‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Season 17 Power Rankings: Episode 4 — Now That’s What I Call Infomercials

With RuPaul’s Drag Race bringing back their Rate-a-Queen system for season 17, Billboard decided to rate each of the new queens every week based on their performance. Below, we take a look at the show’s compilation album challenge to see how the queens performed in the first group challenge of the season. Spoilers ahead for episode 4.

With 17 main seasons, nine All Stars seasons and countless numbers of international seasons under its belt, RuPaul’s Drag Race has become a universe of its own over the last decade-and-change it’s been on the air. With episode 4’s music challenge, the show leaned in hard to that legacy and delivered the kind of self-referential challenge that only Drag Race could succeed at.

On Friday’s episode (aired on Jan. 24), the queens of season 17 were given a lot to do. First, they had to take iconic moments from the show’s history and reimagine them into hit songs in their own right. Then, the queens were asked to create a Now That’s What I Call Music-style infomercial to sell two compilation albums of those songs. Donning ridiculous costumes and outsized personalities, the 13 contestants paid homage to their predecessors the best way Drag Race knows how: by constantly making fun of them.

It’s nice to see Drag Race taking a new approach to the tried-and-true challenge format of “recording a song and then acting it out.” While the musical moments throughout were inherently tailored to reference talked-about moments throughout the show’s run, this challenge really helped give the queens of season 17 an opportunity to show off their own distinct abilities as actresses and singers.

Of course, that wasn’t quite the case for two of this season’s contestants. After some respectively rough performances in the challenge, both Joella and Kori King wound up in the bottom two. In a truly wild lip sync to “Buttons” by the Pussycat Dolls, Kori was granted another week in the competition, while Joella became the season’s second queen to sashay away.

Below, Billboard takes a look back at episode 4 and ranks where our remaining contestants lie based on this episode and the season as a whole: