![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/5282e0bdc4b983856880b2a518aefc7a7c-gamechanger.rsquare.w400.jpg\")
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Game Changer<\/a><\/p>\n Night Shift<\/p>\n \n Season 8<\/p>\n Episode 3\n <\/p>\n \n Editor\u2019s Rating<\/p>\n 3 stars<\/p>\n ***\n <\/p>\n \n Photo: Kate Elliott\n <\/p>\n I occasionally wish Dropout shows weren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Game Changer rarely has that problem. The games have clear progressions, cleverly edited for punchiness. But \u201cNight Shift\u201d is a rare case where it\u2019s clear we\u2019re seeing a heavily redacted highlights reel. This episode is hilarious, but it\u2019s been so ruthlessly hacked down to giggle moments and ironic smash-cuts that important action and context are missing.<\/p>\n The contestants: Rekha Shankar and Katie Marovitch, Siobhan Thompson and Grant O\u2019Brien, Lily Du and Raphael Chestang.<\/p>\n The game: Workers in a stylized \u201cfactory\u201d compete to complete ridiculous tasks, in alternating three-minute shifts. The \u201cday shift\u201d (Rekha, Siobhan, and Lily) is given specific tasks, but their \u201cnight shift\u201d replacements (Katie, Grant, and Raph) have to intuit what the job is based on whatever the day shift left behind at their workstations.<\/p>\n The inspiration: I\u2019m not familiar with any game with these mechanics, but the factory setting and nonsensical tasks feel like a throwback to \u201cThe Everything Factory\u201d (Game Changer season 2, episode 5), with the night shift added as an extra burden.<\/p>\n \u201cNight Shift\u201d is an overcrowded, eventful episode. Let\u2019s break it down by the jobs, which are numbered according to descending tear-off sheets on the contestants\u2019 work stations.<\/p>\n Task 10: Given a laundry hamper full of socks in mismatched balls, reball them into matched pairs.<\/p>\n 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: \u201cIs this good content? Are you having fun? Are we not entertaining?\u201d Lily: \u201cThis is just an excuse to make women do housework. He doesn\u2019t think we\u2019re domesticated enough.\u201d<\/p>\n When they\u2019re told to clock out after three minutes, they catch on quickly: \u201cThere\u2019s an assembly line of lunatics coming,\u201d Rekha theorizes. \u201cGoddamn it. If I\u2019ve gotten Grant, I\u2019ll be really fucking pissed off,\u201d Siobhan says, inadvertently setting up a late-episode punchline.<\/p>\n The night shift is more frantic. Katie, Grant (who is paired with Siobhan), and Raph are brought in and just told, \u201cYou have three minutes,\u201d 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\u2019s \u201cMorning Mood\u201d), 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 \u201cPaul Foremanlino\u201d to inspect Rekha\u2019s work and give his approval for her to move on to the next job.<\/p>\n Task 9: Reball the same socks into mismatched triplets.<\/p>\n The moment Rekha moves to task 9, the tone shifts into rabid competition mode. Siobhan and Lily scream about the night shift\u2019s 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\u2019s comp and trying to spark revolt. Siobhan mostly rolls with Lily\u2019s choices, while realizing the night shift isn\u2019t getting instructions, and trying to solve the problem.<\/p>\n Task 8: Remove all the rubber bands wrapped around a watermelon.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 clocks. None of the early items are useful or relevant, so when Grant and Katie keep grabbing things anyway, they\u2019re docking their day-shift partners\u2019 work time for no reason. \u201cI think you guys fucked your cohorts,\u201d Raph says, and he\u2019s correct. \u201cCan we fuck up their fucking lives?\u201d Siobhan asks when she understands what\u2019s happened.<\/p>\n After that, the day shift starts agitating for a pizza party. Rekha says it would be good for factory morale: \u201cCan I say, Sam? Numbers might be up, but frowns are also up. And not into smiles.\u201d<\/p>\n Task 7: Blow up 25 balloons.<\/p>\n The set dressing on the balloon task temporarily derails the episode. As each contestant reaches this party-themed task, a pi\u00f1ata appears above their workstation. Almost all the contestants assume they need to smash the pi\u00f1ata, even when Sam repeatedly tries to dissuade them.<\/p>\n Sam: \u201cI should mention again that these pi\u00f1atas are merely decorative.\u201d<\/p>\n Rekha: [furiously whacks pi\u00f1ata over and over]<\/p>\n Sam: \u201cRekha, you were my star!\u201d<\/p>\n Rekha: \u201cI do not feel appreciated!\u201d<\/p>\n Lily: \u201cMaybe if she got that pizza party?\u201d<\/p>\n Rekha and Lily: [continue viciously beating the pi\u00f1atas]<\/p>\n Sam: \u201cAnd that\u2019s from players who knew the task!\u201d<\/p>\n Lily: [menaces Sam with a pi\u00f1ata stick]<\/p>\n Rekha: \u201cWait\u2026 he\u2019s the pi\u00f1ata!\u201d<\/p>\n All three day-shift workers go after Sam with pi\u00f1ata sticks, leading to an extremely abrupt cut to the night shift \u2014 and to Katie and Raph both wildly assaulting their pi\u00f1atas, as the frantic bit of Grieg\u2019s \u201cIn the Hall of the Mountain King\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Task 6: Sort a mixed pile of Oreos by mint and wasabi flavor<\/p>\n Here\u2019s where this episode\u2019s editing starts breaking down. Sure, it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s shark pi\u00f1ata has mysteriously disappeared. (Someone finally won the pi\u00f1ata battle, and we don\u2019t get to see it?) It feels like a lot happened offscreen.<\/p>\n The Oreo challenge is one of the episode\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Seeing the huge resulting mess the next morning, Lily incorrectly assumes the night shift is also collaborating. \u201cThey clearly are working as a team,\u201d she says. \u201cI don\u2019t think one person could have done this on their own.\u201d (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.<\/p>\n For the first time, though, they manage to leave a message for the night shift: \u201cWasabi vs. mint, not color,\u201d scrawled on a workstation in smeary red Oreo stuff. Reading it, Grant is baffled. \u201cWait, do they taste\u2014\u201d he starts, taking a big ol\u2019 bite of wasabi Oreo and immediately, loudly regretting it. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to make us taste all of these,\u201d Raph tells Sam. Sam \u2014 uncharacteristically backgrounded this entire episode \u2014 just gives the camera a slightly-raised-eyebrow look, perfect for all your future Game Changer meming needs.<\/p>\n Raph and Grant keep tasting wasabi Oreos, with Raph shrieking and Grant grimacing. When Grant tells Paul he\u2019s done sorting, Katie mocks Paul, thinking he has to re-lick all the cookies. The look of sheer repressed, stymied rage\/laughter on Raph\u2019s face when Paul sniffs the Oreos instead is one of the episode\u2019s biggest laughs. (And also has meme potential.)<\/p>\n Task 5: Accumulate Polaroids of people spelling out \u201cYMCA\u201d with their bodies. Each contestant can only take one photo per shift.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n On the night shift, Chris gets new store items, meant to aid inter-shift communication: stickers, children\u2019s wooden letter blocks, and magnetic poetry sets. Grant initially dismisses all these new items as \u201cgarbage,\u201d so when Chris sarcastically points out what they\u2019re all for, Grant\u2019s facial expression rivals his biting-a-wasabi-Oreo face.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cYMCA\u201d on her workspace in yellow streamers ripped from her pi\u00f1ata. Grant complains he got a \u201cpretty bad message\u201d that we don\u2019t 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\u2019m looking forward to whether the \u201ccut for time\u201d footage in this episode\u2019s behind-the-scenes featurette addresses that or the disappearing pi\u00f1ata.<\/p>\n The night shift gets another new wrinkle: Demi Adejuyigbe as \u201cMysterious Man,\u201d 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 \u201cOnly yes or no?\u201d, which gets him a cheery \u201cYes!\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Task 4: Make a mixtape, with the day shift curating side A and the night shift curating side B.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s themes based on their song titles. Rekha\/Katie needs songs that \u201cspecify a time.\u201d Siobhan\/Grant\u2019s song titles can only use single-syllable words, and Lily\/Raph\u2019s song titles have to be commands. Siobhan, regrettably, puts the poem-notation symbol \u02d8 above the words in her song titles, which just baffles Grant and makes him waste another Demi question: \u201cDo you know why these accent marks are here?\u201d Chris manages to get in a choked \u201cOh no\u201d before Demi gleefully, uselessly answers \u201cYes!\u201d and Grant goes away frustrated yet again.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Task 3: Don\u2019t acknowledge Ron Perlman.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cno get across name knowledge\u201d before they realize they can just write a message with the dry-erase marker from the song challenge.<\/p>\n Grant, meanwhile, discovers that Chris\u2019 night-shift store now has free hair clippers. Determined to get some useful intel out of Demi, Grant asks whether he\u2019ll 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, \u201cDoes this get me anything?\u201d<\/p>\n Task 2: Give a colleague a haircut of their choice.<\/p>\n The editing hits a nadir here. For the first time in the episode, it\u2019s obvious we\u2019re 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\u2019s impossible to tell.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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\u2019s trim first, winning the game for him and Siobhan.<\/p>\n Task 1: There is no task 1. That\u2019s not how the numbering system works.<\/p>\n Another odd \u201cNight Shift\u201d 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 \u201c2\u201d off Grant and Siobhan\u2019s workstation so they end on \u201c1,\u201d but we don\u2019t get a single clear shot, even though it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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\u2019 characters, \u201cNight Shift\u201d is rough and clumsy. But hey, the factory workers do finally get their pizza party during the credits!<\/p>\n The winners: Siobhan and Grant<\/p>\n The prize: Matching \u201cEmployee of the Show\u201d mugs<\/p>\n Prize rating: 2\/5. This isn\u2019t a particularly valuable prize, but at least it\u2019s something useful, tangible, specific, and funny.<\/p>\n \u2022 Lily, mad about having to ignore Ron Perlman, asks why the contestants didn\u2019t get \u201ca pig in a hat,\u201d referencing \u201cSam Says 3\u201d (season 6, episode 3) and another special guest the contestants had to ignore<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2022 Rekha\u2019s intro, \u201cPlaying a game on a topic of my choice,\u201d references the intro of Rekha\u2019s Dropout show Smartypants, where comedians present a lecture on a topic of their choice.<\/p>\n \u2022 Siobhan\u2019s intro, \u201cTrapped her twice, shame on me,\u201d references Siobhan\u2019s previous episodes of Game Changer: \u201cEscape Room,\u201d where she\u2019s trapped in the performers\u2019 green room, and \u201cDeja Vu,\u201d where she\u2019s trapped in a time loop.<\/p>\n \u2022 Lily\u2019s intro, \u201cStart the spin cycle,\u201d is a pun based on her Dropout show Dirty Laundry \u2014 like the show title itself, \u201cspin cycle\u201d suggests both a washing machine and scandal.<\/p>\n \u2022 Katie\u2019s intro, \u201cOtherwise known as Knight Katie,\u201d is a k\/night pun based on her \u201cKnight Katie\u201d character from \u201cSamalamadingdong\u201d and the fact that she\u2019s on the night shift.<\/p>\n \u2022 Grant\u2019s intro, \u201cTry Guy, no, bi guy, yes,\u201d is a deep cut referencing Grant\u2019s strong resemblance to Keith Habersberger<\/a> and his frequently referenced bisexuality<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2022 Raph\u2019s intro, \u201cBut his emails!\u201d references his 11,000 unread emails<\/a>, as revealed on Game Changer\u2019s \u201cThe Newlyweb Game.\u201d<\/p>\n Sign Up for the Vulture Newsletter<\/p>\n Entertainment news, for the pop-culture obsessed.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n