While the category may technically be called Outstanding Production Design for a Variety or Reality Series, only one reality show actually landed a nomination this year: “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
Going against “The Daily Show,” “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and “Saturday Night Live” is the Season 17 “Drag Race” episode “RDR Live” — which just happened to be an improv-comedy challenge/”SNL” send-up.
“There’s an aspect that’s just very over-the-top, a lot of innuendo, a lot of
humor that’s exaggerated. I think the writers have a lot of fun with that,” production designer Jen Chu told TheWrap of parodying the NBC late-night staple. “There aren’t a lot of [‘Drag Race’] episodes where you get to do four or five sets within one episode. Usually it’s just one stand-alone set, so as a designer, it’s fun to get a script that has a lot of components. We get to do some heavy set decorating, we get to do some scenery construction and we have to turn it over really fast.”
How fast? “Sometimes they’re like, ‘How much turnover time do you need? Thirty minutes? Can you do it in five?’” Chu said. “It’s not quite as fast-paced as ‘Saturday Night Live.’ But even though we’re not on live, we’re still always really challenging ourselves to make the shoot day similar to live TV.”
The nominated episode featured four different sets. In addition to the
Tickled Pink runway on the mainstage, there was the Beaverologist Podcast,
Emergency Room (featuring “Hacks’” Paul W. Downs as a hospital doctor),
Neanderthal Town Hall and the Queen News Network, an obvious wink to
“SNL’s” Weekend Update. The latter is a perfect example of the way “Drag Race”
allows Chu to poke loving fun at pop culture through the drag lens.
“I love that it’s loose and a little bit improvised. And I like that it’s a contemporary approach to referencing pop culture itself, which is really fun,” she said.
“Sometimes I think the fans might be even more in tune with the references
than I am, because I’m constantly expanding my drag-reference vocabulary,” Chu added. “There are so many layers to drag references, and they date back so
many decades — just very, very obscure, old but iconic moments in pop culture.”
As a child of immigrants, she was the first person in her family to watch much
American TV. “I have a very deep education and I studied design extensively,
but I haven’t necessarily studied sketch comedy as much. It’s my job to just keep
up with what’s considered to be iconic or important or recognizable within the
culture, and it is very broad.”
Chu came to “Drag Race” three seasons ago after a career that included the reality shows “Project Runway” and “Real Life: The Musical.” She feels lucky that she joined the show at a time when it was reworking its mainstage. “They had
to get some new gear, which gave us the opportunity to redesign it. We felt
like screens would give us a little bit more flexibility, so I got to do some pretty
major facelifts with them.”
The biggest change for Season 17, though, came in the form of the Badonka
Dunk Tank. For this twist, two eliminated queens would be able to remain in
the competition if they randomly pulled a correct lever that dropped RuPaul’s
best friend, Michelle Visage, into a tank of lukewarm water.
“There happened to be a dunk tank that was pretty famously on Nickelodeon and also on the ‘Ellen’ show. We were like, ‘OK, how can we take that framework and make it draggy?’ So we rented the apparatus and made it our own by giving it a little bit of an illuminated proscenium and whatnot. Our lighting department lit it up from within to be really beautiful, and I think it actually exceeded everybody’s
expectations and it was one of our favorite parts of the season.”
“That’s why I love working in L.A.,” Chu noted. “If you’re like, ‘I need a dunk
tank that can hold 65,000 gallons of water and it has to be really deep and
strong and you have to be able to heat the water,’ you can just call around and
somebody’s like, ‘I got a friend who’s got a friend who’s got a friend who’s got a
friend who has that tank.’ It’s all just part of the challenge.”
“Obviously, in drag, there’s so much improvising and so much creativity and so much turning one thing into another thing, so we definitely are doing that behind the scenes just as much as they’re doing it in front of the camera,” she concluded.
This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the Down to the Wire Comedy issue here.
