Dropout is Taking Over

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]The first time it happens, you don't think much of it. Oh, hey, it's that person from Dropout.

[00:00:05]Then it happens again, different show, different platform.

[00:00:09]Then again, a movie this time, then a late night, then commercial, then a prestige drama, and then at some point you realize this isn't random.

[00:00:18]You're not noticing them more, they're actually just everywhere. And look, here at PetSmart we have just the right thing for your pet's health and wellness.

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[00:00:28]You can Yo, South. Yeah, he saw one of those Geico ads online, seized it. He switched to Geico, plus got Stop. What?

[00:00:37]>> You sure you want to do this? Cuz once you take that bite, there's no turning back to breakfast like this.

[00:00:43]What started as a niche subscription add-on to a collapsing comedy website has turned into something much bigger.

[00:00:49]Over a million subscribers, sold out arenas, Madison Square Garden gone in minutes, Hollywood Bowl, Climate Pledge Arena, all over the country. Live shows, a D&D show, a comedy improv platform selling out arenas. And their people are everywhere, not in one place, not in one lane, everywhere. Network TV, studio films, prestige streaming, national commercials, late night.

[00:01:15]Kim is on Abbott Elementary, one of the best comedies on network TV. Lou is the announcer on Jimmy Kimmel Live, his voice in millions of homes every single night. Josh Ruben directing Hard Eyes and more upcoming projects.

[00:01:29]Brinley Logan showing up on Ted. Jeremy Colhane making an immediate splash on his first season on SNL. Anna Garcia in a movie with Scarlett Johansson, as well as many commercials. Vic Michaelis on Pony's. Raff on The Pit, as well as many commercials.

[00:01:46]And these are just the biggest examples from roughly the last calendar year alone. That's not random. That's not luck. That's a system working exactly as intended. But to understand why it works, you have to let go of one assumption first. Dropout didn't create these people. This wasn't a factory, it was a magnet. These performers weren't discovered out of nowhere. They were already working, grinding through improv theaters, booking commercials, writing for animated shows, building careers piece by piece in places where genuinely funny people go when nobody's quite looking yet. Anna Garcia had a national ad campaign for AT&T and Duracell with guest spots on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Party Down, Hacks, and others before Dropout.

[00:02:29]Rath had years of sketch, stage, and screen work across LA.

[00:02:33]Vic had TV credits. Kimia was a fixture at UCB. Rekha has was writing for the Animaniacs. Lou had been on American Vandal. These are not people waiting to be discovered. These are seasoned, talented performers who are already doing impressive work. Dropout has just put a spotlight on them that millions of people can see. Because there's a difference between seeing someone once and seeing them every week. Television gives you a role, Dropout gives you a relationship.

[00:03:00]Week after week, people tune in and watch these performers play games, tell jokes, roll dice, make each other laugh.

[00:03:05]They learn their instincts, their sense of humor, their specific way they light up when something goes sideways. And once an audience builds that kind of relationship with somebody, once they genuinely know them, and they follow them anywhere. Part of what makes this possible is that Dropout is, by all accounts, genuinely good to work for.

[00:03:22]They pay performers to audition, they share profits with the crew, they've been working towards paying residuals ahead of any union requirement. In an industry where exploitation is the default, that reputation travels. And it means the people they attract actually want to be there and tend to stick around. It also helps that most of the Dropout orbit comes from the same improv communities, UCB, Second City, the Chicago and LA scenes, and they bring each other in. So when books a show, they recommend a friend. That friend becomes a fan favorite. They recommend someone else. The network builds itself.

[00:03:56]That's the engine. How'd you get on Dropout? Uh so I've known Jake for a long time and they held auditions and Jake just threw my name in and they gave me an audition. And then Paul auditioned me. Who I also I didn't realize but I didn't realize he worked at Dropout but I'd known him for forever. But that wasn't an accident. Go back to the beginning. College Humor. Late '90s, early 2000s, early internet, early YouTube and before YouTube, before streaming, before any of the infrastructure we take for granted now.

[00:04:25]The goal was never just viral videos. It was something bigger. Build a platform filled with great talent. Let the audience fall in love with these people and then let them launch. Bring in fresh talent, repeat. An indie Saturday Night Live. A comedy pipeline with built-in momentum. And for a while, it worked.

[00:04:42]Just not in the way you might expect.

[00:04:44]The first generation didn't become stars. They became infrastructure.

[00:04:48]Writers, showrunners, the architects of modern comedy television. They went on to shape late night, political satire, network TV. The rooms where comedy actually gets made. It's just that most of them did it from behind the camera.

[00:05:01]Streeter Seidell joined the SNL writing staff in 2014, became supervising writer and was made head writer in 2022. Seven Emmy nominations and counting. Sarah Schneider wrote for SNL and then left to co-create The Other Two, a critically acclaimed comedy on HBO Max. Pat Cassels spent seven seasons as a staff writer on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, an Emmy winning two-time WGA Award recipient.

[00:05:26]Dan Gurewitch is a staff writer on Late Night with John Oliver. Owen Parsons wrote for The Daily Show. Jake and Amir went on to found an entire podcast network that has produced some of the biggest comedy podcasts in the country.

[00:05:38]And it's genuinely lovely to see some of these people have found their way back.

[00:05:43]Pat Cassels and Josh Ruben on Dirty Laundry. Emily Axford and Brian Murphy becoming core Dimension 20 players, Josh Ruben become the beating heart of Make Some Noise. The lineage is visible if you know where to look. But the point is, wildly funny, wildly popular people from that early College Humor era didn't vanish. They didn't stop being funny.

[00:06:03]They just moved somewhere that you couldn't see them as easily. The pipeline worked, it just ran behind the camera with one major exception.

[00:06:11]Adam Conover.

[00:06:13]College Humor and their parent company at the time had always had an eye on television and Adam Ruins Everything was the clearest example of that ambition. A structured educational comedy show built around a College Humor performer featuring familiar faces from the same orbit, mainly Murph and Emily. It ran for three seasons on truTV and it made Adam Conover genuinely recognizable famous person. It was proof that the on-camera pipeline could work. It was also for a long time the exception that proved the rule until everything fell apart. January 2020.

[00:06:46]IAC pulls funding, layoffs across the board. A company that was once one of the most visited comedy sites on the internet is reduced almost overnight to a skeleton crew.

[00:06:55]Seven people, then fewer. What's left?

[00:06:58]One person still on full payroll, one D&D show.

[00:07:02]And that should have been the end.

[00:07:03]Instead, it became a reset.

[00:07:06]Because what came next wasn't just survival. Sam Reich bought the company, kept it alive, and what emerged from the wreckage was something leaner and in a strange way more focused. A streaming service that had no choice but to bet everything on the talent it had and the audience that showed up for them. It was a shift.

[00:07:24]The old system produced writers. The new system produces everything. Actors, directors, hosts, creators, people that move fluidly between platforms without leaving the ecosystem behind. They're not choosing between indie credibility and mainstream success. They're doing both at the same time. Lou Wilson is a core D20 member and the announcer on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Josh Ruben is one of the founding noise boys on Make Some Noise and a Sony picture director.

[00:07:52]Kimiko is a Dropout regular and recurring cast member on Abbott.

[00:07:57]Vic hosts Very Important People and had a huge role in Ponies alongside Emilia Clarke. Jeremy could be live on SNL on Saturday and then have a new episode of Make Some Noise air with him on him on Monday.

[00:08:10]Part of what makes that possible is how efficiently Dropout produces this content. The Dirty Laundry team have talked about filming entire seasons in just a few days. I didn't realize how many episodes a day you shoot until you did your like day in the life. Oh, yeah.

[00:08:22]That was wild. I didn't realize though it's like 4 days. That's That's Even the bigger more elaborate productions tend to be compressed. For a performer that matters enormously. It means Dropout doesn't consume your entire calendar if it's around everything else you're doing. You can be a series regular on mainstream TV show and a Dropout mainstay. You can be in SNL's featured players roster and still show up on Make Some Noise.

[00:08:45]The platform was built almost by necessity in a way that makes it compatible with having a career outside of it. And they don't disappear when they break out. They loop back in. They bring the audience with them and they bring the industry back with them.

[00:08:58]>> I hope it's SNL. It's not. That's the best part. It's an amazing fantastic new show called Very Important People with Vic Michaelis. But here's what makes all of this different from just a successful platform with good talent. They build around it. They don't just work in the system. They cast each other, write for each other, show up in each other's projects, and make things happen without waiting for permission from anyone.

[00:09:21]Izzy Roland wrote Dead, cast Brennan Lee Mulligan, Vic Michaelis, Zach Oyama, kickstarted it in post-production, and then watched one tweet about needing a theater connection turn 14 screenings into 200. Not through a distributor, through a community of people who already cared and wanted to show up.

[00:09:37]Rekha is writing her own feature, a sci-fi buddy comedy, and attracting backing from Mark Duplass, one of the most important figures in American independent film, before the movie has even been made. Josh Ruben keeps bringing people from Dropout into his projects. And then there's the Emmy conversation. Sam Reich hasn't been shy about the fact that a nomination is something Dropout has been openly shooting for. How much money did you spend on last year's Emmy campaign?

[00:10:03]>> [laughter] >> Oh, no. It wasn't nothing. It was at least $50,000.

[00:10:12]And honestly, it's hard to argue with that ambition. The work is there. The audience is there. It's only a matter of time before the Television Academy has to reckon with what's being made outside of traditional studios and streaming infrastructure. And when they do, Dropout is going to be near the top of that conversation. Yeah, but like you guys have put in for Emmys. What do you feel are the challenges there? Cuz I feel like is it just that people are kind of like bound to the idea of what Emmy stuff is?

[00:10:39]I think so. I think that like starting to let in specifically like a lot of these like comedy streamers coming from YouTube days and things like that means acknowledging a like a brand new wave of what film and TV is. I mean like YouTube is the hands-down biggest streamer. It's where like the most minutes are and I think to like discount that is like not a true form of art means that you're missing so much so much stuff that's out there and so much like beautiful and wonderful and like handcrafted um things. So, what is Dropout becoming?

[00:11:11]It's not just a streaming service. It's not just a pipeline. It's closer to an institution. A place where talent isn't discovered by executives in development meetings, it's discovered by the audiences week after week through the slow accumulation of genuine affection.

[00:11:27]Where careers don't replace each other, they stack. Where success doesn't pull people away, it pulls more people in.

[00:11:33]The original College Humor vision was a launchpad. What Dropout has become is something different. A loop, a gravity well, a community that keeps generating its own momentum.

[00:11:44]Dropout isn't taking over because it created talent. It's taking over because it recognized it and gave it space to be seen consistently, authentically, repeatedly.

[00:11:54]Until the audience didn't just notice, they invested. And once that happened, you don't lose that audience. You carry them with you into every show, every movie, every stage.

[00:12:06]It isn't just growth, it's gravity.

[00:12:09]If you want to see it for yourself, start anywhere. Make some noise if you want improv, Fantasy High if you want D&D, Game Changer if you want chaos.

[00:12:18]It doesn't really matter where you start because sooner or later, you're going to start recognizing these people everywhere. Babo hipothamia.

[00:12:26][singing and music] Babo hipothamia.