This is not a joke: CollegeHumor wants your Emmy vote. Actually, just over two months after the internet comedy company, which rebranded as Dropout last year, sold out a 17,000-seat live performance set for January 2025 at Madison Square Garden, that proposition might not seem as funny anymore.
For the second year in a row, Dropout is submitting its competition series “Game Changer” in the outstanding game show category, its sixth season vying for a nomination against decades-old contenders including “Family Feud,” “Jeopardy!” and “Wheel of Fortune.”
In a stale category that’s gotten more attention since the Television Academy moved it from the Daytime to Primetime ceremonies in 2023, and amid a time of deep upheaval for Hollywood studios and mega streamers, Dropout has a better shot at a nod than it’s ever had before.
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“The way that we look at this Emmys campaign is, firstly, a challenge to the Emmys that, if they’re really in the spirit of looking at creative work and innovative work, that they could not not nominate us in that category,” Dropout CEO Sam Reich says.
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Simply put, Dropout’s “Game Changer” is a game show where the, yes, game changes every episode. From installments based on Simon Says and bingo to iterations inspired by “Survivor” and “The Circle,” “Game Changer” is not like the fixtures in the game show category. Or, as Reich says, “You’re not seeing Pat Sajak aboard a party bus” — like the players are on one episode of “Game Changer” — or “bodies falling from the ceiling on ‘Jeopardy!’”
So, in its infancy, this FYC campaign for the show is “really just an awareness campaign” and something Reich says he can wage for Dropout in general “over years.”
“And if we don’t get a nomination this year, the effort to try will have been worth it, in terms of the publicity it generates alone,” Reich says. “We’ll just continue to do that, like an annoying door-to-door salesman, who won’t leave your stoop until we’re acknowledged. This is more of a threat that we’re not going anywhere.”
With a self-reported subscriber total that’s risen from the “mid six-figures” in December to the “mid-high six figures” in May, and a whopping 600% increase in viewership over the past three years (2.5 million views in June 2021 vs. 15 million in April), Dropout is putting up the slow but steady numbers to back up Reich’s claim the platform is not leaving the market for the foreseeable future.
But amassing subscribers and profits — Dropout had a good enough year in 2023 that it was able to do its first-ever round of profit sharing with staff — as a streaming business is one very impressive feat, and garnering a prestige label from the TV Academy is another.
“There’s a certain reverence that protects and coats you as a comedian, where we, obviously, are incredibly proud of the work we do. And if the Academy were to recognize what we think of as being
exceptional work, we would be honored and deeply moved,” says Brennan Lee Mulligan, “Game Changer” executive producer and longtime Dropout star. “And I think that there are so many amazing
artisans and comedians and craftspeople and producers and people in front of and behind the camera that I want nothing more than recognition for their hard work.”
Mulligan adds, “And if the Academy sees differently, we’re like a rubber ball, baby. We’re a bunch of comedians — we’ll just bounce right back and go, ‘That was fun!’”
Mulligan’s pride-and-joy Dropout series, “Dimension 20,” was not eligible to be submitted for this year’s Emmys because the show, which sees him act as dungeon master for a rotating cast that plays themed “seasons” of Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, doesn’t fit neatly into one of the TV Academy’s eligibility boxes — yet. But Reich intends to keep pushing for “Dimension 20” in future years as part of Dropout’s FYC plan to shake up the Emmys overall.
The series has aired more than 200 episodes since debuting in September 2018 and garnered such a loyal fanbase that its upcoming live show was responsible for Dropout’s sellout of Madison Square Garden.
“I don’t think that the Academy’s life is going to get any easier as time goes on,” Reich says. “These lines are only becoming blurrier in terms of what a show is, where it’s distributed, what category it falls into. Cut to two to three years from now: We will not be the strangest shows who want into the Emmys.”
Dropout’s slate is growing at a steady clip, with the recent launches of new series “Smartypants” and “Dirty Laundry,” stand-up comedy specials and a drag-focused variety show set to roll out through the end of the year, plus that live “Dimension 20” special taping at the Garden in January.
All the while, the growing audience and acclaim for Season 6 of “Game Changer” are the direct result of a “funny” story executive producer Paul Robalino tells about the Dropout team (then still CollegeHumor, and then still majority owned by Barry Diller’s media company IAC) just trying to get something, anything, new onto the indie streamer in fall 2019, when “Dimension 20” was doing all the heavy lifting.
“When Sam pitched the show for the very first time, it was called ‘What the What?,’” Robalino says. “We were in the seventh-floor conference room at IAC, and the reason [he] pitched it at all was because we were like, ‘We need another thing to put on the platform. What can we make relatively quickly?’ And we were scrambling for a thing, and Sam was like, ‘Well, how about something like this?’ And we were like, ‘I guess we’ll give it a shot?’”
Reich adds: “And from that tiny, lukewarm reception, this whole thing was born.”