Reality used to be a friend of ours, and it often still is. All three of our staff recommendations for tonight fall into that category in one way or another–although two of them are more traditional documentaries: both looking at the underside of sports. Our third top pick is all about sashaying and shantaying as the premier show for drag queens elects its sixth Hall of Famer via its “all-star” spin-off.

FIONA’S PICK:
RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 6 [Paramount+]
Drag Race All Stars is back! This time exclusively on Paramount +. This season the line up of Queens is compelling! Everyone seems to be entering the competition on relatively even ground career wise. I like not having an obvious front runner. I want to be surprised! Also being exclusive to Paramount + means they don’t have to censor so I’m excited to listen to a steady stream of expletives.

KATHERINE’S PICK:
LFG [HBO Max]
This documentary looks at the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team and its (inspiring) battle for equal pay. (The men’s team doesn’t even win! It’s not even equal!!) 

JASON’S PICK:
Fear of a Black Quarterback [Vice]
It’s truly breathtaking to think about how backwards the attitudes were just a few decades ago when it came to Black QBs. Multiple pundits thought it was just fine to opine that Black people lacked the “facilities” to play the most important position in the NFL and coaches would try to move successful college signalcallers to wide receiver or running back. Future HoFer Warren Moon spent years in the CFL because of this attitude. Vice puts its usual spin of edge on the NFL and its fans’ legacy of racism. 

BUT, WAIT, THERE’S MORE:

• It’s the first day of the fifth season of Paramount+’s The Good Fight, but it’s the last episode for Cush Jumbo’s Lucca and Delroy Lindo’s Adrian Boseman–both of whom have been on the show since its debut, the former actually joining The Good Wife during its run. Joining Christine Baranski and the rest of the cast this season are Charmaine Bingwa as a tough new lawyer at the firm, Wayne Brady as a standup-turned-executive, and Mandy Patinkin as a rogue Brooklyn “judge” who decides to create his own courtroom.
• For a second season of Sundance Now’s British drama Innocent, there’s both a new person released from prison declared the program’s title word and a new mob of people disinclined to believe them. This go-around, the (mostly) exonerated is Sally Wright (Katherine Kelly), a teacher who was thought to have seduced and killed a 16-year-old boy.
• Let’s seamlessly segue to likely far less innocent people from the real world. Peacock airs a new documentary Epstein’s Shadow: Ghislaine Maxwell tonight and you can probably guess the profile of businessman/sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s associate will not be particularly flattering.

• It never gets any easier for the suburbanites-turned-con-women Good Girls as with the body of Lucy turning up in last season’s end, Beth, Ruby, and Annie are even further into an inescapable corner. Oh, and somehow Dean is still alive. It’s still on NBC.
• Japan’s Toru Muranishi is one of Japan’s most prolific adult film director who in his words wants to “make it rain porn from the sky.” He is the odd subject of the fictional rousing comedic series The Naked Director entering its second season on Netflix.
• Leslie Knope and Ron Swanson show us how to build stuff in their Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman personas in Making It–a reality competition that should not be confused with the similarly titled failed 1979 David Naughton vehicle Makin’ It which gave us a truly atrocious late-era disco hit, a confusion no one would ever, ever have.

• Helen Mirren finally finds her calling after dabbling in the acting field, hosting the animal show featuring the cute creature above, ABC’s When Nature Calls with Helen Mirren.
• Shudder keeps rollin’ out the slashers, gore, and terror as tonight’s offering, An Unquiet Grave veers more towards the psychological isolation based terror as a widower invites his sister to help perform a ritual to get over his lost wife–however, that ritual may threaten the latter’s life.
• Ending up on Lifetime as we often seem to do, their movie du jour is The Stranger She Brought Home which we’re guessing is not about Emma’s new boyfriend bringing home to her parents a mysterious man who did not cry at his mother’s wedding and may or may not have killed an Arab on a beach.