Becca Scott is one of the internet’s most well-known gamers, which is big part of the appeal of Parlor Room. The Dropout series brings Scott and a rotating roster of comedians to a remarkably comfy-looking game room. Each episode focuses on a different game, each one getting a quick introduction and entertaining showcase.
That’s the real magic of Parlor Room, which is at its best when the performers are just yelling, scheming, and laughing amid their game. During an interview with TVBrittanyF, Becca Scott sat down to discuss what makes a game perfect for Parlor Room, the process behind choosing which performers appeared in which episode, and what makes for the best party game.
How did you approach the balance of being instructive but also entertaining with these game showcases?
Becca Scott: I think that Dropout just has a magical ability to find the best people. It’s the best comedians, the best editors — Brad Conlan, who edited [Parlor Room], it could have gone so many different ways. There is a slower version on tape somewhere. But the way that the edit came together, where the rules take a back seat and you learn through osmosis as the players are playing, it let us really focus on the fun and the friendship at the table. I’m just so excited to sit at the table with all these incredible comedians and watch them make magic right before my eyes.
How did you figure out the roster for each episode?
It was easy to choose the people that we wanted to be the main guests for an episode. That list was longer than we were able to accommodate in season one, hopefully, we get more seasons, fingers crossed. We have a strong community here, and we just went out to them. We asked, “Who are your favorite people to perform with?” Every single person said Rekha Shankar [Laughter]. I had to tell them that you can’t all have Rekha.
The chemistry at all of these tables was incredible, because all these people are friends off-screen. You can see the joy when we’re all sitting around a table together. It was really fun to piece together who would be right at each table and for which game, making sure we’ve got strong writers for Balderdash and that we’ve got absolute loons for Blood on the Clocktower. It was just a joy to put it together. The list of casts that we would love to have on that we didn’t get put on a table this season is long.
How did you choose the games — and were there any that you couldn’t feature that broke your heart?
There are so many games I deeply love that are terrible for on-camera play [Laughing]. Party games work best for showing off these comedians’ natural skills, so we have a lot of party games in there. But I also wanted to test the waters and see if more obscure, crunchier games could work with this audience and this vibe. I think Cosmic Encounter is definitely the heaviest game we did this season, aside from Blood on the Clocktower.
I think that episode is actually really fantastic… thank God for the magic of editing, because it’s hard to not try to be strategic and to remember that you are performing when you’re really in a game. That’s the plus side of party games, because you just get the absolute nonsense, but kind of the potential pitfall of a heavier game. I kind of want to see what we can do. Twilight Imperium 4th Edition is one of my favorite games. But I have had playthroughs that ranged between 11 and 13 hours. My dream is to someday bring some Twilight Imperium to the masses.
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In your mind, what’s the perfect party game?
The classics are classics for a reason. I think game-wise, one of my favorites in the season is Balderdash, because we chose incredible writers. Eugene Cordero, Anna Garcia, I mean, that was Jiavani’s episode, Corin Wells, and Grant O’Brien, and they’re all some of the weirdest people on Earth. They were trying to decide these crazy definitions of a word or plots to a movie, and with these fantastic and bizarre writers, they came up with some really weird stuff. I may have busted gut on that one. The things where people are using words and generating a creative idea work better than a dice game for the show. I don’t know if [those games] quite bring out the things that are fun for an audience to watch. When the stupidness comes through the game itself, that seemed to work really well [Laughter].
What was the biggest surprise of this process?
I think all of these episodes are phenomenal. I am extremely self-critical, but they are all phenomenal. We would wrap an episode, and I would rush to make my costume changes — because I decided my own mini game was wearing the weirdest stuff having the makeup team give me the biggest lashes — and I was thinking that episode was so fun and so funny, and I had no idea how the next one was gonna top it. But then it was always a unique little butterfly… Brennan knows how to put a bow on the end of anything, to tie something up in a way that makes it seem like the whole universe rides on the outcome of this tiny thing. I felt that each episode had that kind of moment. Each one was a new discovery.
Parlor Room is now streaming on Dropout
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