All hail Vic Michaelis and Aabria Iyengar, co-presidents of Dropout!
Their administration was established as a result of the “Game Changer” Season 7 finale, “Outvoted,” which took the comedy game series outside of its colorful studio and onto the stage of the Elysian Theater for an episode filmed in front of an audience. The episode, in fact, hinged on a voting mechanic where the audience was able to choose their favorite candidate on a bespoke app from among Iyengar, Michaelis, Brennan Lee Mulligan, Ally Bearsley, and Demi Adejuyigbe; the players courted popularity through a series of debate questions, campaign slogans and ads, outright bribes, and special interest endorsements — everyone from Big Tobacco (Chris Grace in a cigarette mascot suit) to former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich (actually Robert Reich) weighed in. The results and their accompanying demographics were analyzed by Brian David Gilbert in real time.
A “Game Changer” that echoes the tropes of election coverage may not outwardly seem like as huge a gear-shift as previous season finales of the show have been, but it required a lot of planning, patience, and programming to pull off. “Game Changer” host and executive producer Sam Reich spoke to IndieWire about making “Outvoted” a reality, why having an audience involved gives the “Game Changer” editors that much more of a challenge to edit the show down to the funniest jokes, and what “Game Changer” may do with the concept moving forward.
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
IndieWire: At what point were y’all confident about moving the show to a live audience format? Was there any sort of testing involved of the actual voting mechanic to make sure that it worked?
Sam Reich: What interested me about that is, because we’ve never done an episode akin to a popularity contest — like we’ve never invited the audience in, in that way, and voted for a winner before. So at its base level, there’s usually something that excites me about an episode for me to commit to it, and here it was [the idea of] voting audience meets politics as motif, you know?
We already had been doing some work with this programmer, Joe Salvatore, so one of my first calls was to him [about] how difficult it would be to make an app that everyone could use to vote? And his response was, ‘Not hard at all.’ And then of course, my subsequent question was, ‘Could we make a magic wall like CNN,’ right? And that was a little more complicated.
But I’m so lucky at this point that “Game Changer” has attracted this murderer’s row of programmers and web game designers and board game designers and escape room designers and all these people. I think everybody is used to getting like 11:00 P.M. emails from me at this point being, like, ‘Hey, could you give me some thoughts on this in the next 72 hours?’ The whole show, every season of the show, I am getting a crash course on game design.
So that’s part of it. It went really seamlessly, and the app worked. The demographics component of that was probably the most complicated — the moment people took their seats, they basically entered in all of that, mostly joke, demographic information, so that we could sort them. Our ability to do that was — I couldn’t believe that it worked. I mean, there are some pieces of this process that are still magic to me.
That’s fantastic. And just being able to execute the idea of Brian David Gilbert as Steve Kornacki, too, it’s a delight.
It’s good casting, right? I think that the real, incredible comedy moment in this episode is when everyone votes for Brennan in every category.
‘Game Changer’ Screenshot/Dropout
There’s also just something about the camera angle — you see Demi’s face being absolutely shocked.
Everybody was mortified, including Brennan himself.
It was great. Can I ask a bit about the editing of this? Are there different challenges from an in-studio episode of “Game Changer?”
Actually something I should say that’s more in response to your last question than this one is that the app did break down on us during the final vote — we covered this in the BTS where what actually happened is I made all the players turn around and then I counted hands. Of course, you can’t tell that’s what happened at all.
We’re always cutting a huge amount of dead air on “Game Changer” — jokes that don’t quite land as well. This one was harder only because more felt more successful, which is to say that when you’re dealing with a live audience, your performers are that much more on. They know every line is going to land or has the potential to land. There were just a litany of great jokes in this episode and that’s why it skews a little bit longer. There’s more on the cutting room floor with this episode, just by virtue of us not wanting to make an episode that was like an hour or two hours long.
Particularly with “Game Changer” and “Make Some Noise,” I’m given so much material, just such sheer quantity of material, that by the time I boil it down to an hour or less, I have something that feels jam-packed with jokes. We’re in post on “Make Some Noise” right now, and I’m cutting three prompts from Round 1, three prompts from Round 2, and two prompts from Round 3. That first cut is just less funny, then by the time I make those substantial cuts and I’m looking at an episode that’s about 40 minutes long, it just feels so tight — and more magical, because it’s like, ‘How did people manage to be this funny off the cuff?’
The answer is not quite that funny — certainly that funny at its peaks, but we cut the valleys. But because this was in front of a live audience, it required more patience from a live audience than you would expect. We were there for over two hours, and that audience kept its energy up for us, which is a huge, huge credit to them.
Especially with, I’d imagine, describing the campaign commercials. That’s funny on stage as well, but we get to see the final product of Vic’s TikTok spoof and all of that.
That VFX job was done, first, by TJ Gonzalez and our in-house team who’re incredibly talented. Then also Eric Wolf Kirchner, who’s Katie Marovich’s husband, who’s in the visual effects business. We often bring Wolf in when something needs to be very well done and has humor to it because he is great at balancing those things. But yeah, this footage exists of our players treating everyone on stage like action figures, moving them in front the green screen and telling them to do X, Y, Z. Of course, that’s hidden from the audience. All you see is the final result, but that’s also very funny footage.
‘Game Changer’Screenshot/Dropout
Coming out the other side of this episode, is there anything you would do differently or be excited to try, now having “Outvoted” under your belt? Particularly with audience participation?
You know, I go to Edinburgh Fringe every year and I’m very inspired by the way that Fringe creators use audience participation in different ways. There’s a gimmick that I’ve seen show up more and more, which I think is so funny, where a performer will take the microphone and put it into the audience, up to the mouth of someone in the crowd, but the microphone won’t be on, and instead they’ll play a voiceover. So it’s as if the audience member said that thing, usually something embarrassing or like they’re volunteering for something they didn’t or whatever it is. But I think I was deeply inspired by that when I thought of putting words in our audience’s mouths.
I think live audiences are super powerful, and we’re still figuring out, as “Game Changer” and as Dropout, how to weaponize them effectively. I probably wouldn’t do a “Game Changer” Live because I worry about consent-related issues that have to do with, you know, on my stage, so long as there is an edit, my players can actively tell me if they’re uncomfortable with something or tell me after the fact they prefer something cut out.
The moment we wrapped “Outvoted,” I thought it would be very funny to do a live version of this as a Game Samer, with players knowing what they’re getting into, right? Being able to watch this version and see what the deal is, [then play] with a bigger voting public, or like with an online voting public that they have to pander to. I think that would be hugely fun to experiment with at some point.
I guess that will require nailing down how long Vic and Aabria’s term in office is.
In my head, it’s a year, but I guess we have the ability to truncate that just by holding another election.
Yeah, don’t use the American system. Dropout should be able to call for snap elections.
Although I have it on good authority that Vic has already made their own letterhead, as President of Dropout, so I don’t know how to feel about that.
“Game Changer” is streaming on Dropout.
