‘Game Changer’ Is the Wildest Game Show You’re Not Watching
The amount of versatility within a single premise is the test of a truly great game show. “Jeopardy” has the clues, “Match Game” has the risqué answers, and “Survivor” has the challenges. But maybe the most versatile game show on air right now — and going for the Emmy that “Jeopardy” has won the last three years running — is one where its entire DNA is based on being a radically different competition every episode.
Now in its fifth season on Dropout (the streaming heir to CollegeHumor), “Game Changer” features a rotating cast of improvisers standing at some very colorful podiums without any idea of the game they’re about to play. “The only way to learn is by playing, the only way to win is by learning, and the only way to begin is by beginning,” host and series creator Sam Reich says at the top of every episode. The Dropout show mines plenty of fun out of great improvisers reasoning their way through unknown rules — only to discover, in one instance, it’s literally how you play the game: They were judged on how closely they kept their heart rates at resting during challenges.
But “Game Changer” has created some of the most elaborate game and reality show parodies ever, expanding well beyond its stage to become a show where part of the thrill is seeing how Reich and the show’s crew find increasingly ambitious, creative ways to transform its performers into players. Even when “Game Changer” reuses a premise, it finds new ways to trouble and surprise the contestants. A relatively straightforward dirty joke–telling contest this season, “Like My Coffee 2,” was spiced up when one of the players’ mothers was brought on stage during the final round, helpfully and/or mortifyingly weighing in.
Episodes of the series fall into three broad categories. The first lets the show spotlight and test specialized kinds of improv and on-the-fly joke writing; “Game Changer” Season 5 has both an episode devoted to creating a Shakespearean play and a karaoke episode where song parodies spring to life in real time. The second category is prize/punishment episodes, where improvisers make the same gambles that fuel “Deal or No Deal,” not quite knowing whether they’re going to get money, text nine friends to borrow money, or have (an exact replica of) their phone smashed nine times with a hammer.
But the third category of “Game Changer” games is replicating actual competition series. Season 5 included a two-part “The Bachelor” and a four-part “Survivor” miniseries as well as “Escape the Green Room,” where Dropout veterans Brennan Lee Mulligan, Lou Wilson, and Siobhan Thompson can’t even make it to set until they solve an escape room built into the existing Dropout offices. Reich watches from set and communicates via monitors before he “magically” appears locked in the green room too.
“We came up with that idea of getting me back into the [green] room before we came up with the doppelganger host,” Reich said. “And before we came up with how we were going to do it, it was the kind of thing where it was like, ‘Here would be an amazing effect. Now how do we make this make sense and possible,’ which is truly, appropriately, how magicians plan their acts.”
The magic act required two weeks of work to build, test, retest, and rig up the green room so it could capture any iteration of what the players might actually do once trapped there. “It was a huge group effort, that episode,” Reich said. “Chloe Badner and the production design team, my incredible producer, Justin Cyrul, and our systems engineer Matt LaForest was a big part of figuring out how we were gonna get me onscreen and then into the room, but still [appear to be] onscreen.”
It’s rare to have a game show that mines fun and tension from toggling between on- and offscreen 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 feels very organic,” Reich said. “There’s two instances this past season where my AD [Mark Reichard] plays a role in pulling one over on the cast. And so now part of the fun we’re having is that you actually don’t know when behind the scenes is real or not real.”
“Game Changer” Season 5 activated its behind-the-scenes most fully during the “Survivor” series, where the wheeling-and-dealing before a tribal council needed to be as incorporated into the flow of the episodes as the wild challenges — one of which included players trying to make spinning clay more erotic than their competitors. It was a huge lift for editors Sam Geer and Eve Hinz.
“When we’re thinking about ‘Survivor’ and what makes those stories come together, it’s the role of story producer that brings those together,” Reich said. “And I have two incredible creative producers on ‘Game Changer,’ Paul Robalino and Ryan Creamer, who helped make it happen. Sam and Eve and I were literally watching and finding things and writing scripts that almost looked like true screenplays in terms of how we imagined stuff flowing between confessional lines of 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 really ambitious efforts, the edit not only guides viewers’ expectations but also becomes part of the joke: The show utilizes Soderbergh split-screens, cheeky insert shots, and a dance between camera angles to reframe conversations. The 11 cameras running concurrently for “Battle Royale” is still less than that of something like “Big Brother,” but the level of suspense is uncannily similar.
It’s an effect the show continues to aim for. “Now that we’re breaking Season 6 — I feel this way headed into every season, but I’m like, I have no idea,” Reich said. “This season is so ambitious. We’re going to break ourselves in half, trying to pull this season off.”
As Reich himself well knows, whatever new challenges “Game Changer” has in store for itself, the only way to begin is by beginning.
