Night Shift
Season 8
Episode 3
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
Photo: Kate Elliott
I occasionally wish Dropout shows weren’t edited so aggressively for punchline power. I particularly have this issue with the Game Changer spinoff Crowd Control, which asks comedians to interact with people who have fascinating or provocative life stories. That show is so unforgivingly edited down to jarring, staccato setup-punchline interactions that the interactions never feel conversational or informative. The supposedly fascinating audience members frequently get cut off mid-sentence, and it feels like the comedians are barely engaging with their stories and are only listening long enough to mock them.
Game Changer rarely has that problem. The games have clear progressions, cleverly edited for punchiness. But “Night Shift” is a rare case where it’s clear we’re seeing a heavily redacted highlights reel. This episode is hilarious, but it’s been so ruthlessly hacked down to giggle moments and ironic smash-cuts that important action and context are missing.
The contestants: Rekha Shankar and Katie Marovitch, Siobhan Thompson and Grant O’Brien, Lily Du and Raphael Chestang.
The game: Workers in a stylized “factory” compete to complete ridiculous tasks, in alternating three-minute shifts. The “day shift” (Rekha, Siobhan, and Lily) is given specific tasks, but their “night shift” replacements (Katie, Grant, and Raph) have to intuit what the job is based on whatever the day shift left behind at their workstations.
The inspiration: I’m not familiar with any game with these mechanics, but the factory setting and nonsensical tasks feel like a throwback to “The Everything Factory” (Game Changer season 2, episode 5), with the night shift added as an extra burden.
“Night Shift” is an overcrowded, eventful episode. Let’s break it down by the jobs, which are numbered according to descending tear-off sheets on the contestants’ work stations.
Task 10: Given a laundry hamper full of socks in mismatched balls, reball them into matched pairs.
The first task starts sedately, with Rekha Shankar, Siobhan, and Lily trying to find the Dropout-style antic comedy in a mundane laundry-day chore. Siobhan: “Is this good content? Are you having fun? Are we not entertaining?” Lily: “This is just an excuse to make women do housework. He doesn’t think we’re domesticated enough.”
When they’re told to clock out after three minutes, they catch on quickly: “There’s an assembly line of lunatics coming,” Rekha theorizes. “Goddamn it. If I’ve gotten Grant, I’ll be really fucking pissed off,” Siobhan says, inadvertently setting up a late-episode punchline.
The night shift is more frantic. Katie, Grant (who is paired with Siobhan), and Raph are brought in and just told, “You have three minutes,” so they each rush into a different task. When the day shift returns (to rooster noises, a sunrise animation, and the classic cue of Edvard Grieg’s “Morning Mood”), Rekha almost immediately finishes her sock-matching, thanks to Katie correctly intuiting the task and helping out. Producer Paul Robalino, in a hard hat and safety vest, shows up as “Paul Foremanlino” to inspect Rekha’s work and give his approval for her to move on to the next job.
Task 9: Reball the same socks into mismatched triplets.
The moment Rekha moves to task 9, the tone shifts into rabid competition mode. Siobhan and Lily scream about the night shift’s interference. The day shift also starts making factory-work jokes, with Rekha playing a perky do-bee who just wants to make the boss happy, and Lily adopting an agitator role, demanding workman’s comp and trying to spark revolt. Siobhan mostly rolls with Lily’s choices, while realizing the night shift isn’t getting instructions, and trying to solve the problem.
Task 8: Remove all the rubber bands wrapped around a watermelon.
As task 8 kicks off, Chris Grace opens a shop that only operates during the night shift, selling oddball tchotchkes (a bobblehead of Sam Reich, a newspaper, a cactus, etc.), which costs time off the day-shift workers’ clocks. None of the early items are useful or relevant, so when Grant and Katie keep grabbing things anyway, they’re docking their day-shift partners’ work time for no reason. “I think you guys fucked your cohorts,” Raph says, and he’s correct. “Can we fuck up their fucking lives?” Siobhan asks when she understands what’s happened.
After that, the day shift starts agitating for a pizza party. Rekha says it would be good for factory morale: “Can I say, Sam? Numbers might be up, but frowns are also up. And not into smiles.”
Task 7: Blow up 25 balloons.
The set dressing on the balloon task temporarily derails the episode. As each contestant reaches this party-themed task, a piñata appears above their workstation. Almost all the contestants assume they need to smash the piñata, even when Sam repeatedly tries to dissuade them.
Sam: “I should mention again that these piñatas are merely decorative.”
Rekha: [furiously whacks piñata over and over]
Sam: “Rekha, you were my star!”
Rekha: “I do not feel appreciated!”
Lily: “Maybe if she got that pizza party?”
Rekha and Lily: [continue viciously beating the piñatas]
Sam: “And that’s from players who knew the task!”
Lily: [menaces Sam with a piñata stick]
Rekha: “Wait… he’s the piñata!”
All three day-shift workers go after Sam with piñata sticks, leading to an extremely abrupt cut to the night shift — and to Katie and Raph both wildly assaulting their piñatas, as the frantic bit of Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” plays. Grant asks Chris about the boxing gloves now for sale in the night store, but Katie forestalls him by running over and grabbing them, nearly flattening Chris. When Chris notes that he still has a dog-cone collar available, she grabs that too.
Task 6: Sort a mixed pile of Oreos by mint and wasabi flavor
Here’s where this episode’s editing starts breaking down. Sure, it’s funny when we get a smash cut between night-shift Katie, expectantly holding up the gloves and collar, and her day-shift partner Rekha, wearing both items while awkwardly trying to blow up balloons. But somewhere between shots, the day shift’s energy completely changes. Rekha seems chastened and silent. There are no wacky factory characters. There are completed balloons everywhere, and the day-shift members are collaborating instead of competing. Siobhan’s shark piñata has mysteriously disappeared. (Someone finally won the piñata battle, and we don’t get to see it?) It feels like a lot happened offscreen.
The Oreo challenge is one of the episode’s comedic high points. Siobhan and Rekha collaborate to sort Oreos, but Grant spends this entire episode unwisely rushing into things and paying for it, mostly in humiliation. Here, he undoes all their work, sorting the Oreos by their red and green Oreo stuffing color. When that fails, he starts wrenching open Oreos to pair red-stuf and green-stuf cookie halves.
Seeing the huge resulting mess the next morning, Lily incorrectly assumes the night shift is also collaborating. “They clearly are working as a team,” she says. “I don’t think one person could have done this on their own.” (The crew absolutely loses it.) The day shift takes out their frustrations on Paul Foremanlino, inventing a wife and kids he should be trying to get home to, then propositioning him, then accusing him of workplace sexual misconduct, from unwanted touching to lecherous texts.
For the first time, though, they manage to leave a message for the night shift: “Wasabi vs. mint, not color,” scrawled on a workstation in smeary red Oreo stuff. Reading it, Grant is baffled. “Wait, do they taste—” he starts, taking a big ol’ bite of wasabi Oreo and immediately, loudly regretting it. “You’re not going to make us taste all of these,” Raph tells Sam. Sam — uncharacteristically backgrounded this entire episode — just gives the camera a slightly-raised-eyebrow look, perfect for all your future Game Changer meming needs.
Raph and Grant keep tasting wasabi Oreos, with Raph shrieking and Grant grimacing. When Grant tells Paul he’s done sorting, Katie mocks Paul, thinking he has to re-lick all the cookies. The look of sheer repressed, stymied rage/laughter on Raph’s face when Paul sniffs the Oreos instead is one of the episode’s biggest laughs. (And also has meme potential.)
Task 5: Accumulate Polaroids of people spelling out “YMCA” with their bodies. Each contestant can only take one photo per shift.
This is the least eventful task, since taking a single photo only requires a few seconds. So the editing here gets much, much choppier. It’s unclear how much time or how many shifts pass as the day shift shoots badly framed photos and the night shift tries to interpret them.
On the night shift, Chris gets new store items, meant to aid inter-shift communication: stickers, children’s wooden letter blocks, and magnetic poetry sets. Grant initially dismisses all these new items as “garbage,” so when Chris sarcastically points out what they’re all for, Grant’s facial expression rivals his biting-a-wasabi-Oreo face.
Grant buys the magnetic poetry, but it just leads to oblique, confusing messages from the day shift. Lily instead leaves Raph another smeary Oreo-stuffed prompt, while Rekha spells out “YMCA” on her workspace in yellow streamers ripped from her piñata. Grant complains he got a “pretty bad message” that we don’t even see. Is the night shift doing anything at this point? It seems like they finally get the task once Siobhan asks a cameraman to instruct the night-shifters, which seems like cheating. Meanwhile, the day-shifters all abruptly acquire eye-black face paint for some unexplained reason. I’m looking forward to whether the “cut for time” footage in this episode’s behind-the-scenes featurette addresses that or the disappearing piñata.
The night shift gets another new wrinkle: Demi Adejuyigbe as “Mysterious Man,” a slouching, black-clad, possibly X-Files-evoking cigarette-smoking man whom the night shift can ask yes-or-no questions by docking their day-shift partners a minute of work time. Demi gets in some sharp one-liners and fun physical-comedy bits throughout the rest of the episode. But no one engages with him except Grant, who short-sightedly wastes all his questions, starting with “Only yes or no?”, which gets him a cheery “Yes!” and loses Siobhan a minute of work. The day shift finally starts taking group photos, knocking out their letters rapidly, and moving on to task 4 simultaneously.
Task 4: Make a mixtape, with the day shift curating side A and the night shift curating side B.
This task gets particularly rushed. The teams have to write out their mixtape lists on a dry-erase board styled like a cassette, with the night shift guessing the day shift’s themes based on their song titles. Rekha/Katie needs songs that “specify a time.” Siobhan/Grant’s song titles can only use single-syllable words, and Lily/Raph’s song titles have to be commands. Siobhan, regrettably, puts the poem-notation symbol ˘ above the words in her song titles, which just baffles Grant and makes him waste another Demi question: “Do you know why these accent marks are here?” Chris manages to get in a choked “Oh no” before Demi gleefully, uselessly answers “Yes!” and Grant goes away frustrated yet again.
Rehka and Katie tear ahead on this challenge, while Grant and Raph need a few shifts to get their rules straight. Meanwhile, the next task starts.
Task 3: Don’t acknowledge Ron Perlman.
Beloved actor Ron Perlman fully leans into trying to make the contestants fail this task by forcing eye contact, asking them polite questions, rebuking their bad manners in ignoring him, and even doggedly getting into their personal space. Rehka literally hides under a table to avoid him.
I have many regrets about the moments edited out of this episode, but the biggest is not seeing the point where Rekha and Siobhan give up on trying to explain the Ron Perlman task to the night shift via magnetic poetry. The best they can do is “no get across name knowledge” before they realize they can just write a message with the dry-erase marker from the song challenge.
Grant, meanwhile, discovers that Chris’ night-shift store now has free hair clippers. Determined to get some useful intel out of Demi, Grant asks whether he’ll get a point for cutting his own hair. (Points have not been mentioned at all during this episode, Grant!) Demi says no. Apparently, Grant is actually determined not to get useful intel out of Demi, because he still cuts off a tuft of his own hair and waves it around, frantically yelling, “Does this get me anything?”
Task 2: Give a colleague a haircut of their choice.
The editing hits a nadir here. For the first time in the episode, it’s obvious we’re jumping back and forth in time instead of following a linear progression. Three people, Charlotte, Miguel, and Claire, present themselves to the day shift for haircuts, though only Siobhan has clippers, courtesy of Grant. The night shift reads instructions that the day shift sprayed on the floor for them in hair product, before we see shots of the day shift leaving those messages. We may just be watching the show zig back and forth between the same two three-minute shifts; it’s impossible to tell.
We miss a lot here, including what haircut Miguel wants and what message Siobhan leaves for Grant. (Miguel is bald! If you listen to the overlapping dialogue really carefully, he says he wants a handlebar mustache, which he doesn’t actually get! Grant just trims his beard, which seems unfairly easy compared to Lily and Raph trying to give Claire a mullet!) This is extra-baffling when Grant finishes Miguel’s trim first, winning the game for him and Siobhan.
Task 1: There is no task 1. That’s not how the numbering system works.
Another odd “Night Shift” choice: The numbering system starts with 10, but there are only nine tasks. If you watch closely, you can see Paul Foremanlino in the background at the end of the episode, tearing the paper “2” off Grant and Siobhan’s workstation so they end on “1,” but we don’t get a single clear shot, even though it’s supposed to signify victory. We do get Siobhan telling her night-shift counterpart, Grant, that she believed in him all along, and to ignore anything he might see her saying when he watches this episode later.
It’s a funny episode, but between the rushed editing, the continuity leaps and confusing timeline, and the often-neglected hat-on-a-hat elements of Demi and Chris’ characters, “Night Shift” is rough and clumsy. But hey, the factory workers do finally get their pizza party during the credits!
The winners: Siobhan and Grant
The prize: Matching “Employee of the Show” mugs
Prize rating: 2/5. This isn’t a particularly valuable prize, but at least it’s something useful, tangible, specific, and funny.
• Lily, mad about having to ignore Ron Perlman, asks why the contestants didn’t get “a pig in a hat,” referencing “Sam Says 3” (season 6, episode 3) and another special guest the contestants had to ignore.
• Rekha’s intro, “Playing a game on a topic of my choice,” references the intro of Rekha’s Dropout show Smartypants, where comedians present a lecture on a topic of their choice.
• Siobhan’s intro, “Trapped her twice, shame on me,” references Siobhan’s previous episodes of Game Changer: “Escape Room,” where she’s trapped in the performers’ green room, and “Deja Vu,” where she’s trapped in a time loop.
• Lily’s intro, “Start the spin cycle,” is a pun based on her Dropout show Dirty Laundry — like the show title itself, “spin cycle” suggests both a washing machine and scandal.
• Katie’s intro, “Otherwise known as Knight Katie,” is a k/night pun based on her “Knight Katie” character from “Samalamadingdong” and the fact that she’s on the night shift.
• Grant’s intro, “Try Guy, no, bi guy, yes,” is a deep cut referencing Grant’s strong resemblance to Keith Habersberger and his frequently referenced bisexuality.
• Raph’s intro, “But his emails!” references his 11,000 unread emails, as revealed on Game Changer’s “The Newlyweb Game.”
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