Review: CROWD CONTROL on Dropout Needs Some Workshopping Before Season 2

During the last season of Game Changer, they introduced a new game that would get spun off into the new series Crowd Control. This last week (as of writing) was the season finale for Crowd Control season one and I wanted to share my thoughts on the new Dropout Series.

Season one of Crowd Control has six episodes and each episode features 3 different stand up comedians with our host Jacquis Neal. There are four rounds per episode and each comic participates in each round.

Round one is a general crowd work round where the comics get to know the audience a little and use that to create jokes.

Then, in round two, some members of the audience reveal their black shirts that reveal some kind of secret about them that serves as a prompt for the comedians to go off of and hopefully build some hilarious jokes.

Round three has the rest of the audience reveal their red shirts with more extreme secrets/stories to be told that serve as a “danger zone.” Finally, round four is some kind of mini-game before a winner is crowned. That’s the entire premise.

On paper and after watching the Game Changer episode (featuring Jeff Arcuri, Josh Johnson, and Gianmarco Soresi), Crowd Control is an easy win. Unfortunately, the show is really hit or miss. There are some fantastic moments throughout the season, but it is plagued with problems. I want to highlight the problems and then end with the things that I think worked well for Crowd Control.

The number one enemy of Crowd Control is the editing team. This was a problem throughout, but the finale really exemplified the problems with the editing. First, there were multiple times when there was a callback made by the comedian to something that had been edited out.

In this last episode, Leslie Liao implied there was some conversation describing Dungeons & Dragons but this was the first time that we, the home audience, had heard those words in the episode. Likewise, Ify Nwadiwe talks about Magic: The Gathering seemingly out of nowhere with one of the audience members.

Throughout the show there are also really fast cuts, comics are given very disproportionate amounts of time with some given what seems like twice as much time as their competitors, and it just feels bad to watch at times.

Now we get to the second great enemy of Crowd Control: the audience. There are a few things to address here. First, Paul F. Thompkins and Guy Branum both did a phenomenal job during their sets because they started calling people out on the fact that their stories were inaccurate.

Now, a good part of the blame here goes to the production staff who did a bad job with the shirts. For instance, Thompkins goes to talk to a supposed “Cult Reject” and learns that the person had just quit the cult they were in.

Those are two wildly different stories. Second, the audience members often were bad at their jobs of being able to briefly give their story to set up the comic. Some audience members were great. Others were bad at articulating their story.

The worst offenders though are the small group of audience members that decided it was their time to be stars and be comedians. No, that’s the job of the comedians. Finally, I felt like too many times, the audience member shirts were just about their sex life or sexuality and it wasn’t actually all that interesting (so many poly/bi/threesome/etc. shirts) and made everyone just feel very samey which meant the jokes felt shallower and less creative.

Let’s talk about some other weak points of Crowd Control now. Every time we got to round three, Neal felt a need to always make a Kenny Loggins joke. This was fine the first one, maybe two, times, but it occurred every episode and never got better. I think it’s time to retire that gag.

In addition, I think they should retire the final mini game. Most of the mini games just weren’t that good and felt more like they stole time from the comics during the first few rounds. It doesn’t help that it sometimes (most notably in the finale) wasn’t good for continuity. Just give us the first three rounds and let the comics really shine with their crowd work.

All that said, when Crowd Control worked, it was great! My personal favorite episode was “Octopus Fight Club” with Branum, Cristela Alonzo, and Atsuko Okatsuka. I thought they did a great job and I especially loved how Branum interacted with the audience.

If audience members were getting too out of line, he would call them out and then later he would highlight good audience members and turn that into jokes as he explained to the poor audience members what made the new audience member a good one. This was a step up from Thompkins who would just call people out (possibly my second favorite episode).

I found that the more that comedians talked to a wider variety of audience members, the funnier the set would be. After watching the finale and being disappointed, my wife and I watched just the clips of Thompkins’ set from his episode and he was constantly going through audience members and then sometimes briefly returning to previous audience members for callbacks and similar jokes. It was so fun to go back to.

I loved the Game Changer episode “Crowd Control.” It was done so well by everyone. The editing was great, the comedians were top notch, and I didn’t have any complaints. I want Crowd Control to be better for its second season and hope that there are changes made to at least address the poor editing in some episodes and really let the comedians shine. It’s a good concept and can be such a great winner for Dropout, it just needs some extra polish.

As a final note, I just would like to do my fan picks for comedians I’d like to see on Crowd Control: Lucy Darling, Taylor Tomlinson, and Randy Feltface (I don’t know how this one would work but I want it so bad).