RuPaul is one of the single most impactful TV stars of the decade just concluded, thanks to a funny sort of double performance. As the host and presiding judge on “RuPaul’s Drag Race,&#…
” has little to recommend it other than Ru himself, bringing to bear the star’s charisma on a tonally uneven, shaky story and trusting that glamour will carry the day. Even RuPaul has his limitations.
Here, the star plays Robert Lee, a performer who takes the stage as Ruby Red. Finally ready to pursue his dream of opening a club of his own, he realizes that his boyfriend has grifted him and stolen his money; this fellow, in league with a villainess in an eyepatch then pursue him across the country to get their revenge for Robert’s dropping the dime on them to copes.
That’s a steamer trunk’s worth of baggage for a new show to take on, and it doesn’t wear well. Carrere’s character, a snarling vixen who feels taken from Carmen Sandiego’s league of cartoon crooks, has to share space in the narrative with AJ’s trauma over her mother’s struggles with addiction. There’s hardly enough space even in generously padded episodes for Robert to show much dimension at all.
It’s as if, in telling the story of a drag queen, Michael Patrick King, who created the show with RuPaul, overindexed just how much we see drag queens as avatars of exaggerated emotional control.
A show about overcoming loneliness and isolation through performance would be an interesting and worthy one. But tasking a show about a cross-country chase and drag tour starring a mouthy kid to take that on, too, is more than King and his queen can handle.
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