With seven seasons under its belt and an eighth getting underway, the premise of Dropout’s “Game Changer” — the game show where the game changes every show — is starting to become more of a threat to its own creative team.
By this point, host Sam Reich has subjected the Dropout stable of comedians to everything from improvised musicals and murder mysteries to elaborate comedy twists on “Survivor,” “The Bachelor,” “The Circle,” and “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire.” According to the show’s production designer and co-executive producer Chloe Badner, “Game Changer” only used its standard rainbow loop-de-loop podiums once in Season 8.
Those podiums are nowhere to be found in the premiere episode, “Don’t Wake Standards & Practices,” a to-scale twist on “Don’t Wake Daddy” wherein Ally Beardsley, Jeremy Culhane, and Lou Wilson complete challenges across a human-sized game board — which, of course, loop-de-loops twice — while trying not to “wake” a giant fabricated lawyer. The spaces they’re allowed to move are based on points awarded by popular legal content creators Iya Baclagan, Alexis Noel, and Devin Stone, but they can “bust” on too much potential legal trouble. Then, the giant lawyer puppet slams upright, sending the contestant back to the start.
There’s always one set piece that gives us a run for our money, and Inertia (that’s her name!) was this season’s,” Badner told IndieWire. “The head had to be big enough that it was formidable, but light enough that it could be rigged to lift from a hinge. She needed to look concerned, but not overly freaked out. She needed to be weird enough to be striking, but also kinda cute.”
Getting Inertia there was all about balance — both in terms of physical balance, but also the game-y aesthetic design and match to the colors of the “Game Changer” set, and even the expression on her face. The design required the production team to bring a broad range of understandings, everything from electromagnetism, solenoid latches, lever arm weight multiplication, spring hinges, DMX triggers, foam fabrication, and sculpture.
While the mechanical workings of the puppet required a lot of technical problem-solving from the show’s production, grip, and electric teams, the art itself benefited from the fact that the “Game Changer” aesthetic is so distinct that it can kind of port into any design and travel anywhere. “Mapping our aesthetic onto sets and props of different themes is one of my favorite parts of the job. What would a ‘Game Changer’ courtroom look like? A ‘Game Changer’ game board? A ‘Game Changer’ study? The Standards and Practices podiums had to match our visual language and work within the game mechanic. So they’re a teal arch with retro colors inside, and they have a reflected mirror image of the front panel on the back, which lets the lawyers see where their arrow is pointing,” Badner said.
The aesthetic is going to go a lot of different places across Season 8, too, including two episodes in the round and the finale, which Badner wouldn’t dare spoil but is proud of the wonderful collaboration between the production design, camera, and lighting teams. “Working on ‘Game Changer’ is a true gift to my ADHD, because we’re constantly navigating novelty. The things we’re pulling off are so unique to each episode that it’s safe to say we’ve never done them before. I mean, has anyone ever built a giant puppet that pops up remotely at the crossing of an ill-defined social boundary?” Badner said. “It’s like a giant puzzle we all get to solve. It’s the best.”
It took up to the eleventh hour to get Inertia prepped and ready for the episode, a tug-of-war — not of potential liabilities and defamatory statements as the contestants competed to come up with on the day, but of weight redistribution and adding last-minute pulleys to get the head to snap up correctly. “It was one of those, ‘Are we gonna have to fake this?’ moments. Proud to say that she did fire correctly! Ally’s reaction is my favorite,” Badner said.
While Season 8 has to keep expanding in new directions (with many different kinds of new podiums), Badner is proud they’ve also brought the show back to its core conceit of the players having no idea what’s going on and having to figure it out as they progress. “Sam and I are both taken with the Fringe theater scene and the philosophy of clown. In the writers’ room, that tends to be my contribution to the concepts — how can we make this physically possible, and how can we clown it up?” Badner said. “There’s nothing I love more than very smart people, very invested, in very stupid things.”
“Game Changer” is streaming on Dropout.
