RuPaul's Drag Race: All Stars needs an overhaul

I am so sorry for the person I will become when season 7 of RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars airs. Unfortunately, on May 20th, I will become a husk of my former self, and all that will be left is the Shea Couleé stan account within. There’s really no avoiding it. But as I enjoy my last moments of lucidity, I do want to talk about the show’s elimination format.

For the uninitiated: on regular Drag Race, RuPaul holds all the power to crown winners and eliminate losers after each challenge—the lower-ranking queens of the week have to “lip-sync for their lives” in a battle against each other to convince Ru they should stay. But on All Stars, RuPaul only decides the top and bottom queens, and it’s up to the queens to decide who actually gets eliminated. The winner of each week’s challenge gets to choose a lipstick emblazoned with the name of one of the bottom queens:

The rest of the group, including the bottom queens, also vote by dropping these named lipsticks into a box. The winner then faces off in a lip-sync battle against a “lip-sync assassin”1, and if the winner defeats the assassin, they reveal who they have unilaterally chosen to go home. However, if the assassin wins, the queen that the group voted for goes home.

The benefits of this system are plentiful, and the season that queens first started sending each other home (All Stars 22) is widely regarded to be one of the series’ best. There’s no shortage of shocking eliminations that even catch the judging panel off guard, and voting and deliberations provide fertile ground for interqueen drama and arguments—both of which are obviously reality TV gold. The lip-sync assassin concept almost guarantees an electric, iconic performance near the end of every episode. And with this system, the show itself doesn’t have to take any of the flak for sending a fan favorite queen home.3

But the drama comes at a cost. Primarily, sending someone home is often quite difficult, and while it seems counterintuitive to cry while getting rid of a competitor, many of these queens have strong bonds with each other outside of the competition. On top of that, many queens describe All-Stars as an absolute emotional wringer, and someone (usually) has to go home every week. All Stars is the most high-profile drag competition in existence, and it’s people’s biggest dream to win. It can be extremely intense to eliminate someone the queens consider a sister, crush that dream, and to risk that bond being severed. On All Stars 3, this culminated in the frontrunner writing her own name on a lipstick with white-out, choosing to eliminate herself rather than to go home having chopped someone else.

The problems persist beyond the emotional toll as well. The queens’ pleas to stay in the competition get very repetitive because there are only so many things you can say to get someone to spare you: “I want to be here so bad, I’ve worked so hard, you won’t see me in the bottom again, I’ll spot you if I get the chance, [other bottom queen] was worse than me.”

The system also incentivizes the challenge winners to send the strongest queens out the second they stumble while keeping a weaker queen to minimize competition. While they usually stick to the standard that the weakest link gets sent home, when the crown is within reach, queens absolutely have eliminated a strong contender who would have delivered better, more entertaining performances than the person they kept. (Like the elimination of Alexis Mateo over Blair St. Clair or both eliminations of Alyssa Edwards over Roxxxy Andrews.4)

Regarding backlash, while it’s nice for the show to avoid flak from avid fans, that vitriol is just deflected onto another person who doesn’t have VH1 backing them.

Finally, on regular Drag Race seasons, the companion show Untucked serves as a breeding ground for interqueen drama and fights as they discuss the top and bottom queens. But on All Stars, that happens in the main program because they have to deliberate on who gets sent home, which leaves Untucked feeling inessential and more like an add-on than compelling television.

As All Stars 7 approaches, the rumor mill is saying that there won’t be eliminations. Instead, there may be a points system in which a queen can win points by winning challenges, and the queen with the most by the end will win the crown. It remains to be seen if this is even true or if it’ll be an effective format. However, I don’t think this is how non-superstars seasons will go in the future—eliminations provide the clearest stakes imaginable, and my guess is that it’ll only magnify the Untucked problem with no eliminations to fight over.

Vulture writers Rebecca Alter and Emily Heller pointed out the current system’s many problems that came to a head on one of its spinoff shows, but they stopped short of suggesting an alternative. So here’s my proposal: keep the assassin, but instead of RuPaul deciding who’s in the bottom and the top, have Ru only decide who the winner of that week’s challenge is. Then you can have the top queen and the group decide and vote on which queens are the bottom two, and they will be given the chance to lip-sync for their lives for Ru, who eventually makes the final decision on who gets sent home. You’d have two lip-syncs: one for the win, and one to stay.

In this overhaul, queens don’t have to eliminate their sisters. They put them in a position where they have to fight to stay, but the bottom two still have a chance. It softens the blow of completely chopping someone else in the competition: instead of “I crushed your dreams of winning the crown,” it’s “I put you in a rough situation but it wasn’t up to me whether you stayed or not.” Tough, but not fatal. This would also help give backbone to a common refrain—often a queen’s rationale for sparing someone is “they still have so much more to offer,” and a last-ditch lip-sync for their life would allow said queen to prove it.

The judging panel could still be “shocked” over who lands in the bottom two, but this system would introduce a second check on who gets eliminated. Placing a strong queen in the bottom to get rid of good competition could be negated by an unimpeachable performance, or an earned bottom placement would be further justified by a lackluster performance.

This system would introduce a second lip-sync instead of one, which might make one wonder if there’d even be enough time to cover both appropriately. The internal solution to that is simple, and it solves yet another All Stars problem: move the deliberation and voting process to Untucked instead of the main show. That way, the bottom two placements could come as a shock to RuPaul and the viewer because we don’t know what went into that decision, which would make Untucked appointment television. For non-shocker bottom two placements, it would also help ameliorate the problem of repetitive pleas to stay—you can just skip Untucked that week instead of having your main event soured by begging you’ve heard a thousand times.

If fan ire over eliminations is unavoidable—and there’s been no indication that’s going to change—it’s better that it lands on the show rather than the individual queens. This system would shift that burden back to those with more resources to deal with it.

Any format for any competition is going to have flaws, and it’s unlikely that the VH1 overlords will try to preserve interpersonal relationships when burning bridges makes for much flashier television. This isn’t even a serious proposal—it’s more of a thought exercise for a no-stakes blog. But if the rumored change for All Stars 7 does happen, I’ll have a much better time not worrying if I’m watching relationships go up in flames on my television screen, and I’ll spend more time focusing on the excellent performances. I want drama, not trauma.