RuPaul’s Drag Race has announced when the series will return to its standard 90-minute runtime (with ads). In a tweet on Thursday (9 February), the official account revealed that season 15 will be bumped from 60 to 90 minutes “starting Friday March 10”.
The decision to slash the runtime, in order to make room for MTV’s new LGBTQ+ series The Friends of WeHo, has been met with fierce opposition from fans, who launched a change.org petition for Drag Race “to return” to one-hour episodes.
As a result of MTV’s decision, the runway and judges’ deliberations have been significantly shortened, and “a lot of fun chaotic” interactions between the queens in the werkroom have been cut.
Not only that, RuPaul’s signature call-to-action – “Bring back my girls!” – is nowhere to be found. In response, Salina Estitties tweeted that the cast “worked two hard and invested too much” for the edit to be slashed while Loosey LaDuca wrote: “These short runways are AC-TU-AL-LY killing me.