paid off big time. It was thrilling to watch the queens adapt to this point system in real time and figure out how to game it, and in some cases weaponize it. It was consistently suspenseful and dramatic, and just when I thought it wouldn’t amount to much in-game, Cynthia Lee Fontaine was pushed into the merge! An excellent (and surprisingly good-natured) eleventh hour payoff to all the back-and-forth that this points awarding ceremony provided for the past nine weeks. It was refreshing to feel like an All Stars twist could actually have major impacts on how the game is played, even if the end result was still more or less what I expected4.
A good balance of queens
I feel like such a cunt every time a new All Stars cast is announced because invariably I always write off half the queens as being unworthy of the “all star” title. All because, what, that queen was eliminated early on? Because I’m unfairly comparing every season against the high of All Stars 2? All Stars is a great platform to display the talents and boost the booking fees of queens who didn’t get a fair shake in their original seasons. As much as I wish every All Stars could comprise of finalists, that’s just not realistic. Both because it’s unfair to said queens who want their second chance, and because there simply aren’t enough finalists anymore to meet the demand. In fact, All Stars in its current iteration is probably more enticing to those early outs than it is to, say, the Gigi Goodes and Asia O’Haras and Sapphira Cristáls of the world, whose booking fees are doing just fine. The magic trick of these stratified groups of six—wherein everyone gets their three episode minimum as well as fewer personalities to have to compete against for screen time—is that there’s plenty of space for both the heavy hitters and the wild cards. There’s space for the wild cards to prove that they’re heavy hitters, such as Irene the Alien. There’s space for the old and new guards to clash, such as the two dueling Brooks’ in Bracket 2. And, yes, there’s still plenty of space for obvious production meddling, like with the respective ascents and descents of Ginger Minj and Denali. Every group felt very evenly balanced, and one of the most joyful surprises of the season so far has been seeing the unique chemistry among each group.
Cons of the Brackets
Predictability
“Predictability” is hardly a unique issue with this season. On any given day, any given Drag Race fan will tell you that any given season was too predictable. Still, on the flipside of the “good balance of queens” is that the results of each bracket were pretty predictable. I was talking with a friend about this and they brought up how each bracket has a pretty obvious spread of: two queens who will definitely make the merge, two queens who definitely won’t, and two who could go either way. It doesn’t quite feel like anyone’s game. And what happens when the show only has three weeks to prove why certain queens should be in the finals is that those queens tend to steamroll. The wealth isn’t shared as far as challenge wins go. In a typical All Stars season, I could see queens like Olivia Lux, Deja Skye, and Acid Betty putting some wins on the board. But because these were essentially fast-tracked mini seasons and these queens weren’t ordained from the start, they got short-shrifted.
Now to be fair, going into this merge where the semi-final cast is (almost) all killer and no filler, I actually don’t know who’s going to win. Conventional wisdom and snotty Drag Race stans on twitter would lead you to believe that this whole season is one big prelude to Ginger Minj’s coronation, and that very well may be true. But I don’t know, I still have hope for people like Bosco and Jorgeous and Mistress Isabelle Brooks. Still, the brackets really did feel like preludes to inevitable conclusions. But one must accept that the true joy of having queens like Phoenix and Acid Betty and Nicole Paige Brooks back on in this format is not that they had much of a fighting chance, but that we got to bask in their idiosyncrasies, even if just for a few weeks at a time.
Now onto the nitty-gritty of each bracket.
Bracket 1
This group was a great place to start and a great way to introduce us to this format. The vibes throughout these three weeks just felt nice and unabrasive, and the final three of Bosco, Aja, and Irene was really satisfying. Aja has a special place in my heart because season 9 was the first season I watched live, and I’m so happy to see her back. This was the perfect time for her to come back to All Stars, more embodied and fully herself. She also gave us the only truly iconic lip sync moment so far this season5. I was skeptical of Irene because of my aforementioned cuntiness about early outs being considered “All Stars,” but she made it clear that her early elimination was a bit of a fluke. To win all three challenges in your bracket and not have the fans up in arms crying rigged is a feat. But no one shined in this bracket as much as Bosco. Surely there’s more to say than just “she’s insanely fucking hot.” But, I mean, she is insanely fucking hot (just ask my folder of screenshots of her). Like any truly hot person, what makes her so attractive is how much of a clown she’s able to be, and how whip-smart her instincts are. Full disclozse, she’s my winner pick. At the very least she seems like a lock for top 3.
The challenges in this bracket were consistently strong. Imagine my shock when the girl group song and improv challenge ended up being really good. I also love whenever a makeover challenge includes women. If this bracket can teach us anything it’s that Drag Race is better with women! I don’t think there’s much drama to get into with this bracket; aside from a few catty werkroom tiffs, this group of queens was really solid and all seem to be on good terms. Slay!
Bracket 2
Okay, so, this bracket was my favorite. Incontestably. It delivered on some of the most exciting potential of the bracket twist with Mistress Isabelle Brooks puppeteering the distribution of points, and all in all it just felt like Drag Race firing on all cylinders. Good looks, good challenges, great drama, and some true charming oddball queens. Anyone who wasn’t into this bracket because of the drama Mistress incited, or some wonky judging, or whatever, yeah you can tune them out. Clearly they don’t possess good taste.
Let’s actually start with the three losers. While I’m very happy with the top three, I can’t help but feel like Tina Burner deserved better. It seems like the producers just do not vibe with Tina, or at the very least Michelle doesn’t. Between season 13 and now All Stars, Michelle always comes in with the nastiest, nit-pickiest critiques for her in a way that feels personal? It bothers me when a well-established, experienced, consummate drag queen who is clearly a staple of their community back home comes onto the show, only to be undermined time and time again. But, when you’ve watched the show as long and pored over it as much as I have, you start to understand that “Drag Race” is a very specific skill set, distinct from simply doing drag. And I guess it’s a case of you either got it or ya don’t.
It kind of shocked me that Kerri Colby made it so close to making the merge on goodwill alone, nevermind that a lot of fans now talk about her like she was robbed. I’m not a Kerri hater by any means, but, like, her? She’s a beautiful girl to be sure, but if Drag Race is a skill… I fear that is a skill she does not possess.
However the real star of this bracket was, without a doubt, Nicole Paige Brooks. God, what an icon. A true kook, a true soundbite generator, and a true fucking drag queen. Did she do well in literally any of the challenges? Not particularly. But if anyone deserved to make the merge on goodwill alone it was her, simply so we could keep getting soundbites. I love her. As someone who hasn’t actually watched season two but who has had the phrase “malicious gay faggotry” ringing in her ears her entire adult life, I hope Nicole stays top of mind in the Drag Race collective consciousness for a long, long time.
But okay, the top three. Magical stuff. I’ve already made it clear how much I love Mistress and how indispensable she is to modern day Drag Race. I mean the producers must be thanking their lucky stars every day that they found her. Her performance in the Rapping Roast challenge is one of my favorite single performances in a challenge in a while. She’s a smart performer and a smart game player (get her ass on Traitors). I think she was one of those queens that producers had locked in to go to the merge, which begs the question of why she didn’t get more challenge wins. Well, it’s probably because they knew that she could game her way to the top, and that that would be infinitely more entertaining.
The highlight of the season for me was the mini-narrative between her and Lydia. Lydia, the young ingénue, with no connections to anyone and everything to prove, immediately clocked that Mistress was a good ally to have (both for her prowess and her plot armor). After jokingly jockeying for a spot as a Brooks daughter, Mistress awards her final point of the bracket to Lydia, betraying the promise she made to Kerri and securing Lydia as an ally (after Lydia won two out of three challenges). She seals this with the scintillating line “you’re welcome daughter.” And, reader, this took my breath away. This secured Mistress as one of the greats, a master of her craft. Her saying “you’re welcome daughter” as she rewards Lydia the blood point, and the subsequent cut to Lydia’s disbelieving face, was like the ending of The Godfather to me. This was the most engaging storytelling Drag Race has managed to pull off in years and a fitting end to such an electric run of episodes.
Bracket 3
Another illustrious word that has long been in the Drag Race lexicon but was solidified by this bracket: favoritism. I mentioned this a little bit above, that there is typically some clear favoritism at play in any given season of Drag Race. That’s true of all reality TV. It’s frustrating when the producer hand feels heavy, or when the narrative being told feels discordant with the actual talent on display, but sometimes that’s just part of the show. But the favoritism, or rather, the fans’ outrage about favoritism, seemed to reach a fever pitch with this bracket, specifically with the trajectory of Ginger Minj. Ginger’s inclusion in this season was strange to me from the beginning, because the mere fact that this was her fourth go around seemed to make it obvious that she was being set up to win. Like, it seemed improbable that the producers would invite her back just to snub her for a fourth time, when she’s clearly a favorite of theirs. But then again, there is a precedent for that with Jujubee, so… Nevertheless, as much as people want to claim that all of bracket 3’s challenges were jerry-rigged for Ginger, you can’t deny that she’s fucking talented. If Drag Race is a skill, then Ginger is a virtuoso. And honestly thank god she was there to make some of those ridiculous challenges watchable. I definitely see the argument that she was favored (I mean, it’s actually pretty inarguable), but I guess it’s just a matter of how much you allow yourself to get heated about favoritism. I’m kind of past that. I kind of just let it wash over me. The story that they’re gonna tell is the story that they’re gonna tell. It’d be one thing if she was some untalented rube, but she’s not! What’s exceedingly clear is that the level of fans’ outrage about favoritism is in direct proportion to how much they dislike the favored queen (which is the kind of bullshit I just can’t engage in because I’m too grown and too intelligent).
Speaking of which, the second biggest headline from this bracket is the mistreatment of fan-favorite Denali. I feel similarly about this as I do about Tina Burner. Denali definitely deserved better. Some of the critiques she got were wack as hell and made it clear that she just wasn’t one of the chosen ones. But there’s also a part of me that can’t push down this feeling that Denali was doing a little too much, that she came into the competition with an air of “I’ve got this all figured out and I deserve this.” I love her as a performer, don’t get me wrong. Her Crystal Waters lip sync is still one of the greatest of all time and she could deservedly sail on the high of that performance for the rest of her drag career. But her lip sync against Ginger, the one that every cried robbed about, was just… way too much. It’s the classic Kenya Michaels vs. Latrice Royale thing. That performance started at 100 and stayed at 100, which is famously how you lose a lip sync. She could’ve justifiably made it to the merge, but, again, her placement is one of those things that I just have to let wash over me. And I agree with this tweet that she would be great on Canada vs. The World (another franchise I don’t watch).
As for the three episodes themselves… chop. The challenges were middling to atrocious, the chemistry between the cast never really coalesced into anything transcendent, and between Acid Betty, Alyssa Hunter, and Cynthia Lee Fontaine, I think these were some of the queens that the producers were least interested in. Which is why it was such a gag that Cynthia was pushed through to the merge. She’s someone who clearly earned the goodwill of her competitors to rack up all those points, and she’s just such a light on the show that I can’t be mad at all. It also felt like a perfect way to close the loop on this points system, with the queens actually seeing through the potential of the points in a way that shakes up the game. After the three least engaging episodes of the season, I’m glad it ended on a well-earned twist. A cucu d’état, as it were.
When looking at the semi-final cast, I had the thought, “Why couldn’t this have just been the original cast? Why go through all the trouble of the brackets just to land on a cast that would have been compelling from the start?” I guess in retrospect, everything I’ve talked about so far has been my argument for why they’re a net-positive. They shake up the gameplay and make room for more queens, and now, with so many different storylines and personal stakes built in, the competition can really hit the ground running. And needless to say I’m excited for the second half of this season aka the Mistress show part two. In the words of a very wise woman, I can’t wait to see how this turns out.
I hadn’t actually come up with anything to write about, but I did decide on a title for that review, which would have been “The Miseducation of Suzie Toot.” I don’t know exactly what that means but I thought it sounded funny.
The elephant in the room is All Stars 7 aka All Winners, an undeniably fantastic and canonical season of Drag Race. My opinion on that is that the format didn’t really do many favors and the reason why that season is so successful is simply due to the caliber of talent. Also, it’s just hard to compare it to any other season of All Stars because of how unique it was.
My personal view on that is that… well, that’s the risk of going on a competition show doll. But what do I know.
I mean preseason I was sure that Denali was a lock for top 3, not just for her bracket but for the season as a whole. So I can’t say this format didn’t shake things up in a major way!
Another note I have about this season, the lip syncs so far have not been particularly memorable