For those who thought neither RuPaul nor Michael Patrick King had any shows left in them to give, turns out, collaborating together might have been just the reinvigoration needed to come up with AJ and the Queen. In the spirit of both RuPaul and Michael Patrick King’s attachment to the 80s (for both experienced a certain ecstasy during it–then again, who didn’t? Save for those we lost to AIDS, but even they were having a good time before the proverbial last days of disco), the show has a whimsical, yet sardonic and seedy underbelly to it. Just like another narrative that dominated in the 80s about an unwitting foster parent and the dog-loving orphan that found her way to him: Punky Brewster. Unlike Punky, however, AJ a.k.a. Amber Jasmine (Izzy G.), isn’t all that sweet, nor does she have much respect for her so-called elders, least of all her own mother, the heroin-addicted prostitute that is Brianna (Katerina Tannenbaum), in and out of hospitals for overdosing as much as she is in and out of men’s cars. Fed up with the situation, the last straw for AJ comes when they’re evicted from their apartment, located just above Robert Lee’s a.k.a. Ruby Red’s (RuPaul). That’s the alter ego she does best with. The one that makes her feel confident and in control.
Of course, she’s anything but after falling for an overt grifter who goes by the name of Hector Ramirez (Josh Segarra), ultimately in league with the Botox-injecting Lady Danger (Tia Carrere, looking a bit rough since her Wayne’s World days), called as such for the fact that she ain’t always injecting Botox. For all one knows, it could be battery acid, which kind of explains right away why she’s sporting a Madame X-inspired eyepatch. Unfortunately for the all too trusting and excited to have found someone (especially this hot) Robert, he learns of the grift at the lease signing for the club he’s supposed to open in Queens–called, cheesily enough, Queens in Queens (“Manhattan is over,” Ruby declares at her final gig at The Box, as though we didn’t all get that memo a long time ago, but hey, Michael Patrick King is often late to the party when speaking through his main characters). When he realizes the joint account he’s set up to include “Hector” has been maxed out, it doesn’t take long for Robert and his best friend/fellow queen, Louis Bell/Cocoa Butter (Michael-Leon Wooley), to figure out what’s happened.
To add to the injustice of it all, Robert soon finds that the trash bag of money he collected during his final show has been snatched by AJ. Tired of being taken advantage of, he breaks open the window of the now abandoned apartment AJ is still taking up residence in, using his knee-high sparkling ruby red boot (à la Judy Garland gone drag) to shatter the glass. AJ’s defenses suddenly worn down, she (though at this point, Robert still thinks she’s a he) bursts into sobs about being hungry and having nowhere else to go, which is why she took the money. Because Robert is still a sucker for a literal sob story, he takes her down to his own apartment and pumps her full of KFC (where he and Louis ended up because that was the fake home address Hector had given him). Watching her unbridled ravenousness, Louis–blind but still intuitive–comments, “Just when you think you have nothin’, you meet somebody with even less.” Robert returns, “Yeah… I’m not there yet.” Trying to sort out the theft before he leaves for his drag tour of the U.S. isn’t much of an option, putting Louis in the position to run the sting operation with a conveniently gay cop he strikes up a relationship with. Nor does he have time to deal with AJ’s drama either, threatening to call social services before she disappears again. Only to, naturally, turn up as a stowaway in his RV with plans to get to Texas to go live with her mythic Pop Pop. Anything to get the hell away from her unstable and seemingly uncaring mother.
Robert, not in a great place to be alone after losing the person he thought was the love of his life and his entire life savings, perhaps decides to go along with it because he knows somewhere that those vintage VHS tapes of Oprah might drive him more crazy than sane. Not that AJ is exactly an agent for mental well-being, constantly annoying with her schemes, demands and rude behavior–prompting former Drag Race cast member Chad Michaels to ask, “Is she a bitch or what?” And yes, there are many cameos by former Drag Race queens, with season four’s Latrice Royale getting a full-on character in Fabergé Legs. In truth, one wonders at times just how desperate and lonely Robert is to want to hang around with someone so vexing. Yet perhaps the woman within has an innate need to nurture, to repair the damage in AJ that she feels in herself. This, too, was the case between Punky and widower/building owner, Henry Warnimont (George Gaynes), the latter possessing the curmudgeonly tendencies imbued in AJ instead of Robert, seemingly impervious to just about all of her mood swings and unpredictable actions, save for when she directly defies him by putting a picture of him in drag next to Hector with the caption, “Beware the gay grifter.” It immediately elicits responses from every queen under the sun, and, evidently, in the same black hole from being conned himself. Fellow victim Brian (Chad Michaels) is the one to admit that he was just as badly burned, yet when he tells Robert that Hector never kissed him once, Robert starts to believe that maybe at least some of what they shared was real.
AJ is quick to put a damper on thoughts such as those, with their rapport growing increasingly like that of an old married couple. At one point during the last episode of the season, AJ even remarks, “Well I just remembered I had KFC at your apartment the night I robbed you. So it’s kind of our anniversary.” Robert bites back with, “Anniversaries are more for a couple, and less for a thief and her victim.” However their relationship has evolved, there’s no denying that something familial has grown between them. Even amid such non kid-friendly exchanges as, “What’s that smell?” and RuPaul answering, “That’s gay bar. I love the smell of gay bar in the afternoon.” For yes, you can con a queen but you can’t keep her from wanting to be serviced. Which she does receive at one point by Fabergé’s oh so sensitive bodyguard in Jackson, Mississippi (a lot of shit goes down in Jackson, come to think of it, including some metaphor realness with a dog–Punky harbored that dog obsession propensity just as much as AJ, yet another parallel between this show and its 80s progenitor). When Ruby’s not busy attracting attention, there is the “tutelage” of being AJ’s drag sensei that so often comes into play when she wants it least of all–i.e. being derailed in Tennessee to a Bob Mackie “museum.” Arguably the gayest episode that’s ever transpired on any media outlet.
As the tense and inevitable moment leading up to when Brianna will at last unearth the whereabouts of her daughter and come a-runnin’, the same social services threats that plague Punky and Henry come to roost with Robert and AJ after she fractures her arm and Robert insists on taking her to a hospital where, fittingly, Mary Kay Place appears as one of the nurses after Robert gets to do his Terms of Endearment impression. With their relationship to one another automatically called into question because Robert is a tall black man and AJ is a scrappy white girl, the inquiries into who, exactly, Robert is to her invoke the summoning of a social services representative with the same take on his “unfitness” as Simon P. Chillings (Timothy Slack), the man who ripped Punky apart from Henry when he was hospitalized for an ulcer and the care available to her–along with factoring in Henry’s age–was deemed insufficient.
Yet for Punky and AJ, it isn’t about “what’s right” from society’s standpoint, it’s about the person who makes them feel the most at home in a way they’ve never known before. As AJ phrases it during one of her voiceovers, “I kinda always found it hard to depend on people. Not really having a family taught me that. It’s the people that take care of you when stuff gets real. That’s your family. The thing is, you just gotta find them.” And even when you do, as Punky and Henry taught us–and now AJ and the Queen–you still have to fight constantly to keep “the powers that be” from breaking up the family you’ve worked so hard to at last find. While some might find elements of AJ and the Queen to be as maudlin as Punky Brewster (the former is even replete with an 80s-tinged theme song that serves as “Ruby’s” ringtone, with lyrics that include, “Ruby is red hot/On fire nonstop”), there’s no denying that RuPaul and Michael Patrick King are spinning their own vintage-inspired comedy gold, which means it is tinctured with the sadness and drama that real life so often throws at people when they’re already down. And no one knows better about that than these two co-creators (especially King, who wrote for both Murphy Brown and Cybill).
