If you’re looking for a cooking show where the cooking actually matters, you’re at the wrong key party, honey. “Drag Me to Dinner,” which premiered on Hulu just in time for Pride Month, is a mashup of concepts like “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and “Chopped.” It is a premise both brilliant and inevitable, but this isn’t “Top Chef” in heels. (That I can hear the cast chiming in my head, “More like ‘Bottom Chef!,’” is a measure of the show’s aesthetic consistency.) It’s more “drag show with suggestively wielded ingredients and inappropriate food puns” — and once you swallow that, well, I’ll end the sentence here. The jokes, they write themselves.
Here is the basic idea: In each episode, two pairs of drag queens face off to create a dinner party with an ever-changing theme, such as Tropical Kiki, Whoring ’20s, or Tupperware Party. For anyone who follows drag, many of the performers will be familiar from screen and stage — BeBe Zahara Benet, Kim Chi, Vanessa Vanjie Mateo, Ginger Minj, Jinkx Monsoon, and more than 30 others. Party guests include executive producers-slash-husbands David Burtka and Neil Patrick Harris, “Drag Race” winner Bianca Del Rio, and actress Haneefah Wood. Veteran New York entertainer Murray Hill is the MC. At some point, amid each episode’s high jinks, there is a trivia contest. The team that wins receives a constructive consultation with Burtka, a trained chef who offers cooking tips no one here cares about. The other team gets a destructive visit from Burtka as Sue Chef, the world’s most annoying drag alter ego. At the end of the episode, one team is declared the winner, based on the success of its food and drink, design and decor, and entertainment and overall vibe. Prizes include many amusingly ridiculous items, from a Cher-cuterie board to the Golden Grater trophy — “because both teams are great, but one is grater.”
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On the one hand, “Drag Me to Dinner” is a bit of a disaster. An actual cooking show where drag queens compete to make the best food would be riveting, full of hilarity and surprise. A queen needs a kitchen like a fish needs a bicycle, so which contestants can throw down, and how magnificently can the others mess up? A drag show with a culinary theme would be rollicking. What setting could be richer and riper for send-up than the kitchen, the traditional domain of femininity and domesticity? “Drag Me to Dinner” high-kicks between modes, tripping over its own feet.
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The cooking also bends the time-space continuum. One minute, queens are blending together herbs and eggs (shells included), pouring the concoction into the center of a pork crown roast along with the blender’s blade, and shoving it all in the oven. OK, so this is about camp, not kitchen skills. But a few minutes later, guests are tucking into that magically browned roast. With 10 minutes left in competition time, a team is just starting to prepare meatloaf. At the 5-minute mark, a Jell-O mold encasing hot dogs, cherry tomatoes, and olives hasn’t gone into the fridge. These then appear at the table for tasting and judging, along with an assortment of dishes the viewer hasn’t even seen before. I’m all for suspending disbelief, but there’s no way to tell how much of the food, drink, design, and decor the contestants are actually responsible for. The entertainment and overall vibe parts are much more coherent, and the more “Drag Me to Dinner” leans into them, the better it is.
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On the other hand, there is really no need to overthink the show or take it too seriously. Things are serious enough out there. This is entertainment, fluffy and silly and chaotic. Take it for the laughs — for Bianca Del Rio’s deadpan, unprintable response when she’s told to stay positive; for every joke about meat, packages, crabs, or balls; for the time a dinner guest is murdered and Harris kneels to help, announcing, “I was once a doctor!” “Drag Me to Dinner” isn’t a wasted opportunity, because there aren’t finite opportunities for drag-centric entertainment. Let someone else make that serious cooking show starring drag queens — whose place is in the kitchen, and at story hour, and on TV, and wherever, because like most adults drag queens adjust behavior for the circumstances. As Hill says of the show: “You’ve clearly binged all of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and needed a palate cleanser.” Exactly that. When we’ve had enough of dystopian visions that hit close to home, we want what “Drag Me to Dinner” is serving: escape-from-realness TV.
Devra First can be reached at devra.first@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @devrafirst.