Every episode of Dropout TV’s Game Changer has a winner. Usually that’s determined by the number of points a contestant has accumulated or by completing one of host Sam Reich’s truly diabolical tasks. But this week’s episode had a clear winner who wasn’t supposed to be playing the game at all. She was cruelly surprised and thrust into the spotlight on the capricious whims of her employer, forced to perform for an audience I assume is at least in the hundreds of thousands with cameras in her face and alongside some of the funniest people on the internet, and she outshone them all while being firmly within a grip of terror so palpable that I felt it on my couch hundreds of miles away.
Give Game Changer production assistant and comedian Kaylin Mahoney all her things.
Every episode of Game Changer is a banger, improving in quality and growing in scale and ambition. This latest season, the show’s eighth, has been its best yet and the latest episode was no exception. The premise of the show is simple. Each week, three contestants show up to play a game they have never played before, forced to learn the rules on the fly from the gentle (if sometimes hilariously evil) direction of the host and his assistants.
This week, I was excited to see show regulars Brennan Lee Mulligan (of Dimension 20 fame), Josh Rueben (director of last year’s indie horror hit Heart Eyes) and comedian Zac Oyama. Whenever those three are together, it usually means we’re gonna get a show of ridiculous sound effects and extended monologues about the evils of capitalism. But this time, there was a twist. Instead of Reich handing down prompts for the trio (affectionately known in the Dropout community as the Noise Boys) to perform and awarding points for the best performance, Reich introduced successive groups of contestants, turning the episode into an extended game of telephone that went so many layers deep Christopher Nolan might wanna call his lawyers.
With that much going on, the show was already funny as hell. I have a rule in my house that my husband and I cannot watch Game Changer while eating because we laugh so hard we’re in danger of choking. But because Sam Reich is an evil, evil man, he added one extra final twist, bringing in production assistant Kaylin Mahoney. The fear in that woman’s eyes when Sam told her she would be the game’s fourth contestant set is a look that will haunt me because I know it very well. It’s the look an introvert makes when they’re suddenly, violently, forced to become an extrovert at a moment’s notice and with cameras in your face. How this woman didn’t immediately flee or explode on the spot will remain a mystery to me.
Usually when someone does well after being suddenly thrust into the spotlight without prior warning or preparation, it’s because they hide their fear and tap into some hidden well of strength. But what made Mahoney so great, so fucking inspiring, was that you could see her abject terror every step of the way. There’s a moment when she fully collapsed in a phone booth, burdened by the weight of her responsibility to accurately interpret then communicate a drawn picture to another contestant. Another time, she mugged the camera, eyes wide as dinner plates, knowing in her spirit her answer was wrong but what the hell was she gonna do about it anyway?
But nevertheless, she persisted, hilariously embodying a tenet of life I’ve always tried to follow, especially working in this games journalism business: “Do it scared.” And she did. There’s a moment in the show that, because of her incredible sportsmanship, made me and the folks in the show cheer.
Kaylin Mahoney is my anxiety hero. She ate and left no crumbs, but probably nervously puked it up later.