There’s no denying that 2025 was, numbers-wise, a very big year for Dropout, the comedy subscription service that has spent the last half decade rising from the ashes of old internet mainstay CollegeHumor. Numbers like 19,500—the number of seats in New York’s Madison Square Garden, where the network’s actual-play tabletop series Dimension 20 successfully sold out its first live show in February, packing lots of screaming fans in to laugh and swoon over every roll and quip. (The crew, led by dungeon master Brennan Lee Mulligan, recreated the feat at L.A.’s Hollywood Bowl a few months later.) Or 16, the number of shows the small entertainment company currently produces for itself and which now run the gamut from more traditional offerings like improv comedy series Make Some Noise to cooking competition Gastronauts and stand-up showcase (and latest network addition) Crowd Control. And, of course, the big number: 1,000,000, the subscriber milestone that Dropout was widely reported to have cracked back in October—a wild amount for a streamer that licenses nothing from third parties and which exclusively produces its own content.
Ask Dropout owner, CEO, and frequent host Sam Reich, though, and the shift becomes a lot trickier to perceive. “My experience of this is more like being a frog in boiling water,” Reich tells The A.V. Club. (He does acknowledge that the number of folks flagging him down for photos at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival has steadily gone up every year, but cautions that “that’s a festival for theater nerds—those are my people.”) As far as Reich is concerned, “it’s probably a good thing that it’s been gradual. Because it’s also kind of scary. I was explaining this to someone the other day by saying the tightrope walk of Dropout is exactly the same as it’s always been. But we’ve gone from practicing on the beach to feeling like we’re a hundred feet in the air.”
Dropout famously embraced that daredevil spirit right from the start: When parent company IAC announced it was planning to sell CollegeHumor in 2020, Reich—who’d spent more than a decade as one of the company’s chief creative voices—offered the owners $0, and a minority stake in the company, to basically not sell it off as parts to a competitor and instead let him see what he and his existing team of talent could do with it. Which, as noted above, has been a steadily widening net in terms of viewership, ideas, and talent, mixing a regular stream of newcomers with veterans from the CollegeHumor days—many of whom have now seen their stars rise alongside the network’s.
Take Rekha Shankar, who joined CollegeHumor as the head writer for CollegeHumor Originals in 2017 and now serves as the host of Dropout’s “comedians try to crack each other up with absurd PowerPoint presentations” show Smartypants. (Recent topics: “Child Labor Is Cool!” “Letters Fuck, And When They Do, Words Are Created,” and “Your Friend Group Needs A Food Captain.”) While noting that securing work in a post-strike entertainment industry can still be dire, Shankar stated that Dropout’s frequently fervent fandom has had direct benefits on her own life, citing how a 2025 Kickstarter for her upcoming film Vidhya’s Guide To The Afterlife raised $250,000 in a month. “Could I have done that a few years ago without the Dropout fan base that I have?” Shankar asks. “I don’t know.” (Meanwhile, fellow host Jacquis Neal, who leads Crowd Control, had a less life-changing, but in some ways still highly notable, anecdote of his own: “I got recognized at a sex club in Germany,” he tells The A.V. Club. “I was just kind of sitting on a little bench and somebody came over and was like, ‘Hey man, I love your work.’”)
Reich is hesitant to crow about Dropout’s success, saying that when the company crossed the million-subscriber threshold, “it was a very small celebration, where I put on Doja Cat at my desk and did a little dance. We’re very low-key about this side of things. I think it partially stems from corporate trauma where we don’t want to get too high on our own supply.” If you want to hear the pride slip into his voice, ask him instead about the company’s track record of keeping its employees happy: “We are a team and crew and cast first,” he says, laying out his priorities as CEO. “Which means that the most important thing to us is that everybody is deriving real benefit out of this journey.” (Dropout made headlines in 2023 when it instituted a profit-sharing program benefiting its cast and crews; a recurring phrase that popped up in interviews with cast members for this piece was “Dropout takes care of its people.”) Reich is careful to note that taking care of employees very specifically comes before even the service’s content, telling us that he gives a speech before the filming of every season he hosts to remind people that “it is my first priority that you be good to work with, and it is my second priority that you be good at your work.”
Defying conventional industry wisdom, Dropout’s embrace of these kinder principles has made it a standout on an internet where entertainment products feel increasingly personal—and where fans increasingly care that the people making the shows they love are being treated well. (Neal, for instance, cites an example of the company’s responsiveness even beyond the financial: When he began working on Crowd Control, he quickly pointed out that Black men’s hair often needs considerably more time and upkeep to get camera-ready than was being allotted. “We’re trying to be a diverse company,” he notes. “And we’re bringing more Black people in. If we are who we say we are, we need to take that extra step that other companies don’t do. I brought it up, and I was serious about it. And the next day, that email started going out to people, and it’s now one of the normal things that goes out. ‘Hey, do you need a barber? Do you think you’ll need additional time?’ Things like that are what make it a very good place to work for.”)
Of course, there’s also a darker mirror to the warm feelings that these choices engender: the dreaded p-word, “parasociality,” which inevitably crops up in any conversation about Dropout’s work. (If you’re somehow blessedly unfamiliar, the term refers to the strong—sometimes unnervingly strong—attachment fans can feel toward online personalities as they begin to perceive them not just as entertainers, but as the subjects of a sort of one-sided friendship.) It’s a phenomenon that Reich diagnoses as a symptom of the work he and his teams are doing and not a sought-after result.
“It’s not a fantasy,” he notes, when asked whether there’s ever a worry about maintaining the feeling of “friends having fun cracking each other up” that pervades so much of the service’s work. (Give or take stand-up specials, Dropout content is almost entirely unscripted, a change from the old CollegeHumor days.) Citing an episode of Game Changer in which Reich conspired to gift $100,000 to regular cast member Jacob Wysocki after a difficult year, the CEO gently pushed back on the idea that the network genuinely seeks to foment parasocial feelings in fans. “We don’t do it to encourage parasociality,” Reich says. “We do it because we genuinely love each other. The parasociality is a byproduct of that.” (Jordan Myrick, who hosts and serves as a showrunner on Gastronauts, where comedians invent absurd personalized challenges for professional chefs to try to complete, highlighted that many of Dropout’s more human moments come from a long track record of casting strong personalities throughout its shows: “It’s hard for them to hide them, even if they wanted to.”)
Reich has heard both the compliments and the criticisms of this personality-forward approach before. “I’ve heard Dropout referred to as a ‘friendship simulator,’” he notes, when asked about how the network’s content traffics, consciously or not, in feelings of connection that can often be absent in modern online living. “Maybe even disparagingly.” (Shankar, when asked about “the Dropout ethos,” gives a warmer spin on the idea, saying, “We all really like each other, and it probably does feel kind of like, ‘Oh, and we like you too. Like come to our living room a little bit.’”) Reich—who says more than once in our conversation that he considers audience reactions to the service’s output to be a third-place priority, after making sure his team is both happy and happy with what they’re making—believes that Dropout couldn’t get by on these sorts of vibes alone. “If we were just that, we would be merely a video podcast network. And we’re not. There’s a huge amount of in-your-face creative that goes into our most successful shows. And that has more to do with just honest-to-goodness entertainment. I think it also is this other thing, which I would say is a byproduct of very genuine personalities and relationships. And it’s not only fine with me; it’s great, I think, if Dropout answers another kind of need in people for that. But genuinely, I’d say it’s 10 percent intentional, and the rest is a natural byproduct of the kind of work we’re producing.”
In trying to analyze why Dropout seemed to break through in 2025, these emotional factors are impossible to discount. (The service recently released, reportedly at fans’ request, a new subscription tier that is specifically built to indulge “superfans” who want to pay more to support what Reich and his team are doing. The attachment is strong.) But they also aren’t alone: Dropout content makes for an almost perfect viral load, for instance, with shows like Make Some Noise—an evolution on televised short-form improv comedy that won’t seem unfamiliar to fans of Who’s Line Is It Anyway?— chopping up easily into segments that can be quickly distributed as algorithmic lures, leading viewers back to full products that carry the care and craft of traditional TV. Shows like Very Important People—in which improviser Vic Michaelis interviews comedians in elaborate, often deranged-looking costumes and prosthetics, help give the network’s clips a strong visual hook. (The network is also hoping to get more into animation in 2026.) And the steadily widening array of shows available means that even browsers who aren’t immediately drawn to stand-up, or tabletop games, might still find something a little more universal, like Gastronauts, to sink their teeth into. (Admittedly, “universal” here includes a comic challenging chefs to make a meal that’s as tall as they are, but the appeal of watching talented people cook under pressure is no less obvious in this space than it is on Food Network.)
But what feels most key to the whole question is what happens next, after the algorithm fires, the eye is drawn, or the hook has been set. And that speaks to a growing space that seems to be developing in modern comedy, between the money-with-corporate-shackles realities of entertainment and the “unlimited freedom, highly limited budgets” vibes of the kind of early online comedy that CollegeHumor thrived on. Dropout exists in the liminal space between the two—in Reich’s words, “You can either look at it as criminally cheap television or criminally expensive podcasting”—where creatives still have both control over the purse strings and the will to experiment. It would be hard, for instance, to imagine any traditional network signing off on something like Game Changer, arguably Dropout’s most important project, which essentially transforms into a whole new TV series every time it airs. Simultaneously prank show, idea incubator, and an elaborate love letter to the game-show form, it’s a pure expression of craft, creativity, and, maybe most importantly, the lack of anyone saying no. Watching its later installments, in which the Dropout team finds ever-more elaborate ways to crack the limits of what online TV can do, it’s impossible to resist the giddy thrill of witnessing people getting away with something. It’s infectious. It’s compelling. It’s rare. And it’s only getting bigger.
“Dropout still has work to do to win everyone over,” Reich notes at the tail end of his interview, pointing out that even a good friend of his like Ben Schwartz had to be convinced for multiple seasons before giving an appearance on Make Some Noise a try. (“Now he’s addicted,” Reich adds, saying that he still has a dream set of guests for the series: a three-way appearance from Ryan Stiles, Colin Mochrie, and Wayne Brady.) Even so, it’s clear that Reich and his team are living something very close to the dream: “We’re all pinching ourselves, all the time.”
William Hughes is a staff writer at The A.V. Club.
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