RuPaul's Drag Race's retroactive erasing of Sherry Pie has made for an incoherent season

The A.V. Club

Some RuPaul's Drag Race fans on Reddit have found the original edit of this season, featuring Sherry Pie before she was disqualified from the finale and retroactively edited over catfishing allegations. "This is where RPDR season 12 becomes a fascinating experiment in reality TV storytelling," says Oliver Sava. "How do you retroactively enforce disqualification on a contestant who does extremely well in a competition? Editing is what ultimately creates the narrative envisioned by the producers, and with Sherry Pie, it’s a strange situation where a top-performing contestant gets no attention from the editors. A win is empty if you don’t see the work that goes into it and learn more about the queen who succeeds, and even though Sherry does well in challenges and on the runway, she loses the screen time that gives queens the biggest opportunity to shine and gain pop culture prominence. And it works. It’s easy to forget Sherry Pie is a contestant until she has a line in a sketch or a verse in a song. But the dropped story threads are more apparent because we’ve seen the narrative groundwork laid in Sherry Pie’s unedited debut." Sava adds: "Sherry Pie’s disqualification throws off the balance of the season by removing a crucial part of the narrative, and there’s always going to be some cognitive dissonance when Sherry Pie ends up in the top without any support from the editing. The overall stakes take a hit because there isn’t much conflict at the top, but there’s also something compelling about seeing what a reality TV contestant’s arc becomes when they have no personal story behind them and appear solely in performance mode. Reality TV personalities are created by what the producers and editors allow the viewer to see, and without any on-screen relationships or solo testimonials, it becomes harder for the audience to root for an individual. There’s no way to completely remove Sherry Pie from the season without leaving huge gaps in the storytelling, but editing her out prevents the disqualified queen from reaping the rewards of exposure." ALSO: Sesame Street meets RuPaul's Drag Race on this week's episode.