It’s not often that “Game Changer” host Sam Reich is the person on the show’s colorful set made to look anxious. But the latest episode of the Dropout series begins with not just a push-in but some vignetting on Reich as he stares down the barrel of the endless wheel of content creation, coming up with “Game Changer” ideas one after the other, “backing myself further and further into a corner where it’s harder and harder to be original.” It’s real Season 7 problems.
Enter players Mike Trapp, Rekha Shankar, and Jordan Myrick, whom Reich deputized to produce the latest episode of “Game Changer” — or really, to produce the things that keep “Game Changer” inside of a virtuous cycle for online comedy series. The show’s segments get broken out into social clips, and those that perform well drive viewers who discover “Game Changer,” “Make Some Noise,” or “Dimension 20,” back to Dropout and the sweet, sweet, $7/month subscription fee that powers the platform.
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This episode would address that cycle head-on, offering the players/producers the opportunity to ‘greenlight’ potential viral videos pitched by other Dropout cast members and compete with each other for which videos will perform the best on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and other social media platforms. The conceit means that this is the first “Game Changer” episode that will require an update, in about a month’s time, to see who actually has won the game.
Even for a show that delights in interrogating its own nature, it feels like an exciting escalation for “Game Changer” to tackle its own social media shadow so explicitly. Cast members pitching ideas grapple with who among the Dropout team tends to go viral doing what — Myrick’s deadpan “Any clip with Brennan [Lee Mulligan] will go viral, so it kind of doesn’t matter what you do,” is a highlight of the “Shark Tank” style commentary the players provide as they debate ideas.
But on the other hand, the Dropout team does put a lot of thought and care into crafting clips of “Game Changer” episodes so they play well on social platforms. IndieWire reached out to Andrew Bridgman, Chief Digital Officer at Dropout, to ask about the team’s approach to social videos and the challenges of “Fool’s Gold” specifically.
Some of the effort is just the work of reframing, “making decisions as to whether certain segments should be fullscreen vertical or letterboxed to show more of the original composition in a 9:16 frame,” Bridgman told IndieWire. Dropout also has a standardized style for captions, usually a manual process vs. automated CapCut-style captions, so they can better maintain accuracy (and occasionally slip in a joke about feudal shrieking).
For “Fool’s Gold” specifically, the team had the challenge of creating ideal versions of the videos to play within the episode itself and to exist out in the wilds of the Internet. That meant making more editorial judgments about cutting, especially with the in-studio segments that had some time lag to them, like Paul Robalino’s Operation Snake Skin or Erika Ishii’s offer of side-shave real estate.
“There will be some small differences between some of the videos as we see them in the episode and the versions that live on across our social accounts,” Bridgman said. “We sought some input from Grant [O’Brien], Izzy [Roland], Erika, and Lily [Du] in particular. There were some cases, like with Katie [Marovitch], Vic [Michaelis], Johnny [Stanton], and Anna [Garcia] (most of the outside the studio ones), where the finished product was so airtight there was no question of how it had to be presented.”
All of the videos, however, went through multiple rounds of revision with the “Game Changer” creative team, including Reich and Robalino, so that the timing on them is exactly right, the captions pop, and the pacing evokes the cheerful chaos of the show proper. Bridgman told IndieWire that adjustment is no hardship, however. “If the original content is good enough, marketing doesn’t have a lot of work to do to make it sing on social platforms,” Bridgman said.
The success is already evident — Tumblr is, of course, already shipping characters from Marovitch’s “Dimension 20: On A Bus” video and demanding a full season, although it may require additional funding to secure Matthew “Mark” Mercer’s appearance fee for that one. But Bridgman refuses to pick a favorite among the “Fool’s Gold” clips.
“All of our social videos are perfect angels, whom we subject to the cold, merciless judgment of The Algorithm to establish value and worthiness of love,” Bridgman said.
“Game Changer” is available to stream on Dropout.
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