SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the Season 8 finale of “Game Changer,” now streaming on Dropout.
“Game Changer” capped off its eighth season Monday with a finale episode that was not at all sponsored by Chili’s but ended with its winner taking home between $3,000 and $5,000 (host and Dropout CEO Sam Reich isn’t sure) in Chili’s gift cards. Combine that with the fact the Season 8 finale (a talent show competition) is the longest episode of the Dropout series to date (coming in at just under 90 minutes) and boasts the largest number of contestants (23) and you’ve got a wildly unprecedented undertaking for Reich and the “Game Changer” team.
The episode, titled “Last Talent Standing,” features nearly two dozen contestants performing in a talent show with a “Squid Game”-esque twist that “killed off” eliminated competitors who then joined a panel of judges led by guest stars Kumail Nanjiani, Maria Bamford and Gianmarco Soresi.
“What you see in this 90-minute episode is extraordinarily faithful to everything that actually occurred,” Reich tells Variety. “There is not a single go that we lifted out of the show completely.”
(It should be noted the episode does cut Katie Marovitch’s answer to the way she’d like to fake die upon her elimination, which was deemed “too dark” for Dropout’s standards. “Yeah, I think Katie and I will probably take that one to the grave, so to speak,” Reich says.)
Reich was willing to let the cameras roll indefinitely to capture the seemingly endless talents (from Japanese fan dancing to mind reading) of the Dropout players. But what he wasn’t up for was making another two-part episode.
“Most ‘Game Changer’ shoots go as long as they need to,” Reich says. “The difference between this season and prior seasons is, if you’re looking for how we’ve creatively pivoted, we’ve done episodes that we’ve split in two. Many. In fact, if you look at other two-parters, the sum of their parts is not as long as this 90 minutes was. I have finally landed against two-parters, and the reason is that I feel like we set up expectations and then there’s no way to surprise people as much with the second half. So their experience of watching an episode, waiting a week — actually two weeks — and then watching the second half is always going to be a funny kind of payoff where that second half better be, in some ways, profoundly different from the first half in order to still feel like ‘Game Changer.’ And I would rather wallop people with one experience. So now that we can afford to, that’s basically what this comes down to. We’re just doing longer episodes here and there.”
Though Reich says he’s done breaking episodes into two parts, there is still a limit to how long he’s willing to let an episode go based on his initial plans in a writers’ room vs. what happens during the actual production.
“There were game mechanics that we had to abandon because the day was immediately running so long and the biggest game mechanic that we had to abandon was mini games that were going to happen in between rounds and those mini games were going to be all players squaring off in the same talent,” Reich says. “For instance, we were going to reach the end of round one and then the players were going to go heads up on beatboxing or heads up on best Scottish accent or heads up on runway walk — which Oscar did do for us later in the episode — and we were quickly running so, so long that was not possible. Winners of those games were going to get a ‘one free death’ or ‘resurrection’ certificate. Our thinking was they could use them on themselves or they could unselfishly use them on someone else, which might also create a funny dynamic.”
Reich says that those planned aspects had to be cut out to account for the lengthy production day, but there was a key mechanic he made sure could stay in no matter how long the episode got.
“There is a distinction between what I am willing to do and what, like a ‘Squid Game’ or a ‘Beast Games’ is willing to do and part of that for me at this point is trying to figure out, if I’m going to do an elimination game, ways that eliminated players are going to stay involved,” Reich says. “So turning eliminated players into judges was important to me for that reason.”
Once the game got down to its final four contestants — Jacob Wysocki, Kimia Behpoornia, Kaylin Mahoney and Oscar Montoya — Reich says the competition hit its “tipping point,” as the desire to end the very long production day and go home warred with everyone’s goal to commit to the bit. This led to moments like Wysocki trying and failing to eliminate himself to, as he (the only “straight white guy” left at that point) put it, “give voices to people who matter” and so he could “go smoke a joint in my car.”
“The meta game of ‘Game Changer’ at any point is that probably everyone is just trying to create the best possible episode, regardless of if that means they’re winning,” Reich says. “I think everyone’s sort of producer brain is — meaning all of my players, and this is what makes for such a good show — probably a little higher than their game-player brain. Not all the time, but sometimes. Which means that I can count on players doing the funny thing, even if that means getting eliminated. Jacob, I think he was sort of saying to himself, ‘I don’t need to win this. The day is already going long. I want for one of my friends to win it,’ and just no one would allow it. And that was, in some ways, the tipping point of the episode, where we went from running long to that being the spirit of the day. To everyone wanting to hang in there as long as possible.”
Ultimately, Montoya walked away the proud owner of a Chili’s gift card with “under $5,000″ on it, courtesy of Dropout, not Chili’s — though that was not for lack of Reich trying to get Chili’s involved.
“I absolutely did,” Reich says. “Granted, I could have probably pressed on that more than I did. There was something about the fact that all of that happened and we weren’t sponsored by anybody, which is also funny. Just like if this ends up being the result, it’s just the result.”
As Dropout has grown, the company has set a steady pace with production and release cycles for its expanding slate of TV shows, which also includes “Dimension 20,” “Make Some Noise” and “Very Important People.” That means that even though “Game Changer” Season 8 has just concluded for viewers, the episodes were shot so long ago now that Reich’s focus has shifted to the ninth season, which begins production in three weeks. And he is trying to limit how the response to Season 8 affects new ideas.
“I’m so deeply entrenched in Season 9 that even to turn back and reflect on it, it’s tricky,” Reich says. “It requires me extracting my brain from one Frankenstein and putting it in another Frankenstein. There’s a natural sort of built-in tweak to ‘Game Changer,’ which is the show itself is such an experiment and we’re lucky to have fans who really care about it. But for the most part, I try to tune out the noise and to remain faithful to the experiment. And what to me that means is every season, it is a show that, like a cat, will always be exploring the perimeter of what it can do because it’s always looking for new things to exploit. And because the show gets bigger and bigger, there’s more at its disposal to be able to exploit season after season. So every season we have this conversation with ourselves, which is sort of like, what do we want to see a little bit more of? What do we want to see a little bit less of? And in some ways, every season is a response to the season that came before it.”
The focus between Seasons 7 and 8 was pushing the boundaries for game design, and Reich says he’s “really proud of what we came up with” for Season 8’s episodes, which has “some of the truest games that we’ve ever done with the show.”
Now going into Season 9, Reich says these episodes are planned to be “by a mile, the strangest stuff we’ve ever done.”
“It is just like whatever those game design impulses were [for Season 8], [Season 9] hasn’t left them entirely in the gutter, but it is like an acid trip,” Reich says. “The show benefits not at all from consistency. So we’ll continue to reinvent it, and it’ll continue to shape-shift and that’s part of the fun of being on this ride.”
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