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'RuPaul's Drag Race' Season 12 Struggles With Editing

Sherry Pie Catfishing Fiasco Sees 'Drag Race' Working To Minimize Damage

By Christina St-JeanPublished 4 years ago 4 min read
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The one thing I've always liked about RuPaul's Drag Race is the way the show illustrates the relationships between the contestants and the contestants and the judges. You can learn a lot about the struggles and triumphs these drag queens have to cope with just in a short hour-long show, and my daughters and I have been along for the ride over the course of 12 seasons.

This season, though, is different. While still enjoyable - I'm rather liking Crystal Methyd, whom RuPaul keeps referring to as El DeBarge because of his hairstyle - there was an unexpected turn when RuPaul's serving of Pie went bad.

As fans of the show definitely know by now, Season 12 contestant Sherry Pie, aka Joey Gugliemelli, has been disqualified from the show well after the entire season had been filmed but before the show's grand finale. Why? Gugliemelli has been "accused by former classmates at SUNY Cortland and actors he worked with at a theater company in Nebraska of posing as a casting director to get the young men to send him videos of them saying and doing degrading things on camera in various states of undress," according to Vulture.

What this has ultimately led to is some questionable editing by the folks behind the scenes at #RuPaulsDragDrace as they fight to mitigate the damage done by having an accused predator who has more or less copped to the allegations against him continuing to perform on the show. Certainly, there's something to be said about RuPaul's producers issuing a statement that they've donated $5,000 USD to the Trevor Project when Sherry Pie won $5,000 - that was smooth on their part - but then, there appears to have been a deliberate attempt to erase Sherry Pie from the narrative as much as possible, and that's the problem.

#DragRace is about the story of the characters, and with a character pretty much being essentially erased from the storyline, the storyline does falter. In reality, those behind the scenes at Drag Race are going where they've never gone before, to paraphrase Star Trek; they have only ever had one other contestant on the show disqualified, but that was during the process of filming and it was definitely not a criminal matter. Season 4 queen Willam Belli was disqualified during filming and on camera because he had a conjugal visit with his husband, which is against the show's rules, and RuPaul called him out on camera for it. It was a situation that added to the excitement of the show and fuelled Willam's rep for being a talented queen but one who was pretty much going to do what they wanted if the opportunity presented itself. In short, Willam's disqualification heightened some of the drama at the show and enhanced Willam's storyline during the show, particularly when at the time, no one watching knew exactly why Willam got the chop.

Everyone watching Season 12 of Drag Race at this point knows what's happened to Sherry Pie, and the show doesn't exactly want to celebrate those ties by giving Sherry Pie more air time. As a result, the show has seemingly struggled with editing this season, because of the concerted effort to cut the amount of time Sherry Pie is on screen. Where ordinarily all the contestants would be shown participating in challenges, Sherry Pie is virtually eliminated until the runway, and we didn't even really see her at all one show until after the runway had come and gone.

While it is logical that the show would want to keep any and all footage of the current pool of contestants and their interactions throughout the season - drag, while entertaining, is definitely not easy, and many of these contestants have stories that would absolutely break your heart - they definitely also want to keep Sherry Pie's air time down. She appears to be an interesting and entertaining queen, but the man behind the makeup has admitted to predatory behavior that is in no way in keeping with the mass market appeal Drag Race has cultivated over the years. Unfortunately, that has left the production team in a difficult spot, one which at times has led to episodes that have lost their rhythm in an effort to chop Sherry Pie from the spotlight.

It will be interesting to see, once the season's grand finale can be filmed - filming is on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic - just how far Sherry Pie makes it on the show. It's fairly widely believed that Sherry Pie does make it to the top four, but given her disqualification and the statement at the end of every episode now stating that she will not be in the grand finale, it will be intriguing to see whether or not the situation is addressed during filming and what will ultimately happen in order to determine who the top queen actually is this season.

Let's hope the editing game will become easier for the production team, though. It's hard eliminating this Pie from the show's diet.

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About the Creator

Christina St-Jean

I'm a high school English and French teacher who trains in the martial arts and works towards continuous self-improvement.

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