Get ready to bow down: Legendary, the groundbreaking HBO Max series spotlighting ballroom culture, is back, in all of its dipping, spinning, duckwalking glory. Since the House of Balmain stormed to a surprise win in the first season finale last summer—taking home both the grand trophy and a cash prize of $100,000—the show has headed from New York to Los Angeles to showcase a new cast of jaw-dropping ballroom stars.
For those unfamiliar, Legendary offers a window into today’s global ballroom scene, using a format where groups—or, in ball parlance, houses—perform lavishly costumed and meticulously choreographed routines to be judged by a panel, with one receiving the winning trophy each week and another being eliminated. Spearheaded by queer Black and Latinx performers in early-’70s Harlem, ballroom and vogueing first burst into the mainstream (for better or worse) in 1990, thanks to Madonna’s chart-topping hit “Vogue.” The scene was also more sensitively memorialized in Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston’s seminal documentary from that same year, while more recently, a new wave of popular interest has been stirred up by the critically acclaimed Pose on FX, whose third and final season began last weekend.