A TV Smackdown: For the First Time Ever, Drag Culture Comes to Pay-Per-View
Get ready for the pay-per-view event of the year that doesn’t involve body slams and piledrives — unless Lady Bunny has some tricks up her sleeve we haven’t seen yet. Yes, folks, drag culture is coming to pay-per-view on July 26 with a first-of-its-kind, groundbreaking phenomenon. Haters Roast RAW promises to be the drag event of the year, a televised smackdown of epic proportions pitting your favorite drag queens against each other in an anything-but-traditional roast format for one night only.
For those of you wondering why a drag show on the pay-per-view platform is such a big deal, consider the type of programming these TV events are typically reserved for. Wrestling (in case your mind was in the gutter and you missed those references earlier), UFC fighting, boxing, porn.
Haters Roast RAW is gaying up one of television’s most hetero-centric institutions and bringing the magic of drag queens talking shit about each other onstage right into your living room.
This time the show is coming to you, and it’s a drag event starring some of the best queens in the business: Alaska, Jinkx Monsoon, Willam, Latrice Royale, Thorgy Thor, Shea Couleé, Lady Bunny, Mimi Imfurst. Bendelacreme will be there, too, if she doesn’t have a moral epiphany and drop out before the show goes live.
Not only is this a historic moment, it’s all happening live. Hosted by Darienne Lake, Haters Roast RAW is streaming to you from the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York City. That means it’s unedited and uncensored. Literally anything can happen.
Sure, there are the standard moments we’ve come to expect from just about any drag show. Without question, everybody will have fat jokes about Darienne, Bunny and Latrice, because that’s what drag queens do. And at some point Willam — who post-Drag Race has made a career out of hilariously roasting YouTubers on his series The Beatdown — is probably going to come for RuPaul.
But then there are the moments which are completely unexpected — moments you don’t want to have to read about on Twitter the next day. Last year, Derrick Barry showed up wasted and roasted himself onstage — check it out in case you missed this gem. The over-under on one of these queens topping that performance and then some is through the roof.
The magic of pay-per-view events is that they’re yours to watch on repeat as many times as you want for 48 hours. Trust me, this is going to come in handy — I damn near broke my remote while pausing and reversing when Farrah Moan ate shit and fell during her burlesque number on All Stars 4, so I guarantee that some serious gems are going to come out of Haters Roast RAW. And if you’d rather not rewatch the same moment on a loop, invite the same crew you hate-watch Drag Race with over and watch it on repeat until you run out of bottles of rosé.
Drag culture has taken the world by storm, and the pay-per-view powers that be sat up and took notice. The pay-per-view platform is reserved for once-in-a-lifetime viewing events designed to watch in a group setting. It’s the sort of thing people are going to be talking about for days. So if you’re one of those people who missed the last episode of Game of Thrones and spent the next three days avoiding social media like the plague, don’t make that same mistake twice.
Book a front row seat to Haters Roast RAW so you can say you remember where you were when drag officially infiltrated living rooms all around the world.
