The amount of versatility within a single premise is evidence of a truly great game. “Jeopardy” has the clues, “Match Game” has the daring answers, and “Survivor” has the challenges. But perhaps the most versatile game show on the air right now – and pointing to the Emmy that “Jeopardy” has won for the past three consecutive years – is one where its entire DNA is based on being a radically different competition in every episode. .
Now in his fifth season on Dropout (the streaming heir to CollegeHumor),”Game changerfeatures a rotating cast of improvisers standing on some very colorful podiums with no idea of the game they are about to play. “The only way to learn is to play, the only way to win is to learn, and the only way to start is to start,” host and series creator Sam Reich says at the beginning of each episode. The Dropout show extracts a lot of fun from great improvisers who reason through unfamiliar rules — only to find, in one case, it’s literally how you play: They were judged on how well they maintained their resting heart rate during challenges.
But “Game Changer” created some of the most elaborate game and reality show parodies ever, expanding far beyond its stage to become a show in which part of the thrill is seeing how Reich and the show crew find increasingly ambitious ways and creative to turn its performers into players. Even when “Game Changer” reuses a premise, it finds new ways to shock and surprise the contestants. A relatively straightforward dirty joke contest this season, “Like My Coffee 2,” was spiced up when one of the players’ mothers was brought onto the stage during the final round, contributing in a helpful and/or mortifying way.
The episodes of the series fall into three broad categories. The former allows the show to spotlight and test specialized types of improvisation and on-the-fly joke writing; Season 5 of “Game Changer” has both an episode dedicated to creating a Shakespearean play and a karaoke episode where song parodies come to life in real time. The second category is the reward/punishment episodes, in which improvisers make the same bets that fuel “Deal or No Deal,” not sure if they’ll get any money, text nine friends to borrow money, or have (an exact replica of ) their phone was smashed nine times with a hammer.
But the third category of games “Game Changer” is replicating real competition series. Season 5 included a two-part parody of “The Bachelor” and a four-part parody of “Survivor,” as well as “Escape the Green Room,” where Dropout vets Brennan Lee Mulligan, Lou Wilson and Siobhan Thompson can’t don’t even set it up until they sort out an escape room built into the existing Dropout offices. Reich watches from the set and communicates through the monitors before he too “magically” appears locked in the green room.
“We came up with the idea to take me back to the (green) room before we find the doppelganger host,” Reich said. “And before we figured out how we were going to do it, it was the kind of thing where it was like, ‘There would be an amazing effect here. Now, how do we make that sense and possible,’ which is really, properly, how wizards plan their actions.
The Magic Act required two weeks of work to build, test, retest, and set up the green room so that it could capture every iteration of what players might actually do once trapped there. “It was a huge team effort, that episode,” Reich said. “Chloe Badner and the production design team, my incredible producer, Justin Cyrul, and our systems engineer Matt LaForest had a huge role in figuring out how we could get me on screen and then into the room, but still (seems to be ) on the screen .”
It’s rare to have a game show that extracts the fun and tension from the alternation between on-screen and off-screen space. “I think because our show is this weird meta show where the show is also about the making of the show, showing the seams and the flats and the sandbags and the crew all feeling very organic,” Reich said. “There are two instances last season where my CEO (Mark Reichard) played a role in pulling the cast. And so now part of the fun that we’re having is you don’t actually know when behind the scenes it’s real or not real.
‘Game Changer’ season 5 activated its behind-the-scenes more fully during the ‘Survivor’ series, where maneuvering before a tribal council was to be incorporated into the episode stream as the wild challenges – one of which they included players trying to make the spinning clay more erotic than their competitors. It was a huge success for publishers Sam Geer and Eve Hinz.
“When we think about ‘Survivor’ and what brings these stories together, it’s the role of the story producer that brings them together,” Reich said. “And I have two incredible creative producers of ‘Game Changer’, Paul Robalino and Ryan Creamer, who helped make it happen. Sam and Eve and I were literally looking and finding things and writing scripts that almost felt like real scripts in terms of how we imagined things to flow between lines of confessional dialogue.
In the “Survivor” series – or to give it its full title, “Game Changer: Battle Royale, Old Guard vs. New Blood” – and most of the show’s truly ambitious efforts, editing not only drives viewer expectations, but it also becomes part of the joke: the show uses Soderbergh’s split screens, cheeky framing, and a dance between camera angles to reframe conversations. The 11 cameras running simultaneously for “Battle Royale” is still lower than for something like “Big Brother,” but the level of suspense is eerily similar.
It’s an effect the show continues to aim for. “Now that we’re breaking season six, I feel this way directed every season, but I’m like, I have no idea,” Reich said. “This season is so ambitious. We will break in half, trying to finish this season.
As Reich himself knows, whatever new challenges “Game Changer” has in store for him, the only way to get started is to start.
