How American High Scored Big With ‘Minimum Wage’ Netflix Series While Building a Pipeline for the Next Generation of Comedians (EXCLUSIVE)

It all started with Jeremy Garelick’s simple but ambitious plan for American High: Buy a high school in upstate New York and turn it into the hottest filming spot in town for coming-of-age comedies.

Since the full-scale production outfit was founded in 2017 and American High Shorts launched online in 2022, Garelick’s motto for discovering talent has been to put the funniest people in a room together and let them prove themselves — whether that be in one of their films that end up streaming on Hulu, or a short-form comedy sketch.

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Now, that motto is taking the young talent discovered through American High farther than they ever could have imagined with the 28-episode Netflix order for “Minimum Wage” (as Variety exclusively reported in April). It started out as a web series posted on YouTube back in May 2024 made for under $2,000, but Variety can exclusively reveal that the first 14 episodes of “Minimum Wage” will premiere on Netflix on Oct. 26.

“It’s the same philosophy we have with film, but in the digital space. If someone’s doing something cool, we’ll just amplify it without all the gatekeeping,” American High president Will Phelps says. “It’s the model that other people were too afraid to do. And now turn the page, everyone wants to give those creators $10 million to make the next ‘Obsession.’ I think we were probably just there five years earlier.”

“Unlike all the studios and giant companies that like to just be reactive and see what’s working, they don’t want to take chances on first-time directors or actors,” Garelick adds, with a majority of American High’s films being helmed by first-time directors (including Jillian Bell and Jason Orley).

Working with Netflix was a natural fit for Garelick, who directed the 2023 Adam Sandler movie “Murder Mystery 2” and the show “Best Worst Weekend Ever” for the streamer. “This is the biggest opportunity we’ve had at American High in terms of getting our stuff to the broadest audience,” he says.

While Garelick and Phelps served as showrunners on “Minimum Wage,” the ethos of collaboration remained largely the same: Cast members had the opportunity to write and direct many of their own episodes.

When the series was picked up by Netflix, there was, of course, the pressure that came with working with a larger budget and wanting to live up to the original series for a wider audience. But cast member Grace Reiter explains that the show was a natural extension of everything American High has spent years building on its digital platforms.

“What an amazing first experience in a writers’ room and directing your friends. We already built such a language working with each other, it’s like second nature,” Reiter says. “It felt totally comfortable to pitch things in the room and to say not funny things and to get ideas turned down.”

Getting to direct episodes of their own also proved to be a great learning experience for the cast. Reiter says: “It was just maybe coordinating camera movements a little bit more because now we have two cameras. We were more used to, obviously, the vertical frame and cross-shooting, but we tried to carry over all the things that made our digital sketches and web series popular.”

The original “Minimum Wage” series took the model of the classic workplace comedy, following a group of overworked teenagers trying (and often failing!) to run a pizza shop. The cast included Reiter, Aidan Micho, Hyde Healy, Julia Dicesare, Luke Burke, Ryan Micho and Tommy Armstrong, who all returned for the Netflix series.

“It was very scrappy, very homemade,” Reiter says of the original web series.

For Garelick and Phelps, “Minimum Wage” is just one example of how they view all their sketches as possible IP to pitch to streamers. American High has the benefit of its own built-in audience online, with the American High Shorts TikTok account currently holding 2.6 million followers and a collective 248 million likes (and counting) across all videos.

American High’s head of digital, Tristan Hall, who oversees all of the company’s social accounts and marketing efforts for their films, says that the online sketch videos “operate like a Gen Z version of ‘SNL.'” A typical week starts off with a brainstorming session on Monday, a writers’ room on Tuesday, and then production on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

“The nice thing about social media is you do get that instant verification,” Hall says. “Within 24 hours, we’ll know if the idea is something we want to revisit.”

American High has focused on organic social media engagement over traditional advertising. After premiering at SXSW in March, “Pizza Movie” — led by “Stranger Things” star Gaten Matarazzo — was released on Hulu in April, and became one of the company’s buzziest titles online.

“Whatever studio that we’re releasing with will often assist with more traditional marketing, and then we cover the social media side of things,” says Surina Belk-Gupta, American High’s social media manager. “‘Pizza Movie’ was a game changer for us in how we can use our company brand in film marketing.”

Jon Hurwitz worked alongside American High as a producing partner on the 2021 high school comedy “Plan B” after being attracted by the resource facilities of the company’s Syracuse hub.

“What struck me was the youth, which is wonderful,” Hurwitz says of his time on set. “A bunch of young people who were passionate and hardworking, getting experience in the film business.”

The Academy at American High program was established in 2018, giving film students from schools like Syracuse University, Ithaca College and Onondaga Community College the opportunity to intern and work on sets. Now, Garelick estimates that more than 1,500 students apply for internships each semester.

American High likes to keep folks around. Matt Sacca, who started off as Garelick’s first intern, worked his way up to head of development and is now writing a comedy titled “Second First Date” for the company. Phelps started out as Garelick’s assistant back in 2014, and Hall began as a creative intern back in 2022.

Filmmakers and producers who have developed a close relationship with Garelick over the years, from his work on films like “The Hangover” and “The Wedding Ringer,” recognize and trust the next generation of comedians he’s bringing up.

Hurwitz says: “We’re working on the latest ‘Harold and Kumar’ movie and there are going to be some young characters in that. Jeremy’s going to be one of my calls where I’ll have him read the script and say, ‘Hey, are there people in your ecosystem that you think would be great?'”

In addition to the highly anticipated release of “Minimum Wage” later this year, American High is betting big on its first theatrical release, “Rolling Loud,” which stars Owen Wilson and Matt Rife. It was written and written by Garelick and will be released on Oct. 2 from distributor Ketchup Entertainment.

“We’re going to always write and make the funniest movies that we believe deserve a theatrical release. We just did ‘Pizza Movie’ that I am 1000% certain would’ve crushed in the theater just because I’ve sat through several screenings,” Garelick says, referencing American High’s first-look deal with Hulu that limits films to streaming.

“It’s just a matter of when distributors realize that comedies do actually work [in theaters] if they’re funny,” he adds.

“Rolling Loud,” which follows a father and son attending a hip-hop festival in Miami, is also the rare American High production to be shot outside of Syracuse. The only soundstage in the area that would have been big enough to fit a stage the size they needed had been sold off, Garelick says. (They were able to film it in Miami at a Rolling Loud concert.)

While Garelick says that American High is “open” to continue expanding filming outside of Syracuse, he recognizes the opportunity to continue hiring local crew.

“It’s just so easy for us to get things up and running — we know every location,” he says. “We can read a script and be like, ‘We’ll shoot that here, this would cost this much.'”

“Minimum Wage” cast member Burke, who first connected with Garelick after he visited his Syracuse University screenwriting class in 2022 and took a liking to his spec script, was hired as an on-set punch-up writer for “Rolling Loud.”

“Being on a large feature film set was such an insane learning experience,” Burke says. “It felt like I was part of the process.”

Members of American High’s sketch comedies are already expanding their footprint onto other shows; Reiter appeared alongside Tim Robinson in his ambitious HBO comedy “The Chair Company,” but she says the set felt just like a scrappy American High shoot.

“The vibes were similar. As a creative, it’s important to surround yourself with people who you trust. It really was just, ‘They’re friends!'” Reiter says. “In between, they were watching audition tapes and then they’d talk about the [basketball] game, sitting there and making each other laugh. And that’s all I’ve ever wished and hoped for — just to make funny things with my friends.”

As American High gears up for the new school year, a new crop of interns and students interested in working on sets will come across Garelick and Phillips’ desk, becoming part of the ever-growing network.

“We created an accidental ecosystem that has really helped every aspect of our business. It wasn’t like we were doing this on purpose,” Garelick says. “We were just trying to do what was fun for us.”