The ‘Drag Race’ vs. ‘Real Friends of WeHo’ saga continues!
The commemorative 15th season of RuPaul’s Drag Race moved to MTV in January 2023. But with it came an announcement that Drag Race episodes would be shortened to 60 minutes (instead of their usual 90-minute runtime on TV) to make room for a new show featuring LGBTQ+ cast members also airing on Friday nights: The Real Friends of WeHo.
Unsurprisingly, Drag Race fans immediately took issue with this new programming strategy. Alas, things got even worse once Real Friends of WeHo actually premiered, and when shorter Drag Race episodes started to feel like viewers were missing out on actually getting to know the queens better and seeing their runway looks.
During a recent interview on the Everything Is the Best podcast, host Pia Baroncini asked Real Friends of WeHo star Joey Zauzig about this particular situation. “The Drag Race people really came for you,” Baroncini declared. “And these are people from your own community.”
Zauzig responded, “There was a petition of 35,000 people saying, ‘We’re not gonna watch the show because we want our 30 minutes of RuPaul’s Drag Race [back].” He then theorized that gay men “have a hard time seeing themselves” on television, which he argues is different from Drag Race because the show features LGBTQ+ people “in makeup and in drag.”
After a snippet of this interview went viral on social media, several Drag Race queens reacted to the statements made by Baroncini and Zauzig.
