I want to love "RuPaul's Drag Race." I really do. I feel like my entire reality TV-watching life has led to this moment. And yet, after Monday night's debut episode, I am not in love. I am barely in like. I don't understand how you take the best parts of "Top Model," "Project Runway," and "So You Think You Can Dance," stock the show with drag queens, and still make it not one-third as entertaining as its predecessors. But somehow, Logo managed it.

The premise is pretty simple: 90's drag superstar RuPaul is looking for the next big female impersonator. There is no better person to host and judge this show. Ru is an icon; I can literally remember the first time I saw her as an extra in the B52's "Love Shock" video. I was transfixed, and wondered who/what that was. She was an extra and she was memorable! That's star power, folks. Of course, Ru went on to dominate the international drag scene, crossed over as a model in major fashion campaigns, scored huge club hits as a singer, and even had modest success as an actor, both in her male and female guises.

So Ru knows her shit. Which is why it's so frustrating that "Drag Race" is so dull. Part of that has to do with casting. The nine queens chosen to compete are certainly diverse, both racially and in terms of the type of drag they specialize in. You've got your traditional performance queens, with bangin' bodies and sassy personalities (Jade, Akashia, Chanel). You've got your out-there, avant-garde queens (Nina Flowers, Ongina). And you have your throw-back queens, ones that rely more on comedy than showmanship (Tammie Brown, Victoria Parker). But they're all the same in that almost none of them are particularly interesting.

How do you have a house full of drag queens and zero drama? How does that happen? Aside from a few shady comments while changing, the girls mostly got along as they were put through their paces this episode. And there were several paces - arguably too many for any real drama to develop. The contestants had to do a photo shoot involving cars, beefcakes, and water hoses. (Will the shoots be a weekly thing? Because I question how many photo shoots your average queen regularly takes part in.) Then they had to create their own costumes out of cast-offs and Dollar Store merchandise (again: is this really salient to the average drag queen's existence?). And then they had to a do a runway show, capped off by the bottom two lip synching for their lives.

That last part should have been the grand finale, the best part of the show. Few things are more entertaining than a good drag number, and yet the synch-off was so poorly staged and executed I nearly fell asleep. I'm sure it didn't help that the two queens on the cutting block - Victoria Parker and Akashia -- seem to be relatively uninspiring, but they both had to simultaneously lip synch to the same song (Ru's "Supermodel"; please don't let this be the elimination song every week) in a narrow strip of runway that didn't afford them any real chance to move or sell it. Terrible.

The episode also looked like it was shot on a $50 budget, most of which went to the Vaseline smeared over the camera lens to make Ru look a little less...shonte, for lack of a better word. The weird hazy glow surrounding nearly every frame and the generally shoddy production values give the proceedings a distinct whiff of desperation. (You know you have issues when former "Project Runway" villain Santino Rice - here part of the judging panel -- looks embarrassed to be involved.) I'm sure that the crew is doing the best it can with a meager budget, since Logo is best known as "that gay channel that doesn't show ‘Dante's Cove.'" And I kept telling myself and my best friend that we just need to get through the ghetto that is Season 1 so that the network will cough up some more cash for Season 2, when all good reality shows inevitably get so much better.

Because for all my bitching, you know I'm in for the next episode. And it's not all bad: I kind of love Nina Flowers, and think Rebecca Glasscock is really handsome when not in drag. I just want fabulousness. I want glamour. I want bitchiness. Is that too much to ask from a pack of drag queens?