RuPaul’s Drag Race Season-Premiere Recap: It’s a Suzie’s World

Well, I don’t know about you, but after tonight, I’m feeling very lucky to be living in a woman’s world. Specifically, I’m feeling lucky to be living in Suzie Toot’s world: a world in which a 1920s-themed Jewish drag queen named Suzie Toot can tap-dance her way into winning a lip sync to the most-hated pop song of 2024. It’s times like these that I remember why I love RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Because let’s be real: I was not necessarily feeling the love walking into this premiere. Global All Stars was, by my estimation, a colossal failure. Also a colossal failure? All Stars 9. That’s two seasons in a row in which I was actively mad to be watching this show owing to production issues that cannot be understated. It’s a lot of bad energy to overcome. Still, I remained hopeful because season 16 was surprisingly strong, and Drag Race UK just put out its best season since the beloved Bimini Bon-Boulash graced our screens. When I first watched this episode at a premiere party here in New York surrounded by a mix of influencers, drag queens, and journalists, I would say I came in with one eyebrow raised. And you know what? The episode started, I saw a bunch of drag queens play a Squid Game: The Challenge–themed round of Red Light, Green Light — in which previous contestants got pelted by pies — and I laughed. Reader, I laughed! Something that happened rarely, if at all, in those terrible All Stars seasons in 2024. I was in.

Now, that is not to say that this premiere episode was not without its issues: I found Katy Perry excruciating the entire time, the talent show was more than half-filled with forgettable performances, and no contestants stole control of the camera’s eye in the way that Sapphira Cristál, Plane Jane, and Nymphia Wind all did within seconds of first appearing last season. Still, I’m choosing to be optimistic! It feels as though we’re operating on a relatively level playing field for season 17 — nobody is the obvious Ru favorite, and there are not many obvious outs. Maybe that will come back to haunt us later if girls aren’t rising to the challenges, but for now it’s kind of exciting. So let’s get started, shall we? Let’s meet the girls.

Lexi Love
One of my favorites so far this season walks in first, dressed as a Victoria’s Secret Angel. Her entrance line is fine, but her confessional opener (“I put the whore in hormones”) is better. She’s the oldest queen this season, though that’s not saying much since she’s only 33, but it is true that she has a certain grit to her that none of the other girls have. There are a lot of queens this season who I’m not sure would be drag queens if it weren’t for Drag Race. Lexi Love is not one of them.

Joella
Up next is Joella. I’m not going to say that I think she was cast because she is the world’s foremost (only?) Katy Perry stan, but I will say that I don’t think it hurt her chances. She is … fine. She talks like a parody of a reality-TV contestant.

Kori King
Next in is Kori King, who is the only contestant this season who seems like an immediate natural on-camera. She’s Plane Jane’s drag sister, and you can tell from the hips (likely made by Boston-based queen Camille Yen). Her entrance look is very polished and not at all try-hard — I would expect Kori to go far.

Lydia B. Kollins
Lydia B. Kollins is up next, doing Winona Ryder drag. She’s named after a character from Beetlejuice, and, based on her vibe this week, I would put money on the fact that she loves Heathers: The Musical. RuPaul loves that her middle name is Butthole, so that’s good for her.

Arrietty
Next in is Arrietty, who does elf drag by whitening the triangle between her eyebrows to the extreme. She is confident, which is good. She notes that her drag mom is Irene the Alien, but I do have to wonder if she personally knows Hungry from Berlin, because sometimes, like in her promo look, her makeup is … rather reminiscent of that very signature beat.

Jewels Sparkles
Then it’s Jewels Sparkles, who enters with an extremely cliché line, claiming that “I’m not just a bitch — I’m that bitch.” The combination of the name and the entrance line made me almost immediately write her off. Then she went “Ding!” a bunch of times while posing, and I got back onboard. In fact, I think Jewels is significantly savvier and funnier than she has any right to be. One to watch.

Lana Ja’Rae
Lana Ja’Rae, daughter of Luxx Noir London, is up next. She is the sole New York queen in the bunch, which, as a resident, surprised me. Only one this year? How dare they. How is it that Baby Love mentions that she wants to be cast on this show regularly and doesn’t end up there? Is she just joking? Explain THAT! Anyway, Lana looks great, but she’s a pretty laid-back personality, which may be tough.

Sam Star
Sam Star, daughter of Trinity the Tuck, is the next queen in the room. She’s extremely pageant and extremely southern. I wouldn’t say I connect to her style of drag (she says she loves anything gay, which almost immediately makes me go, Well, duh), but I would imagine she’ll do very well. Polish goes far.

Onya Nurve
The next queen is Onya Nurve, who exclaims, “Bitch, I’m from Cleveland!,” then cackles. Love her personality. Seriously — love it. It is infectious. Do not love her eyebrows.

Suzie Toot
Then it’s Suzie Toot. I adore Suzie Toot and her stupid name. It’s like Betty Boop but bad. She’s amazing. I’ll talk more about her lower down, but I expect big things from Miss Toot moving forward. An authentic weirdo.

Hormona Lisa
Ru’s handpicked queen from her book tour, Hormona Lisa, is the next one through the door. The name is great, the look is right, and the out-of-drag look is hilariously giving Yankee Candle, but her personality is just so, so low-key.

Crystal Envy
Then it’s Crystal Envy, whom I’m having a tough time getting a read on. She’s kind of what I worried Jewels would be (basic). She’s just a little … nondescript so far. She’s pageant but not as pageant as Sam, feminine but not as feminine as Jewels, polished but not as polished as Kori (clock the hairline), etc. Need to see more.

Acacia Forgot
Acacia Forgot enters next, and, no matter what she did this week, she was probably doomed by this entrance look. It’s just not great, and the blush is tough. Plus I don’t understand why she does an ’80s pastiche, saying “totally tubular” for her entrance, if her brand is country x Stepford Wife. Did Dolly Parton ever call anything tubular?

Lucky Starzzz
Finally, it’s Lucky Starzzz, who I think is just great. The crafty-queen aesthetic isn’t exactly new for the show, but it’s a flavor that I always want in the mix. She’s got a big personality, huge looks, and, it appears later, some performing chops. Expecting big things.

Next, RuPaul enters and announces that the girls already competed in their first photo-shoot mini-challenge without knowing it, and Lana Ja’Rae won. To this, I say, “Uhhh … sure, whatever, cool.”

The challenge, this week and next, is the talent show, with half the queens performing each week. Rate-a-Queen is back, and the group that is not performing will rate the other group, then the bottom queen from each group will lip-sync, with one of them going home. Fun! Good challenge! It’s made even better when Ru announces that the girls will get to choose which group they’re in. That means we get two separate chances in the first two weeks to see not only the girls’ challenge capabilities but their strategic abilities, too. Smart construction! Also, they reveal that Katy Perry is the judge this week, to Joella’s excitement, as she is the world’s biggest Katy Cat.

No surprise, Kori King takes the lead doling out the weeks. More people want to perform in the second week than the first. I think this is somewhat a mistake — premiere performances that are great have a way of living on forever in a way that second-week performances don’t. Everybody remembers Willow Pill and Kornbread’s season-14 performances, but Angeria’s “Talent, check!” number doesn’t ring the same bell. Lydia B. Kollins eventually relents and agrees to perform in the first week.

The next day, Perry enters the Werk Room, makes some “jokes” about her “tuck,” makes Joella cry, and leaves. I found this to be a bad segment. She is not very good at seeming genuine. Also, a lot of the girls share very intimate details about their lives and traumas. Not as into that. Then they talk about drag families, and Lexi says she will “smoke and toke those nepo babies.” I love her.

The runway category is “Masc 4 Masked Singer,” which it took me a while to realize just means “wear a mask.” I’m gonna go through these pretty quickly because intro episodes are a lot.

Acacia’s snowman is kind of ugly, but I liked the blush this time. Joella’s is a style that I hate: things plastered onto a bodysuit. Jewels looks great, and she says she wanted to look like “Ariana Grande was invited to a masquerade ball in the ’60s.” That is an insane description, but also … she nails it. Arrietty does a macabre bridal-elf look, and it looks great. Lydia’s alien look doesn’t really work for me — neither weird enough nor glamorous enough. Lucky Starzzz dresses as a pizza, and it is awesome. Suzie Toot is a coin, then takes it off and pisses off Michelle with her makeup. I love the makeup! I like that it looks a little ugly! Kori King is a ginormous raven, and it looks polished and grand. Hormona is a skunk but says she does “wear deodorant.” Seems fine. Crystal Envy does a doll look with a mask that cracks open — I still cannot tell what this girl’s drag persona is, but the look is well made. Lexi Love dresses as the MTV Moon Man, and it’s impressively proportioned given how puffy it is. Lana is a sleek cat. No complaints. Onya’s look doesn’t fully come together to me — it’s a lot of different textures — but her interactions with Ru on the runway made me crack up. Sam Star wears a very polished, cloud-themed look that is also gay-themed. As expected!

Okay, on to performances. A note generally: At this point, it seems pretty clear that on this show, a talent show really means “Do your best number.” Almost everybody lip-syncs to an original song, because that’s what you do. For a while, I was mad about this. Now, I’ve come to accept it. RuPaul wants it to be like this, and, by now, the girls do, too. The results at the end of the episode bear this out. All that to say: I’m going to try to judge these on the show’s terms rather than my own.

Jewels Sparkles
Great number. It’s the best ponytail-flipping since Sasha Colby. She has complete command of the stage, and I’m glad it looks like she did her own vocals. But the thing that’s really impressive is how many moments the track packs in for Jewels to be silly, sexy, and fierce in just one minute. Every five seconds, something new is happening, and none of it is on exactly the same level as the moment before. It’s very impressively constructed — like I said, she’s savvier than you’d expect.

Arrietty
I have no technical knowledge that would allow me to critique the literal quality of Arrietty’s flamenco performance. I will say that, as a piece of TV, it was not thrilling because, in opposition to Jewels’s, for example, it has only one level. And Michelle is right that the makeup did not make sense here.

Lydia B. Kollins
It started superstrong and ended pretty boring. I liked the makeshift nature of the puppet, but it didn’t appear that she was necessarily an expert at controlling it — the lips did not always move with the lyrics. Needing a bit more from this girl.

Lucky Starzzz
This lemonade-themed number was a little reminiscent of the beloved/abhorred “burger finger,” but it otherwise worked. Something I always find impressive is when a girl can play directly to camera within the first few days of filming: Lucky does that. Most newcomers to TV have trouble finding the lens that naturally. Other numbers this week might have been more polished, but this is the one I’d want to see the most (well, the second-most) at the club.

Joella
For my money, this is the weakest performance of the bunch, simply because it’s the only one without a concept. Joella just … lip-syncs a song she wrote. There’s no idea behind it, nothing to distinguish it, and the outfit is just fine. Shoes don’t go.

Acacia Forgot
This ends up in the bottom, and I get why. Standing with a guitar and singing a song that wasn’t that funny just isn’t dynamic enough for TV. Still, she has a nice voice, and the song was nice to listen to. I’d rewatch this before I’d rewatch Joella’s.

Suzie Toot
Loved it. The “nine tapping toes” is funny, the Little Orphan Annie hair was well referenced, and tapping the Gettysburg Address in Morse code made me laugh out loud for, like, 30 seconds. One thing: Suzie Toot is nominally a “Broadway queen,” which can often be a curse on this show, but I think she’s got the goods to go all the way. As opposed to queens like Rosé, Jan, or Marcia, who are theater performers who became drag queens, Suzie’s got a visual perspective on musical theater that distinguishes her. She’s clearly a drag queen first. I think she’s got the stuff.

The judges avoid giving critiques to the girls this week but do talk among one another, which is kind of weird but also means that nobody gets to cop out of Rate-a-Queen and just imitate the judges. They have to make their own decisions. Either way, the choices end up bearing out approximately how I think Ru would do it, with Acacia in the bottom.

The ranking queens ultimately choose Jewels and Suzie as the top two. I think that’s right, though Lucky could have snuck in there without me thinking anything was off. The top two then lip-sync to “Woman’s World” by Katy Perry. I would be pissed about this because the song is bad, but “bad song” and “bad lip-sync song” are not necessarily synonymous. Watching Ms. Toot slowly win, even while Jewels looked shockingly like Perry and danced better than her, was super-fun. It should have been a blowout! The trick is that “Woman’s World” being actively bad to the point of camp actually opened the door for Suzie. Whereas Jewels approaches it as she would any pop song, Suzie ends up basically making fun of it the whole time. And it worked! I was shocked and excited. Congrats to Suzie Toot, our new front-runner. I hope you stay kind of weird and ugly.

• Perry comes backstage and still seems a little too stiff. I’m hoping that we have fewer backstage judges this season.

• As I mentioned before, I thought the Squid Game thing was a stroke of genius. Could not for the life of me, however, figure out if they actually filmed it before entrances (and thus all the girls saw one another for the first time off-camera) or if they just did it after and had them all act. Please, Joseph Shepherd, ask!

• Shocked they let Lexi make a SheDevilByNight reference.

• I’ve been loving on Suzie a lot. Something I didn’t like was her saying “They finally see that I am a real threat.” Girl, it’s the first week.

• Kori is also the best at doing Rate-a-Queen dramatically. Doesn’t take any screen time for granted, that one.

• Trauma makeup corner: Jewels had a neck injury and didn’t think she’d ever be able to dance because of it, making her win feel even better. Lucky has a precarious housing situation.

• Gay thoughts from gay people: I asked Craig Jenkins, our pop-music critic and a Pulitzer Prize nominee, about the top-three Katy Perry songs he’d like to see on Drag Race. He said:

And he gave honorable mentions to “E.T.” and “Ur So Gay.” I think it’s crazy to have two post–Teenage Dream tracks in there (and told him as much!), but I’m not the one with the Pulitzer nomination.

• Predicted top four: I don’t want to make any full predictions without seeing the second group perform, but, of the first group, I see Lucky and Suzie as the biggest contenders.