Every Monday night, TV gives itself over to a mass of preening, posturing men, indulging in petty backbiting. Some are decked out in elaborate costumes, most are presenting idealized versions of the human form, and all are angling for a shot at a singular, prized accessory.
Also, RuPaul's Drag Race is on.
To compare WWE's Monday Night Raw to RuPaul's Drag Race may seem like an easy punch line to those who dismiss both as lowbrow entertainment pitched to niche audiences. But those who indulge in both (almost assuredly a very small sliver of that particular Venn diagram) know better than to reject the notion out of hand. While that opening description focused largely on surface similarities, that's only the beginning of the resemblances. Dig more deeply, and you'll find that not only are the two shows comparable, but they're essentially one and the same.
The sports-entertainment industry and reality-competition-television complex both exist wholly in the realm of massaged reality. While scripted in advance, Raw remains a far more malleable property than your typical scripted series. The WWE churns out five hours of traditional network programming each week, but storylines remain fluid, with emergency rewrites happening at the last minute, if necessary.
The most notable example of late came in the aftermath of the Royal Rumble in January. Fan outcry was so vehement in the wake of the pay-per-view event that no less than Vince McMahon, chairman and CEO of the WWE, reportedly demanded an 11th-hour rewrite of the following night's Raw. That the ultimate outcome of the program is predetermined serves as the gist of the argument to those who dismiss professional wrestling as fake. But such a restrictive point of view misses the fact that while the scripted storyline provides a skeletal frame for the performers to work within, the matches themselves provide the true heart of the show. To watch a high caliber match is to watch tremendously skilled athletes move with seamless and acrobatic grace in an elaborate and largely non-choreographed dance. Beneath that garish exterior is a core of quiet elegance, plainly evident to any who care to look.
Balancing elegance and garishness is the hallmark of any good drag queen as well, and the queens featured on Drag Race do it better than any. The show itself operates under the rules of any reality television show, by trading traditional writers for story producers. (Meaning the show crafts the narrative after it films, rather than before.) And while the composition may differ, the song remains the same: Strings get pulled, plot gets finessed, but the true entertainment comes not from the story, but from the element of performance. Drag Race, too, showcases seasoned, dedicated performers at the height of their skills. The queens see drag as a passion and work to elevate it to art.
Both shows contain the shadows of ancient entertainment forms: large groups of men coming together to put on elaborate, out of the ordinary performances, many of them performing as women. From ancient Greek theater to Japanese Kabuki to Shakespeare, it's not hard to see the trickle-down effect that's led to a single night of programming featuring men acting out the most extreme archetypes of masculine and feminine with big, broad strokes. Conflict need addressing on Raw? Resolution most likely comes with a steel chair to the back, if not a choke slam through a table, if not both. Spat brewing on Drag Race? Someone's almost certainly been disparaging someone else's sewing skills. Or makeup. Or wig. One man's steel chair is another queen's sharp tongue.
At times, the shows present almost like a lazy stand-up comedy set: "See, men act like this, but ladies act like this." The men—wrestlers—snort and snarl at each other, so aggressive that it's inevitable all conflict resolves physically. Often, the most winning are the smoothest talkers, who bring finely honed skills to the microphone and cut the best promos. Most of these men are simultaneously oiled up and watered down with images meticulously fashioned, worked and then reworked. Wrestlers are coiffed and costumed and spray-tanned and chiseled within an inch of their lives. Tradition dictates that anything less than a veritable Adonis must be relegated to a bit part. (For some viewers, this isn't such a marked difference from how the world already operates.)
The women, meanwhile—the drag queens in performance mode—are all vivacious, good time girls, pretty and polished and perfect. Bodies are tight; hair impeccable. The interactions are predictably catty, with girls throwing shade and proving beyond a doubt that this is not RuPaul's Best Friend Race. Queens fine-tune their personas through years of trial and error. ("You better work" no doubt echoing through their minds.)The girls that stand tallest are those whose minds work the fastest. Pretty will get you far, but an acid wit will keep your frenemies where you want them.
Such are the surface observations of shows centered on what it is to create, maintain, and make an art out of your own gender facade. Each world, wrestling and drag alike, contains a multitude of characters and character types. In drag, queens often identify within a certain type, be it comedic, camp, pageant, etc., and no single is dominant. Fishy queens (that is, queens that resemble women to the extent that their true gender is confusing or "fishy") don't perform substantially better than more niche queens when it comes to taking home the crown.
Similarly, at least of late, Raw has moved away from the thought that only the manliest of men can dominate the field. The driving story in the WWE for the last nine months has been that of an ascendant wrestler named Daniel Bryan. His storyline represents a struggle between what the WWE has been — a place where wrestlers are bred (no, really) and bigger is better — and what the WWE could be, which is a place where talent and technique count for more and pretty packaging counts for less. Bryan's rise was fueled by an organic and passionate affinity from WWE fans at large, and his story came to a climax at WrestleMania XXX, a night in which he triumphed over two former WWE champions and one current champion to win the belt(s). (There are two. It's a long story.)