Drag Race's problem • Survivor vs Survivor on The Challenge • Killer Camp • and more!

Dear newsletter friends,

This morning, I saw a few tweets about My90sTV.com, which allows us to watch clips of shows and ads from the decade. It’s wonderful!

If you’re not a creature of the 1990s like me, they also have each decade from the 1960s to 2000s.

I was thinking about that and news from the newly merged Warner Bros. Discovery.

Besides firing talented TV executives, it’s already cancelled and killed a completed reality TV show before it ever aired. And this week, there was the news that Batgirl will never be released. So weird that it’s somehow cheaper for companies to never release a completed product.

Days after HBO Max tweeted about the flower arranging competition show Full Bloom, it disappeared, too, likely gone forever, along with other shows.

Warner Bros. Discovery is going to merge Discovery+ and HBO Max into one service by next summer, but between now and the end of the year they’re going to do a lot more of this cancelling and gutting to save the company money. 🙁

So it’s probably a good idea for me to take Racquel’s advice:

Racquel Gates @racquelgates

I don't want the HBOMax news to function as an "I told you so," but really, folks - get physical copies of the stuff that you care about while you can. If film and media history teaches us anything, it's that availability and accessibility are NOT givens.

August 4th 2022

82 Retweets243 Likes

RuPaul’s Drag Race

I wrote in-depth about this (great! terrible!) season of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, and also about the direction the show has been going in:

• Drag Race’s talent has never been better. The producing has never been worse.

I answered

…these two questions in this week’s Ask Andy:

• Where did Chopped’s bigger set from last summer go?

• Is Killer Camp season 2 back? (Yes, tonight!!)

I recapped

…these two shows:

• The Challenge: USA, which set up a spectacular Survivor vs Survivor showdown

• Claim to Fame, which has increasingly interesting strategy—and some super-obvious clues

🤩 I recommend

• This show, which is one of Food Network’s best competitions

• This show, which is dumb but knows it

Coming this weekend: my interview with Alex Guarnaschelli about Alex vs. America season 2. It was one of the new and returning shows that premiered this week.

That’s everything. I hope have a terrific rest of your week!

—Andy

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🌄 This is Reality in Focus issue 301, first sent 5 August 2022, and it owns no shows from the 1990s.

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📷 Photo of flowers and the Swiss Alps by Stefan Lehner