Drag Race’s Kita Mean and Anita Wig’lit hatch clucking mad gameshow Winner Winner Chicken Dinner

Kita Mean and Anita Wig’lit are back on our television screens with their bonkers new gameshow Winner Winner Chicken Dinner. But is there a deeper meaning to the chaotic, poultry-themed madhouse?

The answer that both Kita Mean, winner of the inaugural season of Drag Race Down Under, and her bestie, castmate and later Canada vs. the World star Anita Wig’lit will give you is this: No.

And that’s the magic of Winner Winner Chicken Dinner; it’s just madness.

The premise is simple – three members of the public are kidnapped recruited to take part in completely random tasks at the behest of Kita and Anita, with no set rules, concrete way to win, or guarantee of personal or mental safety (that last bit was a joke).

 At the end of each episode, a Loser Loser Chicken Snoozer is banished to the coop and the other two competitors are invited to share a winner’s chicken dinner together. But nobody goes home empty-handed here – all three guests will take home matching prizes for their efforts, as the real prize was the friends they made along the way.

But in a world where ‘Drag queens on TV‘ is synonymous with the juggernaut of the RuPaul’s Drag Race franchise, Kita and Anita exclusively dish on how Winner Winner Chicken Dinner helps facilitate that all-important inner child, why confetti cannons are essential to any TV pitch and how to make a career “out of being stupid”.

PinkNews: So our first question on Winner Winner Chicken Dinner is this: What the hell, guys?

Kita Mean: Well that is a great question. Anita and I always throw around random ideas, and we love working together – whenever we’re together, we make our most magic. And all of a sudden it came to us and we thought we’ve cracked the code. So we were like: ‘A chicken themed game show can’t hurt.’

And how many chicken themed puns have you run through by now?

Anita Wig’lit: Too many. When I think of the show and I try to describe it to people and say: ‘It’s a chicken themed game show by drag Queens,’ It is stupidest thing in the world. It makes no sense. But I think it makes so much nonsense that it makes sense.

The more formulated version of my previous question, I suppose, would be to ask the process of creating Winner Winner Chicken Dinner. How did the show hatch?

Kita: I came up with the idea that we need drag queens hosting a game show, because there aren’t enough drag queens hosting game shows, so we need to do it.

And I went to Anita, who was totally on board, we did a bit of a brainstorm, and we contacted OUTtv and were like: ‘We don’t have a fully fledged show yet, but you’ve seen House of Drag, you know how dumb that was. We want to do that but as a game show and they were like: ‘We’re in.” Much like how we operate a lot of our career, where we sell the tickets and then create the show.

Anita: You could say that Kita hatched the idea.

Kita: I believe the only way we secured funding was by setting off confetti cannons during our meeting with OUTtv. These were pyrotechnic cannons that we’d never used, and we think they were just so startled they told us to take what we wanted.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by OUTtv (@outtv)

What I love about the show is that these contestants are literally just members of the public that you’re bringing into the madhouse; what was your favourite part about that?

Anita: It was just that, that they were so wonderfully ordinary. We tried to have a theme with each group, but it was more: ‘These people applied, we’re desperate, perfect!’ And the live studio audience was so invested in these games, it was crazy to see. People as insane as I am.

It does speak to people, now more than ever, wanting fun, and wanting silly – was that present for you two when facilitating the show?

Anita: Oh, a hundred percent. We’ve made a career out of being stupid, and this show is kind of the ultimate version of that. We’re just being ourselves, and taking the audience along!

Kita: I think fundamentally, we’re all very immature at heart. And we’re conditioned as grown-ups to hide that side of ourselves because we think it’s abnormal, but if we encourage people to feel as silly as we are, they’re not just having fun, they actually feel liberated.

I know that sounds like a very serious concept for a very dumb show, but it’s true!

Not to parrot RuPaul, but there’s that inner child, you know.

Kita: Yes, and just like a child, Anita sh*t her pants before logging onto this call!

And as mentioned, this show is complete chaos, rules are changed on a whim and there are no winners, only losers; was this silliness a conscious response to a more structured show like, perhaps, RuPaul’s Drag Race?

Kita: I wouldn’t say it was a conscious response, and this is going to sound contradictory, because I did quite well on the show, but I don’t think my appearance on Down Under is a great representation of who I am as a drag queen. Yes, it taps into the ‘real’ side of who we are, but that’s not what I’m doing when I entertain an audience.

So Winner Winner Chicken Dinner was not a conscious response to Drag Race, but it was a conscious choice to create something that better encapsulates who I am and who we are as performers.

Anita: Yes, I agree, Kita is actually far more unlikable than she appeared on Drag Race.

We didn’t go about the show trying to create something with RuPaul in mind, but suppose we’re all now conscious that when people think of drag queens on TV, they immediately think first of House of Drag, then of RuPaul’s Drag Race. So for us, we had to create something unique, something new.

And what do you hope people take away from this show, if anything?

Kita: Listen, we did not create Winner Winner Chicken Dinner to change people’s lives in any way, shape or form. If, for some reason it does, fabulous. But it’s really to give people a break from reality, and just be silly for a moment in time.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner is available to stream on OUTflix and the OUTflix Apple TV Channel in the UK, and on OUTtv outside of the UK.

Share your thoughts! Let us know in the comments below, and remember to keep the conversation respectful.