Six minutes into the first episode of Queer EyeSeason 4,free videos of men and women who love sex with dogs something happens that has never happened on the show before. The Fab Five — Tan, Karamo, Jonathan, Antoni, and Bobby — enter a gymnasium packed with high school students and are greeted with wild, screaming applause. The school is in full pep rally mode, Jonathan performs with the cheerleaders, and the Fab Five take turns hyping the crowd up on the mic before whisking hero Kathi Dooley off for her weeklong makeover. For the rest of the episode the Fab Five hang around the school, taking over classrooms and talking to students who appear starstruck and thrilled to be hanging out with real-life Netflix stars.
From a television standpoint the pep rally is a great way to start the new season, but the Fab Five’s choreographed entrance and celebrity welcome sets a tone for Season 4 that is slightly different from past seasons of the popular Queer Eye reboot. In previous episodes, the Fab Five entered the lives of their heroes as virtual strangers whose helpfulness hinged on building trust in their expertise. Now that Queer Eyehas gone on for three sucessful seasons, the Fab Five come in to each new person’s story with their schticks established to the point of being expected.
Jonathan’s gonna shave that beard, honey, but he’s also going to make sure the hero has gorgeous positivity moments all week long. Tan will teeter on the edge of being a dick about their closet situation and introduce them to the majesty of the french tuck. Antoni will sniff everything in their kitchen but make sure they come out of this knowing how to cook at least a pancake, Karamo will pinpoint their deepest insecurities and guide them towards inner peace, and all the while Bobby will work like a dog offscreen to turn the home or common space of their choosing into an HGTV-approved paradise.
This five-part system is visually effective and entertaining, but the Queer Eye“thing” has become so ubiquitous over the past year that the Season 4 heroes feel less like ordinary people changing their lives with expert help and more like sweepstakes winners lucky enough to spend a week in the presence of superstars.
Because the Queer Eyeexperience is so well known, the heroes of Season 4 act differently than those in previous seasons. There’s no way someone like Season 2’s Ari, who infamously sulked and whined through his episode, could get away with seeming ungrateful for the Five’s help these days. Nearly all of Season 4’s heroes come to their episodes prepared to work through their stuff and open up about mental illness, grief, body insecurities, and the roots of important traumas within hours of meeting the Fab Five.
Season 4 heroes feel less like ordinary people changing their lives with expert help and more like sweepstakes winners lucky enough to spend a week in the presence of superstars.
Even the heroes who seem least likely to watch the show— an older man named Kenny and Matt, the farmer who has “never met a gay man” — yield instantly to the physical and emotional whirlwind that is Queer Eye, as if they know that having access to the Fab Five is a rare opportunity that shouldn’t go to waste. And considering the perks that come with Season 4 Queer Eyecoming to town, no one can blame them.
The glamor that comes with Queer EyeSeason 4 is enormously beneficial to some of its subjects — in one episode Jonathan pulls some strings to have Olympic champion Michelle Kwan give a sad dad’s daughter a private figure skating lesson, and another shows Bobby coordinating with the Kansas City musicipal government to donate office space for a cultural arts foundation. Both of these feel like larger scale versions of the Seasons 2 and 3 moments that brought Todrick Hall in for a guest appearance and launched a pair of sisters’ bottled barbecue sauce business, but there’s a big difference between getting someone through the door of a bottling plant and calling in a favor with the major of Missouri’s largest city.
Even Queer Eyeitself seems to be aware of the impact of fame this season, with five out of eight episodes featuring heroes having some connection to a charitable foundation or project that could benefit from its feature on the show. Four of the episodes end with the hero revealing their look at an event pivotal to their work with emphasis on how the Fab Five have helped them so they can help others. The show does well to use its growing audience to shed light on community figures, but the fact that it seems to pick its subjects based on who needs a PR boost indicates that the producers are officially aware of the power they wield.
The tagline for Queer Eye is “more than a makeover,” and the reboot has done a lot to justify that motto. A Queer Eyehero’s journey isn’t about the clothes, the house, or the haircut, it’s about allowing the effort of five good-hearted and talented men propel them to a place they didn’t know how to reach by themselves. The growing popularity of the Fab Five has already changed the dynamic of the show and there’s no way to tell how the baggage of Hollywood might affect future seasons. The tagline for the Queer Eye reboot has always been “more than a makeover,” but how much more is a question Season 4 is only just starting to answer.
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