Dropout: The Ultimate Media Chaser

The Entertainment Palate-Cleanser You Didn’t Know You Needed

Back when the internet was going through its awkward adolescent years, some guys from Maryland started a comedy website called College Humor. It featured content of varying degrees of humor and relative viral-ness, some of which was original and some of which was user-generated. Eventually the site was purchased by multi-billion-dollar holding company, AIC, and it prospered in the 2010s and grew its audience and bullpen of writers and performers until just before the pandemic, when AIC sold majority shares in the company to College Humor’s Chief Creative Officer, Sam Reich. Somewhere in all of this the web-based content had shifted to focus on YouTube and a dedicated streaming service called Dropout (get it? They were in college and now they’ve dropped out?).

The phoenix that has arisen from the ashes of College Humor’s sale and the subsequent pandemic is a lean little streaming service offering incredibly charming, hilarious, geek-culture-forward content, largely in the form of game shows featuring CH’s cast of writers and comedic performers. It’s a bunch of 30-something creatives who live in Los Angeles cracking each other up in clever and surprising (and often touching) ways.

Emily and I first caught wind of Dropout from short clips they were posting to TikTok from the game show, Game Changer, which is hosted by Reich and is the game-show version of every party game you’ve ever played where the point of the game is to guess what the rules are. It’s nothing short of delightful. The contestants are all people we would be thrilled to know socially (it doesn’t hurt that they are professionally funny) and the audience gets to figure the games out right along with them.

Several full episodes of Game Changer are available on YouTube. I recommend starting with this one:

Much of the streaming content we watch is pretty, shall we say, dark. Like, we’re in season two of the Das Boot series right now (it’s excellent, but holy god is it grim), and an episode of Game Changer is a wonderful little pre-bedtime chaser after an hour or two of fictional Nazi brutality.

Other delightful offerings available on the Dropout channel include:

• Dimension 20 — Brennan Lee Mulligan hosts his friends in a game of D&D.
• Um, Actually — a game show where the host tells you something about geek culture and intentionally gets some nerdy detail wrong and the contestants have to buzz in and correct the host, always beginning by saying “um, actually…”
• Breaking News — a fake newscast where the anchors are given funny things to say on the teleprompter and they have to try not to laugh. The one who laughs most, loses.

…and many others.

Game Changer is in its 5th season and they’re still making new episodes.

There are only a few full episodes and a handful of clips on YouTube but a year-long subscription to Dropout is just $60 ($5/mo) and the time-spent:joy ratio is a lot better than most offerings. Highly recommended.