‘Drag Race’ fans rejoice as the show’s 90-minute runtime is restored: “Bullying works”

RuPaul’s Drag Race fans have been fighting an uphill battle this year; the show’s previous 90-minute runtime was pared down to just an hour after its move to MTV and viewers have been fighting tooth and nail to get this egregious wrong made right.

A lot of that energy has been directed at the new reality show The Real Friends of WeHo, which was given a 60-minute slot between Drag Race and its sister show Untucked. The inconvenient placement and the Deadline report that said MTV was using the Drag Race brand to try to launch the new show led many fans to believe that Real Friends was the cause of the deeply edited episodes.

In a series of lengthy handwritten notes, Todrick Hall slammed detractors of Real Friends and assured that his show wasn’t the reason the runtime was cut and that 90-minute episodes wouldn’t suddenly be reinstated after his season ended.

In a new announcement, the lie detector test determined that was a lie:

That’s right, full-sized Drag Race episodes are on the way! This announcement comes as the change.org petition to have the show reinstated (and Real Friends booted off the air) was just a few hundred signatures away from its 35,000 signature goal.

Mind you, half (or more) of the season 15 cast, the largest cast in the franchise’s history, will have departed the main stage by the time its 90-minute episodes return.

As much as fans of the show are celebrating, they’re also clamoring for retroactive restitution on behalf of the girls who were cramped into the hour episodes. Keep in mind that save for the commercial-less debut episodes, “hour-long” episodes have ended up being about 40 minutes of Drag Race and 20 minutes of commercials.

For instance, Robin Fierce was given just six short talking head confessionals across the first five episodes, and then was eliminated in episode six. Jax, an incredible performer who nearly won the debut talent show and has since shown off her lip-syncing talents, has gotten an average of 1.8 confessionals per episode so far. Very often, some girls get no confessional time in an episode at all.

Most egregious of all was episode four’s Snatch Game, which saw fourteen queens attempting to play the game at breakneck speeds. Anetra and Sasha Colby, two fan favorites and early front-runners, each got to answer one question.

As psyched as viewers are to hear its all coming back to them now, they can’t help but keep their fingers crossed that Diructor’s Cut versions of the previous episodes will be made available at some point.

The queens of RuPaul’s Drag Race themselves are checking in to celebrate the return to form. They, of all people, know the wild amounts of work and dedication that have gone into the season 15 cast’s runways and how irritating it must be to have them be shown for 6.9 seconds.

Much like Jasmine Masters, these girls have something to say:

Lowkey, Big Brother-style Drag Race isn’t the worst idea. Maybe a petition for Big Sister could make it happen!