#‘RuPaul’s Drag Race,’ Spinoffs Score New Seasons

RuPaul’s Drag Race continues to expand.

MTV and Paramount+ announced Monday that it has greenlit additional seasons of the flagship original along with RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars and Untucked. The news follows the franchise’s nine Emmy nominations, the most of any reality competition series this year. The forthcoming season of Drag Race will mark the show’s 16th.

After initially bowing on Logo back in 2009, Drag Race has since expanded internationally, too, with local editions in the U.K., Canada and Australia, featuring local “queens” and runway challenges. The U.S. edition has done stints on several of the cable networks in what is now the Paramount ecosystem, moving from LGBTQ+ channel Logo to VH1 to MTV, in addition to streaming on Paramount+.

The franchise has waded into activism, too, as drag performers and the larger LGBTQ+ community has increasingly faced backlash and censorship. In fact, the show’s production company, World of Wonder, created the first-ever Drag Defense Fund with a donation from MTV and Drag Race. The 501C3, which supports the ACLU’s work to defend and ensure LGBTQ+ rights, has already raised more than $1.5 million. (For their art and activism, World of Wonder founders Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey received THR’s Impact Award at June’s Banff World Media Festival.)

“Drag queens are the Marines of television. They speak television fluently. They dance, they sing, they lip-synch, they do makeup, they do hair,” Bailey told THR earlier this spring, before acknowledging that despite the ratings success of the franchises around the globe, it hasn’t been easy to get execs to sign on to local editions. Added Barbato: “Our whole business is built on no. We’ve only had one pitch that was ever greenlit in the room, and the next day that person called us back and said they changed their mind.”