RuPaul's Drag Race UK vs the World

This has tarnished the brand significantly. The format doesn't work. We were left with the dregs. Basically the show was fuelled by these queens insecurities. I think this was even worse than Australia and Italia. Painful.

This season has been a disappointment to say the least...If you enjoy seeing bad performers kept safe and think the best should go home, this one is for you!

SEASON 1 (1.5/5)

It's a shame that the first international all-stars season was a miss, after all the hype it gave. I always found "the winner chooses who leaves" rules from the previous All-Stars seasons entertaining, but this time it condemns the show to exit strong and charismatic participants way too early in the competition leaving us with drag queens that don't make good TV or that doesn't have a real motivation to win (one of them was merely putting any effort but still get to the finale). Because of that, the finale was pretty deceiving, and the winner didn't seem to merit the win.

Also, some little changes in the presentation made things a little off and cheap, which is not worthy of the "international" premise of this show.

SEASON 2 (3/5)

A huge step up after the awful first season. The cast was memorable even if some of the contestants were quickly overwhelmed by the level curve of the competition. La Grande Dame and Manilla were the stand-out of the season.

The season was still missing some good lipsynch, despite having a very good dancer like Manilla, and the challenges were not very funny or interesting, snath game included.

The winner feels right from a narrative point of view but it's hard to not see more talented drag queens in the cast.

The first episode was one thing, but we're to #3 and the production messing with everything is already out of control. To save the show from being the world vs 1 UK queen they are protecting queens from the bottom and offering others up as bait. This thing is a mess. The show has the same problem of the UK version of being poor and offering no good prizes to these queens. It gives queens no good reason to want to win the lipsyncs and essentially makes them try and avoid burning bridges/passing off fans all for the opportunity of a co-song with rupaul? They put the judging on the queens to make the choice of who goes and to keep their control they make sure to rig the bottom to try and save the queens they want.

This is my first "allstars" format from the ever-expanding and slightly creaky RuPaul franchise and so I wasn't accustomed to a lot of the format decisions on display here but a lot of them don't work particularly well. Going into it though - I was hyped, there were some solid queens on show and it promised to be fun. The eliminations though, were poorly constructed, and ended up favoured tactics over talent which soured the experience somewhat. I call this the "Big Brother 4" effect - and it means you get fireworks early on but you end up with an underwhelming finale. Otherwise though it was still a proper hoot to watch, really nice to see some underrated international queens get a chance to shine in front of Ru.