Legendary Review (TV Series, 2020)
Legendary is a new competitive reality TV show about ball culture on HBO Max. Eight houses compete in weekly themed balls for a grand prize of $100,000 and the title of Superior House. The categories all come from the ball culture you might recognize from Paris is Burning or Pose: face, modeling, vogue, body, etc.
Let’s start with the positives. The cast on this show is incredible. Legendary has some of the biggest houses in the scene as competitors, including Ninja, St. Laurent, and Lanvin. The lesser known houses are also incredibly talented. This is a showcase and celebration of talented LGBTQ performers who rarely get a national platform beyond a few episodes in a reality show or as a backup dancer/ensemble performer for a music video.
The judging/host panel is mostly great, as well. Leiomy Maldonado is one of the most successful and revered voguers in the world. She even choreographs for Pose and appears on a few episodes, as well. She is the expert on the show and pulls everyone together real quick when things get out of line. Legendary offers a few glimpses into the power of her movement and it’s spectacular. The duet with MC Dashaun Wesley at the start of the finale is worth watching the whole show for.
Law Roach (a stylist) and Megan Thee Stallion (one of the best rappers working right now) bring a lot of energy to the panel and aren’t afraid to have contrarian opinions. They’re also not afraid of doing some excellent back and forth with the audience when it inevitably starts booing over the most mild critique. The audience is there for a good time and has been coached well to have big reactions and engage with the performers and judges.
Dashaun Wesley is the host and MC of the ball. He’s done it for years and he’s very good at it. You’ll see him working the mic on a lot of the most viral ball scene clips on YouTube. The MC’s job is to keep order in the ball, hype of the crowd, and remind everyone of the rules while the battle is happening. That’s the point of talking over the battle: it makes it clear what the category is looking for. If the contestants are supposed to be spinning, he will let you know that they should be spinning; if it’s old way vogue, he will constantly remind you that it should be old way, not the new way/vogue femme with a whole lot more stunts. Wesley flows very well over the music by house DJ MikeQ, who puts together amazing thematic mixes for the various performances each episode.
Jameela Jamil is also a host and a judge. She’s not bad. She’s clearly excited to be there. She helped produce the show, so she’s part of the reason we have Legendary at all. I just think everyone else, even the guest judges, brings more to the table as a judge than her. She’s great at the host banter, but seems to not want to be too critical as a judge. I hope she takes on more of that RuPaul style host/judge role if there’s a second season, acting as a tie breaker and a host more than a judge.
I will give major credit to Legendary for the production values. There are teams of makeup artists, hairstylists, designers, and “performance coaches” working with the houses on each episode. Ball culture looks expensive, but many of these competitors are not well off in society and invest everything they have in competing. HBO Max took that burden off of them. The limits of their costumes are not their own budget but their imaginations. Everyone has an equal chance to look amazing every time they step on the runway and it shows. These incredibly creative artists are allowed to dream big without the worry of building everything themselves.
Before I go further, I have to point out that I did really enjoy the show. Truly. I had a lot of fun watching it and appreciate that these artists got this platform.
Legendary is a mess of a first season that never really finds its voice. The problems are evident in the first episode. There is nothing to indicate what the format of the show is. There are no rules explained, but the contestants are judged anyway. No one says anything about how the show will work except announcing a competition and a grand prize. Some of the contestants even fight back after harsh critiques because they were told the category was Presentation and they were being judged on a Vogue Performance. No one is eliminated in the first episode and we’re only given a theme for episode two.
From there, the rules and format change episode to episode. I don’t mean one week they walk Face and the next week they walk Hair instead. No, I mean how the contestants are judged, what the expectations are, and the mechanics of the episode change each week. Episode two is the messiest of all, with an argument happening in the middle of the final category for the night over the rules. The show has those wonderfully extra category names, and not everyone understands what the expectations are. The category is Three Fab Mice Trio Runway and some contestants are eliminated for not looking like mice while others are eliminated for not being in sync for their modeling. The judges argue over what the rules actually are, with Law even demanding eliminated teams return because of how vague the rules are; the show continues and the bottom two teams of the week are there because of the scattered judging in the final category.
Clearly, Legendary was still trying to find its final form while filming. The judging works the same (until it doesn’t). Contestants compete in their category. If all five judges in a week (the panel plus a guest) give them 10s across the board, they advance; if one person says no, they’re out. So one week, they use their hands; the next week, they have wands; the next week, they have fans; then they have nothing; then they have something else. The conestants who aren’t chopped do head to head battles until a winner is chosen. Eventually, they stop with the 10s/chop judging all together and just vote on a winner regardless of the number of contestants.
It’s incredible inconsistent from a production standpoint. It takes until episode 3 for the Superior House Trophy to even exist on set, so two teams are announced as winning a trophy that doesn’t exist. The trophy itself, by the way, is this ugly 3D printed stack of thick rectangles with a whole lot of webbing still hanging off it for at least another two episodes. Like, someone clearly said “We’ll 3D print it” and didn’t know that a 3D printer would probably take a solid week working around the clock to make the parts for a giant trophy like that.
The focus of Legendary is also unfair to the contestants themselves. If they wanted this to be a Vogue competition in every category, they should have cast voguers. Instead, they called it a ball competition, then most of the time gave the win in any category to the final contestant who vogued the most, even if they were walking Runway or Body. I’m still angry about the Face category and it’s been a week since I saw the episode. One finalist walked Face, and the other danced while smiling. Guess who won. The elimination each week is determined by a 1v1 vogue battle and the final challenge is a house vogue battle. Even when voguing is not required, the contestants are criticized for not voguing enough.
I don’t like to bring backstage drama into a review, but I’ve seen a lot of Instagram stories from angry contestants from this show with very similar experiences. Aside from the concerns about the format, any astute reality show viewer can confirm that the producers clearly wanted certain contestants to go very far on the show regardless of how well they performed. Sob stories flow aplenty to the point that it goes from backstory to exploitation. Some houses are praised for just existing because they represent something in the community, while others are treated like a coiled up pile on the street because the judges don’t like the shoes they chose to wear. Contestants who wipe the floor with their opponent in the elimination vogue panel are often eliminated because “we can clearly see [other contestant] had so much passion for their house.” The rare exception is when one of the favored houses has a talented voguer, then they’re heralded as one of the all time greats and the final judgment is done in seconds.
If a second season happens, I hope the show is cast appropriately for what the producers want the program to be. I hope they pick a format and stick to it. I hope the editing doesn’t just chop out entire parts of an episode (a non-elimination episode goes from “This team wins” to two teams ready to fight for elimination and being told it’s not happening with a literal jump-cut) just because they can.
If you have an interest in ball culture and want to support some incredibly talented LGBTQ performers, sign up for that free week of HBO Max and watch Legendary. The talent of the contestants and the energy of the performances make up for a whole lot of producer ex machina and the ever changing rules.
Legendary is streaming on HBO Max.
