A trailer for the long-awaited Queer Eye semi-season Queer Eye: We’re in Japan! is here, and the Fab Five are, indeed, in Japan. The trailer teases a plethora of meme-able, heartwarming Queer Eye moments from Jonathan Van Ness, Tan France, Antoni Porowski, Bobby Berk, and Karamo Brown’s jaunt to Tokyo. They dance in a crosswalk! They eat sushi! A nice middle-aged woman says “yaass queen” and then slow dances in a kitchen with Antoni! Tan says one entire sentence in Japanese! He wears a kimono! After four seasons of plain ol’ American Queer Eye, which saw the Fab Five bringing their Joyful Expertise to heartland-ish locales like Georgia and Kansas City, this extremely different cultural context will prove for an interesting watch. As 23-year-old Kae says in the trailer, “I want to transform from a rock to a psychedelic flower.” You just don’t get voice-over like that in Kansas City!
This new location should raise some interesting cultural questions. How will, say, Karamo school a Tokyo resident on their own culture? How will Antoni explain uni? Most importantly, what on earth are the Fab Five gonna do without their signature, massive Uber XL? We only pray for a shot of them riding a four-seat tandem bicycle, with Tan in the basket like Toto. Some of these concerns are alleviated by the season’s two special guest guides, model and actress Kiko Mizuhara and comedian Naomi Watanabe. Based on the trailer, the seven look like they have a supercute rapport.
Netflix will drop all four episodes of this on November 1, in a move that feels like it’s pulling out its signature-series big guns in direct response to Apple TV+, which launches the same day. If Dickinson is too steamy a watch, or if the pure emotion of seeing Jennifer Aniston in a leading role again is too much to bear, Queer Eye: We’re in Japan! looks like it will be a nice, light bit of counterprogramming. We know they’ll do Bruley proud.
