Drag is everything. It's history and it's the future. It's glitz and it's grime. It's campy and it's uncompromising. It's comical and it's political. It's avant-garde and it's story time. It's queens, kings, and everything in between — and that's why Revry's King of Drag is so very vital to this moment.
Right now, the art form of drag sits at the impossible intersection of enjoying unprecedented mainstream acceptance and becoming a political flashpoint used by right-wing politicians. Drag matters, perhaps now more than ever, and King of Drag is here to serve.
Okay — all that sounds incredibly serious for a show about performers getting decked out in exaggerated masculine ideals and performing in challenges called "The Dong Show," but remember: drag is comical and political, frequently at the same time. And King of Drag, the first-ever drag king competition series, walks that fine line with .... whatever the male equivalent of grace is. Swagger? Swagger.
The series, which debuted in 2025, showcased the artistry of 10 drag kings across six highly emotional and highly entertaining episodes. Well, 11 drag kings if you count the incomparable host Murray Hill — oh, and judges Tenderoni and Wang Newton bring the total to 13. (spoiler: as you'll see, the number is way higher than that!) King of Drag immediately found its audience, earned rave reviews (hello), snatched a nomination for a Webby Award in the Video & Film - Reality & Unscripted category, and was dubbed the runner-up for Queertie's Best Digital Series.
Now King of Drag is preparing for Season 2 — and series co-creator (and Revry co-founder) Damian Pelliccione is ready. Pop Heist had the privilege of a one-on-one conversation with Pelliccione, a trailblazer in the queer media landscape. As you'll read below, Pelliccione is ready to celebrate Revry's 10-year anniversary by dropping another groundbreaking season of what's become the streamer's breakout series.
Brett White: Given the success of Season 1, was it a no-brainer to bring King of Drag back for Season 2?
Damian Pelliccione: I'm not gonna lie: We always knew we were gonna bring it back for Season 2. Revry is funded by its advertisers. We're not funded by subscriptions, like other streaming networks are. We do have a subscription product, but that's a super small percentage of our audience that just wants to turn off the ads. The majority of people watch for free, much like you would YouTube or Tubi or Pluto. And we have great advertisers, like, in this case, e.l.f. Cosmetics, where we were waiting for them to sign off and say yes. The advertisers are the ones that essentially green light our shows. We will pitch the advertisers to get sponsorship and then use those dollars to actually create the content.
In the case of King of Drag Season 1, we had actually set out to fund it ourselves with our tiny little bit of profit that we made in 2024. What was truly amazing, and hats off to e.l.f. Cosmetics, is they came in three weeks before we started production last March and said that they wanted to be a sponsor. So we got to make an even bigger show, which was spectacular.
So our whole thing was more or less like, "Will e.l.f. come back? And will they increase their investment?" I'm really happy and proud to say that e.l.f. was extremely happy with the success of Season 1, and decided within a couple of months of finishing airing that they would come back for Season 2.
I will say this also: It's a risk for brands to be supporting our community. But e.l.f. is one of those really dope, really cool brands that takes risks. It's really great when you have advertisers that trust our voice and will make great things like King of Drag. Even hats off to McDonald's, who underwrote last year's World Pride Ball, our international vogue show.
There's been a hole in the queer TV market for a drag king show for almost 20 years. After Drag Race proved that you could do a show like this, it's like, where are the kings? Why was now the right time for this show?
Revry has been casting drag kings for years, probably since we started doing originals. Our first original, House of Pride, which was a variety show special that we did in 2021 — and that was our first big sponsorship, from McDonald's — I cast a drag king and a queen. We've always been very intentional about making sure that we are including kings in the creation of our content. We had kings like ShowPonii and God Complex and Sweaty Eddie and the Cake Boys in our drag docu-series Queens of Kings. I think God Complex's Queens of Kings episode is one of my favorite of that entire series, all five seasons combined. It was so good.
Kings are a big part of the community, and have been a big part of drag artistry, but have not been given the platform. We've been sponsoring king shows. I travel to king shows all over the country. I've really been in the culture of the kingdom, so to speak, for a long time. Before we turned on cameras, we wanted to make sure that people working on King of Drag are actual drag kings themselves. Our director is a drag king, Marielle Woods. Our casting director is a drag king, Noga Wind. Sweaty Eddie, who's a drag king, made the show's opening animation.
There has always been drag king artistry in the history of drag. There's a great website, dragkinghistory.com. It's unfortunate when mainstream shows fall into a format and stick to that format and don't really think creatively or outside of that box. And what I think is really unique, even with our show, being a drag king doesn't mean that you are trans or lesbian. We have heterosexual drag kings too. Buck Wylde, Big D — you know Big D is married with kids and has a family, right? The world of drag kingery is just about parodying masculinity — and what better time in history to be parodying masculinity?
Yeah, it completely makes a ton of sense. From the outside, Season 1 was such a success. Personally, I loved that all the Drag Race podcasts I listen to either did segments on King of Drag or just full on covered the show every week. The community seemed to rally behind it. What did you learn from launching Season 1 that you have applied to prepping Season 2?
There's a lot of things that we learned from Season 1 that we are very conscious of in planning. We're in pre-production right now for Season 2. We shoot in May, release this fall. One of the biggest things is that the challenges are going to evolve. There's going to be a few that we bring back, like "The Dong Show." That's our reoccurring challenge that will happen every season, because it's just so fun and the kings had so much fun with it. It was so campy and laugh out loud funny.
Think about Drag Race and how the show evolved as they created space, like Gottmik, a trans male drag queen, even just trans women being queens. There's horror, there's comedy, there's such a rainbow of queen artistry. There's a rainbow of king artistry, but the world's really only seen the first season, the first 10 contestants on the show. As a king, I would think this is a really exciting time to get in on the ground floor, so to speak, and really show your point of view, your perspective on what it is to be a drag king, and show the world who is now watching this show.
I will tell you: we're a startup, we're minority owned and operated, we're still a very small team as a network. We're grateful that, King of Drag blew up in the way that it did, from the press perspective, but more from the audience perspective. We were tracking over 200 watch parties from Taiwan to South Africa to Brazil to Madrid to London to Paris to all over Canada. There were four in Los Angeles, in my hometown. And I know we were responsible for one in LA and one that we were supporting, I think, in Idaho. We helped fund two watch parties. That's it. To see the videos come in and the photos and the tags that we had on social media for these watch parties, I was like, "Oh, my god — I think this is it. I think this is our hit. This is going to be our household name show." And so we want to make sure that we do right by the fans and keep this excitement and ground swell that we had from Season 1 going into Season 2.
You had Paul Feig in the first episode, and then Sasha Velour and Gottmik on the judges' panel. Have people been reaching out to be on Season 2?
What you can't see on the other side, if I were to move my camera, you would see who we're courting. There is no shortage of A-list celebrities who want to be a guest judge on the show. I am really excited, once the ink dries on some of these offers that we've got out to celebrities, to announce who is coming to sit on our King's Court for Season 2. I get tingles. I'm excited, and I am going to be one of the regular judges on the King's Court. I'm going to be on all the episodes this season. I will not know who the cast is until day one, so this is going to be a treat.
It's perfect that this is happening at Revry's 10 year anniversary. Y'all have a lot of experience built up ahead of King of Drag potentially becoming your flagship show. How does it feel to experience this moment?
I started this company when I was just shy of 35 years old. Us at Revry — and this goes for all of our co-founders, Alia [J. Daniels] and Chris [Rodriguez] and LaShawn [McGhee] and myself — the things that we know now and the experiences that we've had in 10 years shaped us to be able to deliver shows like King of Drag, and to be able to continuously build our network here at Revry and audiences surrounding our amazing content. I truly feel like I am blessed because I get to go to work every day and love what I do. And how many people can say that they can do that? Especially right now with everything going on politically and economically. People need relief. People need queer joy in their life. That's literally written in our mission statement. The purpose of what we were building with our network and shows like King of Drag is to bring queer joy to the world. I don't want to do anything that does not speak to that mission. I don't want to work with anyone who doesn't speak to that mission. I don't have to, and we don't need to. We can do things differently. We love to disrupt the status quo. We're already disruptive as a culture. Queer is a culture, and one of the greatest things is our culture is just growing. It's getting stronger and louder and more prevalent. And now is the time to really be loud and proud and do crazy, awesome, cool shit, like King of Drag.
Watch King of Drag Season 1 on Revry
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