Since 2019, Dropout.tv’s flagship series has been Game Changer, a comedy game show with a new premise and mechanic nearly every episode. Some of those mechanics are inspired by other game shows or reality competitions — Game Changer has done fairly straightforward riffs on The Bachelor and Survivor — while others are wholly original.
Season 8, which launched on May 18, kicks off with a bang: The episode “Don’t Wake Standards & Practices,” a riff on the old board game Don’t Wake Daddy, invites contestants Lou Wilson, Ally Beardsley, and Jeremy Culhane to push the limits of what they can say and do without getting Dropout fined or sued. That includes everything from violating Disney, McDonald’s, and Nike copyrights to sexually harassing each other at work. Polygon spoke to Dropout CEO and Game Changer writer, producer, and host Sam Reich about the episode.
“I cast these episodes with a lot of love, and Jeremy and Ally and Lou are three very trustworthy people who I know are going to be able to walk that line judiciously and find stuff that’s very funny and creative to do, not merely edgy,” Reich told Polygon. “Also — I couldn’t believe this was true — our own legal team looked at the episode after the fact. Their POV was that because we were commenting on legality itself, we could get away with even the most risqué things we wanted to do in that episode.”
Reich says the part of Dropout’s legal review that “floors me to this day” is that the company lawyers approved an animated sequence Beardsley narrated in response to the prompt “Propose a visual effect to go here.” The short cartoon clip features a version of Mickey Mouse with pierced nipples and dangling, swaying udders; the Death Star from various Star Wars movies; and the use of Nike and McDonald’s corporate logos and slogans.
“Even as you’re watching, I feel like you’re aware of the paradox of it,” Reich says.
The episode is judged by three guest lawyers: Iya Baclagan, Alexis Noel, and Devin Stone (aka YouTube’s LegalEagle). They deem Ally’s cartoon to be too provocative, and give the comedian a “bust” rating, sending them back to the starting space on the episode’s giant game board.
“You’re like, well, wait a second — Ally’s busting for this reason, and yet I’m allowed to watch it?” Reich says. “And our legal team says ‘[this is] OK!’ What say you, Disney and McDonald’s? I guess we’ll see.”
An odd element in the episode is that the judges are only introduced briefly by name (and pronouns, and social-media accounts, per usual Dropout practices). Nothing is said about who they are or where they work, which may give the impression that they’re actual Dropout legal staff, though Dropout viewers may wonder why the company’s lawyers are so attractive and TV-ready. Reich says they were actually guests brought in by Dropout casting.
“They are three actual lawyers, the most recognizable of whom would be Devin,” Reich says. “The other two — who did such a stellar job, by the way, with limited on-camera experience, are lawyers who were found by our very talented casting director, Jazzy [Collins]. One of whom I believe is a corporate attorney, and another of whom is actually in standards and practices as a job. So between the three of them, they actually really run the gamut in terms of specialty, which is why they don’t always see eye-to-eye. Sometimes they do, but I thought some of the more interesting moments of the episode were when they didn’t.”
Longtime Game Changer fans will notice that the show’s previous seasons gradually built up in complexity, cost, and ambition. It all led up to the blowout season 7 finale, “Samalamadingdong,” which references more than a dozen past episodes, as the Dropout cast “forces” Reich to become the contestant in a highly referential game. It’s a series high point — but it left the open question of how Dropout’s producers could possibly follow that up in season 8.
“The idea of topping ourselves gets a little bit problematic at a certain point,” Reich says. “If with every episode of Game Changer, we’re trying to make it somehow bigger, or more out of the box than the one that came before it… I’ve said this before: A twist every episode is no twist at all.”
The philosophy of the show, which extends into season 8, is that Game Changer needs to set a baseline, which every episode can meet or build off.
“This season, we did two things kind of deliberately,” Reich says. “Every season is a little bit of a response to the season that came before it, in some way. It’s not in any way a criticism of the show up until the point — it’s just what excites us the most creatively to do in one season versus the other.”
Reich says season 7 “felt very performance-artsy at times,” and cites the “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”-inspired episode (“Who Wants to Be Jacob Wysocki?”) as having “no game — it was pure performance art.” Coming out of that, he and the producers wanted to steer the show back toward its game-show origins.
“We wanted to create a season that felt very gamey, really playable, meaning that our players could compete with each other, that there were real levers that they could pull and tug,” he says. “And second, that kind of reset a bit of the baseline for the show. Not that this season doesn’t have some very outside-the-box moments. Episode 5 of this season might be our favorite episode of all time. It’s certainly up there, and it is pretty out there. That’s an episode called ‘Count the Rice.’”
Ultimately, Reich says, season 8 will be about “right-sizing” the show. “In some ways,” he says, “it’s a season that’s like, let’s decide anew what Game Changer even means, and see if we can stick to that with some discipline.”
New episodes of Game Changer air on Dropout.tv on alternate Mondays.
