The first 14 episodes of 'Minimum Wage' will drop on the streamer on Oct. 26 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. 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. If someone’s doing something cool, we’ll just amplify it without all the gatekeeping,” American High president Will Phelps says. 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. 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. We already built such a language working with each other, it’s like second nature,” Reiter says. 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. 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. 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.
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