Whether AJ and the Queen is a good or bad television show isn’t really up for debate. The premise is that AJ, a 10-year-old ragamuffin with absent parents, falls into company with Ruby Red, a down-on-her-luck drag queen played by RuPaul Charles. It’s bad in a variety of equally painful ways. It looks and feels chintzy. Its politics are loud, proud, and as simplistic as a child’s My First Read-Aloud book. It has all the aesthetic and tonal hallmarks of a made-for-TV family movie from the early ’90s, but spread across 10 hours of a Netflix season. The acting is also bad. There are elements of AJ and the Queen that seem blithely, deliriously unaware. It’s inexcusable length, for instance, feels more like the result of being a Netflix show than anything essential to the project. So much that happens is unnecessary beyond pointless and most scenes feel inflated. The series may well be terrible, but it may also be immaculately high camp. In spite of all reservations about Notes on Camp, it can be watched in a state of perplexed unhappiness, caught between the desire to just call it bad and the persistent sense that maybe it was actually bad in an impressive way. Finally, though, a later line from Sontag helped clear the fog. She ends the essay by saying the ultimate camp statement is “it’s good because it’s awful.” Whatever the intention, AJ and the Queen is indeed awful. But it’s not good because of it.