It’s Snatch Game, people! Ru didn’t even waste time on a mini challenge this week. The contestants were told to do their best celebrity impersonations for the annual game show that separates the contenders from the pretenders.
The contestants who chose funny characters did well. The contestants who didn’t chose funny characters did poorly. Not even a RuPaul-themed runway presentation could save the bottom three from their horrible work in Snatch Game. It’s Season 6. You know the challenge has appeared every year from Season 2. How could you not prepare a comedy character before coming?
It’s the natural evolution of the RuPaul ballet challenge last year: a Rusical. It’s hard to imagine that there hasn’t been a musical theater challenge on RuPaul’s Drag Race, but there hasn’t been. Since Season 2, there has always been a singing challenge. Now we have the triple threat challenge.
Spoiler alert: everyone was amazing. This should be the Emmy episode. Deny them the Reality Show/Host nominations this season, Emmy voters, I dare you.
Finally, another horror episode. We haven’t had a horror-themed challenge on RuPaul’s Drag Race since Season 4. That was the season premiere episode where Sharon Needles proved her craft and justified her position in the contest with an amazing post-apocalyptic zombie. Bonus points were duly awarded for flawless use of theatrical blood capsules.
Though my cynical prediction for the bottom two from last week was totally wrong, I was right about the quality of contestants in the second season premiere of RuPaul’s Drag Race. These girls really brought it. Even the bottom 2 would have been safe on any other season of the show so far.
Recap
In a twisted fit of brilliance, the producers decided to throw a little party for the six surviving queens from last week after the runway. Then Ru showed up in full mud mask and curlers to kick the queens out of the studio. The brilliance? They left the mess all night long for the next group of queens to find when they walked into the workroom for the first time.
Forever and a day ago, I did elaborate, photo-driven, cartoon-styled recaps of RuPaul’s Drag Race. I really enjoyed the result, but it was very labor intensive. It required watching the episodes multiple times each just in the hopes that the buffer for HD would load in time for a clear screen grab to work from. Doing those recaps meant less time writing, more time screaming that everything wasn’t going right.
This season, I’m covering the show again, though I’m doing it in a different way. I toyed with a Project Runway recap a couple seasons ago that just didn’t go anywhere. However, the format was good: a quick recap of the episode, followed by a ranked list of the contestants’ performance on the show. That’ll work much better on a show where you can still care about who is competing.
The Best in TV list is only going to look at series that premiered in 2013. This excludes shows such as Psycho-Pass and The Mindy Project that began Fall 2012. Let’s not muddy the waters further.
Another unranked list because, to be blunt, I didn’t find a lot of new shows I fell in love with this year. Let’s get to it.
Say “performance art” in mixed company and you’re liable to have no company around you in no time. It’s a great way to kill a party. For better or worse, performance art has this pretentious reputation. Performance art conjures up images of people standing in a gallery doing some mundane thing and charging people money to see it. It’s hard to perform and even harder to convince people that your particular message is one that belongs in a gallery.
When famous people do performance art, it’s laughed off a lot, too. Lady Gaga confused people with her Marina Abramovic-inspired VMA performance this year. Yoko Ono has been confusing people for decades with her performance art (though, oddly, her installations of ladders, telephones, and other every day objects tend to get a pass). James Franco is getting a lot of crap for pursuing art projects and Hollywood feature films, leading to a lot of downright homophobic jokes and comments about his non-narrative work.
Yet sometimes, it’s that element of fame that can give the audience enough context to accept performance art. Last year, while fulfilling her duties as winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Sharon Needles wrote and performed a shocking piece of performance art called “TV Will Never Love You.” It’s incredibly NSFW and will be discussed in great detail below the jump.
We’ve reached the Face Off season finale where, once again, the contestants had to do a lot of makeup for a live stage performance. I love that as a finale challenge. I just wish that, you know, the contestants painted for the back row considering it was a ballet challenge. You couldn’t really see the details during the dance. That’s not good. Live theater doesn’t come with one on one closeup examinations to fully understand the concept.
For the finale, I took the unused theme–the Roaring 20′s (Hello, flapper girl to swan transformation. Why you not obvious to the finalists?)–and tried out a new style of diorama. I originally wanted to paint a backdrop and draw the characters and accessories on card stock, but I had no way to house the finished project. The answer was literally in front of me the whole time. No, really. Those gift boxes have been right smack in the middle of my workshop for years.
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