‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Only Has One Hard and Fast Rule — And Mhi’yah Didn’t Break It

There’s one thing that schoolyard games of dodgeball and Emmy-winning competition shows have in common: rules. In both cases, rules are in place to get everyone on the same page. Like, yes, Rebecca, we’re playing dodgeball. Why are you holding a bowling pin? But there is something fundamentally different about games as they appear in reality TV. Not only do the rules have to define reality for the players, there have to be meta rules in place that ensure that a TV show is produced. That’s why there are weird stipulations, like making sure chefs are fast enough to get their finished dish on a moving platform, or that time that fashion designers had to be inspired by yogurt. In the case of RuPaul’s Drag Race, there’s the whole drag element of it all. Drag itself is a heightened form of artistic expression that’s known for subverting expectations, fucking with rules, and taking nothing seriously while taking everything very seriously. A drag competition on TV is like a hat on a hat on a hat — or a wig on top of rose petals on top of a wig cap.

So, let’s talk about the madness that was RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 16, Episode 9, “See You Next Wednesday.” SPOILERS ahead, obviously. The episode was already a gag, what with it being the third design challenge in one season. But when you have a cast packed with this many skilled seamstresses — Q, Nymphia Wind, Dawn, Sapphira Crist��l, Plane Jane — why wouldn’t you lean into their talents? Of course that means trouble for the queens who aren’t as comfortable behind a sewing machine, like Plasma, Morphine Love Dion, and — the reason we are gathered here today — Mhi’ya Iman Le’Paige.

I’m not here to recap the events of Drag Race 16×9. I’m here to re-litigate, or really de-litigate, the non-troversy surrounding Mhi’ya Iman Le’Paige’s performance in the challenge. As seen in the episode, Mhi’yah got help from Sapphira. As in the previous design challenge, Sapphira provided Mhi’yah with a pattern and some ideas, and then left Mhi’yah to execute them. During judging, Michelle Visage called out that Mhi’yah, by her own admission, cannot sew. If she can’t sew, then how is she wearing that gown? What is the truth?! Mhi’yah ended up in the bottom with Plasma, who turned out a wild look that screamed UWS housewife raids Y2K fashions from daughter’s closet to go to a Cher-themed fundraiser for goth teens.

And despite having two wins under her two belts, Plasma was out-performed by Mhi’yah and sent packing. I said I wasn’t going to recap, and yet…

People on The Internet, a place where people go to voice notoriously wrong opinions, were livid that Mhi’yah got a pass from the judges and that she got away with cheating or broke some rules on this competition, and that she should not have won the lip sync because of her track record. That response is, of course, notoriously wrong — because RuPaul’s Drag Race only has one rule: make entertaining television.

That’s it. Okay, well, Drag Race has three rules as far as I can tell:

• Make entertaining television
• Know your lyrics
• Don’t fuck with the production

And honestly, #2 is only a rule because it violates #3, and together they make #1 impossible. So yeah, just one rule, really.

Drag Race is a reality show, and the producers want to make the most entertaining television possible — and that means if they can justify a shantay via the edit, they will do so (see: Amanda Tori Meating vs. Q for a possible example of this, your mileage may vary). It is, however, impossible to edit around a queen not knowing the words — and that’s how you get shocking moments like a dance assassin like Mirage going home second and, infamously, frontrunner Valentina getting the chop a bit before the finale. Drag Race made the decision in Season 1 to name this portion of the TV competition the “Lip Sync for Your Life.” To quote Mama Ru: What part of that do you not understand? It’s not the “Lip Sync as Extra Credit to Your Track Record.” And if it is that, then the show awkwardly dubs in “… and your performance all season long” before revealing the winner, baby (see: All Stars 7)

But this whole discussion, combined with some truly show-breaking shenanigans on Drag Race Belgique Season 2 just a week ago, made me realize that Drag Race really does not have any in-competition rules beyond knowing your lyrics. Other shows like Survivor, Project Runway, and Top Chef have rules out the wazoo, but Drag Race’s has never even brought a wazoo to set. Drag Race does not know her.

For example:

On Project Runway, we’ve seen designers get in trouble for getting a deal on designer shoes, thus skirting budget limits. There is famously no budget cap for queens on Drag Race, which is how you have queens showing up on the show in looks that cost $10,000 or more to compete against bedroom queens from Nowhere, Arkansas. Also on Project Runway, designers are not allowed to take workroom materials back to their hotel and have been disqualified for doing so. The queens are allowed to work on all of their looks, even their design challenge looks, at the hotel.

Survivor is overloaded with rules and wild contingency plans, usually involving rocks, fire, blind luck, and panic. Drag Race introduced an Immunity Potion this season without telling us how it worked, until RuPaul was randomly like, “Plane Jane: You have approximately 30 more chances to use your potion.” The show also introduced the Rate-A-Queen method, à la The Circle, in the season premiere and then dumped it almost immediately for no clear reason.

Similar to Drag Race, Top Chef has a few faux pas that can get a chef dragged by the judges — like anytime a chef uses a store-bought ingredient instead of making it from scratch. Now, it’s easy to think of these faux pas as rules, but they very much are not — especially on Drag Race where one season’s faux pas is the next season’s runway category. Just off the top of my head:

• Queen’s don’t have to
  • … write their own verses (Megami wrote Nymphia’s in Episode 5)
  • … write their own reads (how many “patient zero” reads have we heard?)
  • … have original ideas (remember when Ru flat out gave Heidi N Closet the drink Heidi Hydrates?)
  • … stick to a budget
• Queens shouldn’t do boy drag (Season 5), and then Kennedy Davenport proved boy drag is valid (Season 7)
• Queens shouldn’t do facial hair (Season 6) except when there’s a whole facial hair runway (Season 7)
• Queens shouldn’t wear H&M unless it’s stoned for the gods (or, in the case of Choriza May just a few weeks ago, Amazon)
• Queens need to care (Pearl) but they shouldn’t care too much (Jan)
• Queens should lose their wigs if so compelled (Shannel in Season 1) until it gets tired, then it’s immediate sashay (Milan in Season 4), unless losing a wig is part of a sickening reveal (Roxxxy Andrews in Season 5)
• Don’t take off your shoes, or do take off your shoes — whatever, just sell the lip sync the house down in or out of your boots

What happens time and time again is that a faux pas one season becomes the norm the next season, and then can become tired in a few seasons and then become so tired that it becomes retired and then, out of nowhere, wired. Again, the only real rule of Drag Race is to make entertaining television.

In fact, queens have never been disqualified for breaking a rule within the show. They have only ever been disqualified for fucking with production. Willam was disqualified in Season 4 under mysterious circumstances that, over the past few years, seem to have been mostly about Willam speaking out against production and breaking off-camera and off-set rules during filming. Sherry Pie was disqualified from Season 12 because of claims of sexual harassment and abuse. And on Drag Race Belgique, queens were called out as cheaters because they snuck onstage and peeked at the judges’ notes. Truly, the only way to break a rule on Drag Race is to undermine the production.

All that being said — Mhi’yah Iman Le’Paige broke zero rules by getting help in the Werk Room. Queens help each other all the time (remember when Asia O’Hara helped everyone finish their looks in Season 10’s ball?). And, as Mhi’yah and Sapphira have pointed out, the girl sewed her look! Like, Sapphira left Mhi’yah with the hardest thing to do, and she executed it! And when it came time to lip sync for her life, Mhi’yah was ready to do so — and did. And unlike nearly every other queen who’s been in her shoes, Mhi’yah actually served a different style of lip syncing from her previous two. She’s not relying on flips and penguin slides every week. She’s got a lot of tricks, and that’s a talent that’s just as fierce as instinctively knowing how to cut out a pattern for a mermaid gown.

It comes down to this: if Mhi’yah broke an unwritten rule, it’s that she’s a Black queen who sent home a white queen, and there are too many viewers who lose their minds when that happens (because of racism). And if anything needs to be disqualified from Drag Race, it’s that “rule.”