“Do Your Best, Or Else”: Guy Branum on the Comedy and Competition of ‘Talk Show the Game Show’

If you enjoy stand-up comedy, or podcasts, or Twitter feeds that comment on everything from British politics to Oscar-winning actresses, there’s a good chance you’re already familiar with the work of Guy Branum. He’s been a writer on shows like Chelsea Lately, Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, and The Mindy Project, hosts the Pop Rocket podcast on the Maximum Fun network, and got to see Ashton Kutcher all kinds of naked in No Strings Attached.

And for the past several years, Branum has been hosting a live comedy event in Los Angeles called “Talk Show the Game Show,” which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Guy plays the host, he has various comedians and celebrities as guests, and they compete to see who can do better at the job of being a talk-show guest. That means points for name-dropping, mentioning your current project, bringing the host a gift, drinking alcohol, et cetera. As you might imagine, somebody thought this would transfer beautifully to television, and as of this week, it is. Talk Show the Game Show premieres on True TV tonight at 10pm, hosted by Guy himself and co-produced by Wanda Sykes.

The rules are simple: three guests, each one on a time limit to score as many points as possible. Afterwards, they’re judged on style by comedian Karen Kilgariff and strategy by lead judge Casey Schriener, whose exacting standards and willingness to dole out penalties gives the show a real combative edge at times, especially if you’re used to the decided nice-ness of games played on, say, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

We got a chance to chat with Guy recently about the origins of the show, talk show guests of yore, and why Diablo Cody is more competitive in a party dress.

Decider.com: Talk a little bit about how the live show came about, and how that evolved into the TV show. 

Guy Branum: Well, seventeen years ago, I was in a sixteen-passenger van driving to a Quiz Bowl tournament in the Midwest. I was talking about TV with my best friend at the time, and we were talking about talk shows, about how there was a right and wrong way to do them; the idea that some people are good at it, some people are bad at it. And I came down with a hard stance that there should be a game show, the purpose of which was to find out if you were good at talk shows. This was just an inside joke between me and my friend for the better part of a decade. After I left Chelsea Lately, I was in a sort of career slump. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing, and I missed that process of [working on] a talk show everyday. I got drunk and started typing up rules, basically set up like bylaws for an organization, for how it would work. I had a good time and was amused with myself. I didn’t really think “Oh, I could do this.” Then I realized I could just ask The Improv. I’m at least famous enough now that I could ask The Improv if they would give me a night there. They said sure. They let me put it on at The Improv Lab, which is sort of like the experimental theater next to the main Hollywood Improv. I did it there for a couple of years, and then I did it in New York while I was working on Totally Biased. I came back, and I did it at the The Nerdist Theater here for the past two and a half years. It just became a fun thing where every month I would produce a talk show tip-to-tail. I would write the monologue, I would produce the guests, I would get the prizes, I would pre-interview the guests. It was fun, and it scratched that itch that I was missing from having a talk-show job.

At what point did Wanda Sykes jump in on the deal?
It was actually, I think, a couple of years ago that I ended up inviting her producing partner, Page Hurwitz, to come be a judge. Page was super funny, super great, and at the end the show she was like, “We have to make this.” She went back and she told Wanda about it. A couple of months later, Wanda came, and she was a judge for one of the shows. The whole problem with the show was always that if you explained it to people, a lot of people wouldn’t understand, but if they saw the show in action, they got it. Wanda came and watched and judged and was like, “Absolutely. We have to make this.” Throughout the entire production process, Wanda was so involved. From like pitching games for the pilot presentation that we did. I’ve been on a lot of shows with celebrity executive producers and I was really impressed with the amount of time and attention she gave this.

I’m curious to know what talk shows you watched growing up. Or, I guess, watched versus liked. The Tonight Show was the one everybody watched, but I feel like everybody has had a niche show that they really liked. 

The thing is, The Tonight Show as an industry standard was amazing. As a very small boy, I remember watching Joan Rivers guest-host The Tonight Show, and I was like, “Oh, she’s the most amazing person on the planet.” But I feel like as I grew up, like … Letterman. So much of the spirit of [Talk Show the Game Show] is Letterman. We’re paying homage to the classic talk show appearances of Johnny Carson, but we’re doing it with kind of the smirk and real-time criticism of Letterman. It was Johnny’s job to make you feel like it was a flawless, high-class affair at all times, but Letterman would let you know when things were going wrong, when you were having a good time and gave you some of that energy. I feel like that was really at the heart of this show. He did it in kind of a frat boy way, and we’re doing it more in a 7th grade girl kind of way.

I think beyond just being very fun to watch, it’s interesting to focus on a talk show from the perspective of the guests, as you said before. We always think of these shows so much in terms of the hosts and which host is better or worse. This show says these guests have a job to do, and let’s see how good they are at it. I assume that’s a lot of what’s at the heart of the show. 

I think what’s really fun about the show is that we are trying to set everybody up to look good. We’re trying to do everything possible to make everyone be amazing, but what they do with that varies so much, and that’s super fun. Every time anyone does go on a talk show they are a little bit competing. They are trying to make you fall in love with them and go see their movie or buy their album or watch their TV show. Making that explicit, putting it out there that this is charm, that it is aggressive charm, I think is really fun.

Who do you think does it really well? Either now or ten, twenty years ago.

It’s very funny. We had an aspect of the show that ended up getting cut out, but on every show I would say, “We’re trying to figure out who does it best.” It was probably Teri Garr in the ’80s. It was probably Isabella Rossellini in the ’90s. Classic Teri Garr — Teri Garr that Letterman wanted on the show every week and a half: deeply amazing work. You look at people like Robin Williams or Jonathan Winters coming on and just giving you non-stop comedy offensive were amazing. Or somebody like Bette Miller or Emma Thompson, who come on and are charming and classy but are throwing this broader material at you. To me, that fact that Bette Midler won an Emmy award for just being on The Tonight Show is emblematic of what this canon should be.

I had occasion to watch that last Tonight Show episode for a thing that I was writing a few months ago. It was [Midler] and Robin Williams, and I was in awe of how incredibly hard working they were, and all they put into making that hour phenomenal. It was really something to watch. 

They had a huge responsibility, because it was their job to pay homage to what that show had been at it’s best. The thing is, a lot of people show up to a talk show and think that their job is to provide answers to questions that are asked of them and kind of mention their movie, then show them their clip. Then there are people who show up so honed and prepared and on but also in the moment and having a good and engaging with the host, engaging with the other people on the panel. Those people are stars. People who think of this stuff as an obligation or are annoyed with it, don’t waste my time. It really seems to me like playing sports for fun or playing a party game. It’s the people who show excited to have a good time who do it well and give you good entertainment. Look, there’s a lot of highly produced scripted entertainment out there, but it’s nice to have some stuff that still has a little spark of life in it.

Did you happen to watch Hollywood Game Night at all? 

I did watch it.

What did you think of that? 

I think it’s charming and it’s moving in a direction that’s good. I have far more criticisms for when Fallon plays party games with celebrities, because it is so produced so that nobody looks dumb. And if there’s no risk that anybody looks dumb, you’re not playing a game. I watched one of them, and everyone does false guess, false guess, correct guess. The rhythm of that just made me angry. It is hard. We don’t want people to show up and feel like too much is being thrown at them but we also want to book the kind of people who are ready for a game. We’re not playing touch football, we’re playing the real thing. If you live in a world where Wendy McLendon-Covey exists, she should get to use all of those skills. She should get to go to one place and show the fullness of what she is capable of.

The thing I liked about Hollywood Game Night was you could get to see which celebrities would get honestly competitive and want to win. Those were the people I’m like, “I can hang with you people.” That is one of the things I watch these shows for, talk shows is the same way, is who would I actually feel like I would enjoy in person. 

One of the beautiful things about this first season was seeing so many people shine and so many people shine in different ways. There is a New York Giants running back named Rashad Jennings who comes on the show and is so good. He’s just so good, so unexpectedly good. He’s up against all of these people who are super talented comedians and writers, and he super holds his own. Or somebody like Paul Feig who has spent the past ten or fifteen years behind the camera, showing up in a three-piece suit, ready to fucking play.

I was going to say, “Was he in a suit on your show?”

Oh God, yes. He showed up dressed. There’s that thing of when you show up in your game uniform, you play a better game. Diablo Cody is fun and funny all of the time, but in a party dress on a talk show set, she comes alive in a way that I want to enjoy.

I wanted to talk about the show itself. It can definitely be combative in a way that’s fun, but especially when Casey Schreiner is throwing out penalties and stuff like that. You can see the looks on these people’s faces sometimes where it’s like they’re honestly a little perturbed, or they’re rattled a little bit. Is this element of the show something that informs the kinds of guests you seek out? 

Yeah. This is a show that requires people who don’t take themselves too seriously. This requires people who are willing to play and take it seriously enough to try but who can handle a game where they’re not in control of everything. There was one moment where, I don’t want to give anything away, but in one of the earlier episodes that we shot, I looked on the face of a very talented, gifted performer and writer as they saw somebody who should not be beating them — as they saw their lead slip away. You could see it on their face, and I was like, “All right, this show is getting going”. Casey is such an interesting force, because he’s not somebody that people know unless they were avid fans of the G4 Network. He is an exacting lead judge. [These guests] are big-deal people who aren’t frequently told that they aren’t doing a great job, so having somebody come in with a truth bomb is really, really great.

There’s a pitiless quality to Casey that I find very interesting on the show.

He is all about the rules. It’s not so hard for Simon Cowell, successful music producer, to tell some random kid from Ohio that they’re terrible, but [we’ve got] Casey Schreiner, basic cable producer, looking a Tony winner in the eyes and telling her that she’s lacking. Our goal is never for it to feel harsh and our goal is never to be creating bad blood, but it is to say, “Do your best. Or else.”

Congratulations on being one of the few TV talk shows to realize that RuPaul’s Drag Race contestants make good TV guests. 

One of the main reasons that Pandora [Boxx, season 2 Drag Race contestant and Talk Show the Game Show guest] did the live show was because she’s the rare drag queen who was willing to put on make-up without me paying her. I previously tried to book drag queens, and they were like, “Yeah, that’s a lot of work. How much am I making?” Pandora is also a really, really gifted comedian, and she liked doing stand-up and liked being in this world. When I mentioned people who I had on the live show, Page and Wanda were immediately like, “Yes, Pandora Boxx. That sounds great”. When she came on the show, she entered at such a broad angle. Karen Kilgariff so fell in love with her making an entrance that understood, “This entire audience needs to see my outfit or else.”

With all of the stuff going on the real conversations and the real moments of discovery that were able to happen were astoundingly fun. Also, just watching the joy of the other people on the panel as these conversations happen … in the rules of Talk Show the Game Show, there is both an emergency guest rule and an emergency host rule where if somebody gets kicked out they can be replaced. There was one moment when that happened and watching the faces of everyone as the emergency host came out was really phenomenal. It made me happy to sit back for a moment and realize the people in this were having a good time.

Any dream guests for the next season? 
There are really amazing people out there who we weren’t able to get. My joke answer is always Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Tom Hanks, and Justin Trudeau for a little bit of eye candy. More realistic? God, Emma Thompson would be great on this show. I realize she’s far too much of a big deal to do it. Mindy Kaling was trying really hard to do it, but her schedule was just too busy with movies during the hiatus of The Mindy Project, and she wasn’t able to make it. If we get to do another season I want Mindy on that show because, underneath all of the giggling and pop culture there is an Ivy League grad with a fierce competitive streak, and I think she could walk away with that show with nobody even realizing it’s happening.

So you’re saying you couldn’t have taken the show on location to New Zealand and film it while she was doing A Wrinkle in Time?

It would have been the dream. The whole time she was like, “I’m going to be home for a couple of days. We’re going to make this work,” and I was like, “This is never going to happen.” She stayed on our official booking list until two weeks beforehand, and then she was like, “it’s not going to work out.” But, she tried valiantly.

Where to stream Talk Show the Game Show