Featuring drag artists of all genders from across Canada, the series pushes the genre in a familial direction.
The mammoth that is the Drag Race franchise has become a genre of television to itself as of late. Currently, there are two Drag Race editions airing concurrently (the third season of U.K. and the second of Canada’s very own) with a third on the way next week (the latest spinoff, this time from Italy). But the RuPaul Industrial Complex finally has a bit of competition.
On the heels of Shudder’s spooky The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula (currently in its fourth season of naming “The World’s Next Drag Supermonster”) and HBO’s non-competitive We’re Here (which is in its second season and just aired an episode set in Selma, Alabama that deserves all the awards), OutTV recently debuted the Canadian-produced Call Me Mother. The show, which was filmed in North Bay, Ontario earlier this year, stands out as a drag competition series for being both fully inclusive to all drag artists and for being centred on drag family.
“I had some hesitations about going on a reality TV competition, despite the fact that I would obviously be a judge this time rather than a contestant,” says Miss Peppermint, a Drag Race alum who is one of the show’s three titular mothers. “But [the producers] let me know that the approach would be different than other drag reality competitions that we’ve seen before in that they wanted to be inclusive as possible, and that it really is about that family element. So once I heard that idea, I said yes immediately.”
“I was really excited for the opportunity to be able to show that, of course, drag can be cutthroat and competitive — but it can also be loving and nurturing.”
Read more on cbc.ca.
