Drag Race RuCap: "Red Carpet Mash Up"

Law Roach is THAT GIRL! She is MOTHER!!! Just look at the material.

CLÁUDIO ALVES: After a couple of great first episodes, season 18 of RuPaul’s Drag Race seemed to fall off a cliff with the advent of its first comedy challenge. While this fourth installment still leaves much to be desired, it’s a marked improvement, full of drama and strong work by the queens. Sure, the judging’s still fucked and some of the conflict skewed nasty rather than entertaining, but it was better than that “RDR Live!” trainwreck. And, at least, this week, Law Roach added some needed sanity to the judges’ panel, delivering good if catty critiques, showing he’s getting better and better at this Drag Race gig. There really is no better critical eye for a challenge this focused on celebrity red carpet fashion, a refreshing spin on the team’s design challenge from DRUK season 2 that was a tad complicated but not nearly as frustrating as I initially assumed. Following my grumpiness last time, I’m ready to be the good cop to your bad, dear Nick.

NICK TAYLOR: What if we’re both on a similar wavelength?...

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Drag Race RuCap: “RDR Live Returns!”

Nick Taylor and Cláudio Alves continue to follow and recap and despair over the new RuPaul’s Drag Race season…

Live, from Tuckahoe, it's RDR Live! And yes, that's a threat.

NICK TAYLOR: Well diva, here we are. Another week where this fun cast of queens did their level best with a very fun runway prompt and a new maxi challenge staple. Another week where Mandy Mango is improbably fucked over to save a presumptive frontrunner from potentially being sent home, only this time I found almost all of the judge’s critiques baffling as hell. When was the last time the show worked this hard to eliminate one of its contestants this early in the game? I mourn for Mandy, and really, I feel so gaslit by the last 15 minutes that an otherwise solid episode is retroactively rendered meaningless. If Ru’s not watching the challenges, I’m not sure why I should either.

CLÁUDIO ALVES: Especially when those challenges are as desultory as RDR Live continues to be. Three weeks in, season 18 delivers its first truly bad episode, a trainwreck that’s only saved by the queens who do their level best to keep a sinking ship afloat…

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Drag Race RuCap: “Q-Pop Girl Groups”

Like in the last couple of years, Nick Taylor and Cláudio Alves are following and recapping the new RuPaul’s Drag Race season…

You know what? Bless this MESS.

CLÁUDIO ALVES: After that promising premiere, Drag Race season 18 continues to prove itself an entertaining new addition to the franchise. Sure, some judging decisions at episode’s end left a little to be desired, but these girls are very fun, and the runway is an all-timer that had me cackling alone with my cats - Major Tom looked very confused, but he always looks confused. Were your fur babies similarly mystified by your reactions to “Q-Pop Girl Groups” or were you a very sedate watcher, bored into inexpression? I can’t imagine you could be that displeased by this hour, though one never knows. (I know, because we’ve discussed the episode on DMs and GroupChats, but please allow the subterfuge for this intro’s sake. You saw nothing, dear reader. Thank you.) 

NICK TAYLOR: I wasn’t with my cats when I watched this episode, though the host of my watch party has a lovely, skittish young cat who didn’t seem inordinately cautious while we were howling at the runways...

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Drag Race RuCap: "You Can't Keep A Good Drag Queen Down!"

Like in the last couple of years, Nick Taylor and Cláudio Alves are following and recapping the new RuPaul’s Drag Race season…

Raja, Bob and Kim Chi came back for an unexpected, unexplainable intro.

NICK TAYLOR: Happy New Year, everyone!! Can you believe it’s already time for another season of Drag Race? Season 18 premiered this Friday, and I had a great fuckin’ time. The cast seems uniformly entertaining, and the challenges felt like the best kind of throwback to earlier seasons while still feeling right for 2026. In short, this was a great introduction to these divas, and I’m excited to spend four months watching them on my TV. RuCap OVER.

Oh wait, what did you think, Cláudio?

CLÁUDIO ALVES: I’m mostly glad they’re not all baby queens. We actually have a pretty seasoned cast after last year’s youth revolution. Multiple divas are even older than me! What a concept!!...

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“Heated Rivalry” is here to make the yuletide gay

by Cláudio Alves

HEATED RIVALRY | © Crave / HBO Max

First of all, everybody please say thank you to the Canadian taxpayers – Thank you, Canadian taxpayers! With that out of the way, let’s all come together and celebrate one of the loveliest surprises of the year in television, slipping right in at the end of 2025 to queer up the holiday season.

Written and directed by Jacob Tierney, Crave’s Heated Rivalry adapts the first two books in Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series of gay love stories in the world of men’s professional hockey. A good mix of angst and smut, like most projects born out of fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off, the novels are a delivery system for romance more than they are great literature, but that’s alright. Sometimes, that’s exactly what the heart yearns for, what the body needs. And, after the first two episodes, it was hard to argue against notions that Heated Rivalry was little more than soft-core under a very thin layer of respectability. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the show has proven itself more interesting. It has also become an international phenomenon…

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