Today’s Strip Search episode is pretty powerful I think. Tycho and I have a policy here at Penny Arcade. It’s to show you everything. Even when it’s embarrassing, or makes us look bad. We share it all with you guys through the comics and everything else we do. Well it doesn't get much more “real” than this episode of Strip Search.
***MINOR SPOILERS BELOW***
***I’M NOT KIDDING, WATCH THE EPISODE FIRST!***
There’s a lot of talk in the comments and on Twitter about this episode which I expected. It’s hard to say too much because I don’t want to spoil the rest of the show. I’m gonna try and answer some of the big questions I saw though.
Who else is in the audience during the elimination?
It changed from night to night but it was always various other PA employees as well as the Loading Ready Run crew. Some people like Robert were there every single night while other people from the PA office showed up when they could.
Who makes the final decision on who goes home? Is it just you and Jerry or do the other people at PA get a vote?
It always comes down to Jerry and I. In fact most of the time the people in the audience made a point NOT to tell us what they thought of the strips.
Why did you pick strip A when strip B was the obvious winner!?
I don’t know what to tell you here, other than this sort of thing is incredibly subjective and we put a lot of thought into every single decision. Not agreeing with the judges is just part of reality television. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve yelled at my TV because a judge sent home the “wrong” dancer, chef, clothing designer, tattoo artist, or singer. At the very least even if you don’t agree with our choices I would hope you could look at this episode and agree that we didn’t make any of these decisions lightly.
Did you not realize you would have to eliminate people?
I talked about this a bit in the comments on the new episode but I’ll go into it again.
I thought the show was going to be fun but I was not prepared for how hard these decisions would be. This episode shows the first time the scope of the show really hit me. I was overwhelmed and I lost my shit. Robert took me outside and (as he has done many times over the decade he has been my friend) helped me get it together and put things in perspective. We could have cut all that out. We could have edited this episode to make it look like just another hard decision. That’s not what really happened though. What really happened was messy. What really happened was scary and mean and sad. You want reality television? Well there you go.
-Gabe out
