Sam Reich isn’t expecting an Emmy nomination this year. He isn’t expecting to lose, either.
For the CEO of Dropout, the indie comedy streamer’s first-ever FYC event at the iconic Laugh Factory was never about a single outcome. It was about getting in the room.
“All we’re trying to do is get a little better every year,” Reich tells Variety.
The venue seats roughly 150 people. Dropout’s RSVP list topped 900. But the biggest surprise of the night wasn’t the turnout. It was the appearance of former “Dance Moms” doyenne Abby Lee Miller.
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“She told me she’s a ‘Game Changer’ fan,” Reich says. “My wife, Elaine, almost fell out of the bathtub when I told her she came.”
That balance between intimacy and ambition sits at the center of Dropout’s current moment. With 11 Emmy submissions spanning “Game Changer” and “Very Important People,” Reich is mounting a modest campaign in a landscape dominated by billion-dollar media companies.
“Streamers are trying to be everything to anyone,” Reich says. “We’re trying to be something for someone. When you’re paying seven bucks a month for Dropout, you’re probably hardcore about us.”
That loyalty has helped turn “Very Important People” into one of the platform’s defining shows. Hosted by comedian Vic Michaelis, the prosthetics-heavy interview series thrives on improvisation and absurd character work. Season 3 featured performers including Frankie Quinones and Chelsea Peretti, along with other Dropout cast staples.
Reich says Michaelis possesses an unusually rare comedic skill set, managing to be “both straight man and funny person in a way that I’ve never seen juggled in another comic.”
The hilarious show enters the revamped outstanding variety series race at a moment when the Television Academy is increasingly opening to internet-native programming. Reich points to creators like Sean Evans of “Hot Ones,” Brittany Broski and Michelle Khare as part of the same broader movement. A breakthrough for any of them, he argues, benefits all digital creators trying to break into traditional awards spaces.
Nonetheless, for Reich, the Emmy push also functions as a larger branding exercise. As he describes it, Dropout is evolving, moving from “unscripted alt comedy” to simply “alt comedy,” with ambitions that may eventually stretch into animation, horror and scripted storytelling, especially for its flagship Dungeons and Dragons-inspired series, “Dimension 20.”
“We’ve been loosely or vaguely threatening a ‘Dimension 20’ animated something for a while,” he teases of the tabletop RPG comedy show hosted by fan favorite and game master Brennan Lee Mulligan. “We have a couple of irons in that fire that are ‘medium’ to far along at this point.”
Still, Reich resists anything that would ever be deemed as “traditional.”
“I hope that we never produce something that’s recognizable because I always want what we do to be just that little bit avant-garde,” he says.
Kate Elliott
Kate Elliott
Most of Dropout’s Emmy hopes rests on “Game Changer,” the competition series Reich hosts himself. The show’s blend of elaborate game mechanics and psychological humor has turned it into a cult phenomenon, particularly after an episode orchestrated by Mulligan turned the tables on Reich himself and became one of the year’s most talked-about installments online.
Season 8, which premiered in May, includes what Reich describes as some of the show’s strongest episodes yet. “Roulette 2” revives a format he felt was too elegant to abandon, while an upcoming episode, titled “Count the Rice,” ranks, in his estimation, among the series’ top five best.
“If you’re asking me if it involves counting rice,” Reich jokes, “it surely does.”
He also exclusively teases to Variety a future episode titled “What’s the Catch,” loosely inspired by the classic game show “Let’s Make a Deal,” saying it’s a “top five”-ever episode of the franchise and one of his personal favorites of the series.
Then there’s the matter of “Survivor.” Reich is a longtime obsessive about the CBS reality franchise, enough so that Dropout once devoted an entire “Game Changer” episode to it.
And of course, how could we not talk about “Survivor,” Reich’s longtime obsession to which he dedicated an episode years ago? Asked about Aubry Bracco and her Season 50 win, he praises her timing:
“Aubry for sure would have been my vote of the final three. She peaked at the exact right moment. It’s so key to strategy; not emerging as clever too soon.”
For a comedy executive navigating the rise through the Emmy ecosystem, the observation is perfect.
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