Antoni Porowski is moving into a new chapter on screen, but he is not pretending the last one ended neatly. As he promotes Best of the World With Antoni Porowski, his first solo hosting role after nearly a decade on Queer Eye, he said the way that chapter closed became a distraction from the people who built it.
That matters now because his National Geographic series premieres June 7 and streams the next day on Disney+ and Hulu, putting Porowski back in front of viewers just four months after his Queer Eye run was described as over. In the new show, he travels to Mexico City, London, Paris and New York City, a sharper, more personal turn for a host whose name has become tied to a franchise that once felt bigger than any one cast member.
Porowski did not sound eager to relitigate the end of Queer Eye, but he did say he is left with more questions than answers. He said he was sad the fallout served as a distraction from honoring the “countless people” who worked on the show from day one to the end, both in front of and behind the camera, and added that he refuses to let the way it ended overshadow the messaging he says was always real and truthful.
The show’s final stretch had already been shadowed by uneasy headlines. Karamo Brown pulled out of a CBS Mornings segment in January, saying he had been “mentally and emotionally abused for years,” and a 2024 Rolling Stone investigation reported allegations of emotionally abusive behavior by Jonathan Van Ness, who has denied them. Porowski said he is only in touch with some of the cast, a reminder that the reboot’s on-screen warmth did not fully survive the off-screen strain.
Queer Eye, which began its Netflix reboot in 2018 with Porowski, Van Ness, Brown, Tan France and Bobby Berk, was built on a simple promise: makeover television with a broader sense of care and inclusion. It also introduced many viewers to openly queer people for the first time, which made its ending feel larger than a routine cast change and helps explain why Porowski is so focused on protecting the legacy of the work itself.
For now, the clearest answer is the simplest one: Porowski is done closing old chapters and ready to host his own. The harder question is whether the bonds forged on Queer Eye can hold long enough for any of those former co-stars to appear together again, or whether the new projects will be the only place this cast story goes next.
