Jess McKenna and Zach Reino break down Dropout’s new semi-scripted show MP3

Dropout’s newest show is MP3, a partly scripted, partly improvised series about a music video countdown show going through some growing pains and creative changes. It’s the latest project from duo Jess McKenna and Zach Reino, improvisers who have been working together for over ten years. The pair first delighted Dropout fans with Game Changer’s improvised musical episode “The Official Cast Recording” back in 2021, leading to appearances for both on many of Dropout’s programs and the short-lived spin-off show Play It By Ear.

The pair describe MP3 as part Total Request Live, part 30 Rock. The throwback music television show features three deliriously creative music videos per episode, written by the duo and performed by a variety of Dropout stars. Each mixes the platform’s comedic sensibilities with believable and catchy genre songwriting, across a wide variety of musical styles. Then there’s the power struggle in the show within the show, as washed-up former boy band member Dane Cartel (Jeremy Culhane) feuds with his director dad (Paul F. Tompkins) and the two eccentric new co-hosts (Skye Townsend and Aparna Nancherla) recently hired to join him on the program.

I spoke with Jess and Zach about balancing comedy with credible songwriting, how performing hundreds of improvised musicals have “expanded” their brains, their working relationship over the years, and more!

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I'd love to start with where it all started. How did this show come to you?

Zach Reino: This is a pitch that we brought to Dropout. We were in Zingerman's Deli in Ann Arbor on tour, and we knew that Dropout was looking for a show. We had this idea to get back to our roots. Jess and I started writing together by doing one-off music videos. Jess, I think, had the idea to be like, what if it's a TRL [Total Request Live], and it's just a device that allows us to do a lot of music videos? 

Dropout was looking for something semi-scripted to bridge the gap. The music videos would be totally scripted. We had both been on Curb Your Enthusiasm. We can semi-script the in-studio portions with people that we know are hilarious and incredible and also give them jokes to do and then diving boards to jump off of and swim around in the fun pool.

Jess McKenna: As both Dropout cast members and Dropout fans, we knew the directive of having it still feel like something that could live on Dropout. Our original vision was that the material between the videos could feel very improvised, very loose, and like a cousin to VIP, where it's a host playing a character. In the process, working with our incredible showrunner Bridget [Stokes], the show in the studio actually really took on a much bigger life of its own in a really exciting way. 

There’s a version where maybe the show could have been 15 minutes and you would just have fun bumpers between music videos, but it's actually gearing further towards a 30 Rock or a Larry Sanders Show. When you cut to the sketches in 30 Rock, imagine you got to see the whole sketch and it was actually good.

Zach: It was important for us for the music to be cool and we wanted to listen to it. Another thing that we had planned from the jump is the sort of Dropout cinematic universe of it all.

There's a lot of people in VIP that are canonically musicians. We have songs that are based off of lines from other Dropout properties. It's not stuff that you need to know to enjoy the show, but if you are a Dropout super fan, you'll be like, oh, they're really pulling from a bunch of different wells.

Jess: At one point, when we were in development, I talked about how TRL would always cut to down below where people would be on the street, or how The Today Show has people out the window. I was like, imagine at any moment you could have a character from VIP walk behind the glass doors or you could have a single inside joke on a poster. 

I think the show is truly for everyone and I hope it brings new fans to Dropout because I think it's doing something different and specific, but if you are a Dropout fan, there's a ton of extra Easter egg love for you to explore.

You mentioned TRL – the show feels like a throwback to that era of music television, but it's also definitely set in the modern day. How did you approach that?

Jess: I keep saying that it is simultaneously 2003 and 2026. Honestly, it's just like we're all regurgitating so much. Everything is a reboot, everything is nostalgia-coded, everything is pandering to millennials already. But what if you just dove into that and played around with it and didn't pretend you were doing anything other than that? And at the same time, how can we use the musical stylings of any era?

I think that it's interesting to watch how younger people, with streaming music, can listen to everything. It is this moment where your end of the year [Wrapped] could have music from like a hundred years ago. We want to play with that. That's fun for us and it gives us more genres of music to play with.

Zach: Yeah, like there are new emo artists finding audiences now just because that's the way music is. Which is great for us as a sort of musical landscape, because it means that we get to write nine songs across all genres and end up with an album that feels both very us, because we have our hands on the wheel, but brings in a lot of incredible different talent that's bringing different stuff to the music. 

And like Jess said, Bridget has done such a great job of expanding what the studio universe is and the lore. And Jeremy and Skye and Paul and Aparna, these characters…

Jess: And, accidentally us? We were sitting at video village and they were like ‘be prepared to be on camera’ and then we just started having lines in the show. Zach and I created the show, and we want everyone to understand that this is our music love letter. But at the same time, we were excited to create this platform for a lot of other of our friends and peers and colleagues at Dropout. It was not really meant to be a Zach and Jess vehicle in an acting way, and it's very funny to me that we are now in a lot of shots.

Zach: Shadowy figures in the back.

Something I found very interesting about the three songs in the first episode is they're funny, but they also function as legitimate singles within their genres. Beverage Girlie in particular has that TikTok-style loop that a lot of modern pop songs have. I’d love to hear more about your thought process behind balancing keeping it credible while also keeping it funny.

Jess: For sure. Beverage Girlie is just a thing that I deeply identify as. I have lots of drinks. I kept getting fed this person in my algorithm who's like, Hello, I'm a beverage girlie. And when Zach and I were writing it, I kept being pulled to loop more. It should be so repetitive. Because to me, it felt like a TikTok song. But hopefully it’s still funny and catchy in its own way. And then to pair it with a hip hop song.

Zach: Courtside’s chorus changes every time. 

Jess: It’s much more of a comedic exploration song that gets very heightened as it goes.

Zach: Which is a gift of being able to do multiple genres, right? To accurately do a song like Beverage Girlie, you should do it that way. Luckily we have incredible music video directors where you can be like Well, the chorus is the same every time. That just means that if there are jokes changing, it's in the footage. I think, as a creative community, individually, doing a song as the best version of that genre of music will just lead itself to doing jokes in different ways, and different executions of the music video, all of which is a really fun, creative puzzle to put together, and gave us nine songs that feel funny in very different ways.

Jess: Yeah. I think we were very motivated and we were confident in our pitch to Dropout that we could give them variety, and that was going to be part of the joy of this show. Musical variety is so fun to play with, it gives you such a bucket of specifics, but you want to have comedic variety as well. Like, what makes this song funny is actually more the character who's singing it, like Truth Summons, Jacob Wysocki's character. That's a funny conceit of a song, it's a very throwback song, but he's really a character in that world.

As any sketch writer would tell you, sometimes you're starting from like different kernels. This is a character-driven sketch, this is a premise driven sketch, this one's more satirical, this one you think it’s one thing, and then it’s something else. So we’re doing that same thing, and we’re trying to also bring in musical variety.

A lot of Dropout viewers know you for your improv musical talents. But you two have written non-improv music for a long time as well. I’m curious what differences those processes bring out for you.

Zach: They’re both different and the same. Doing so many improvised shows together has given Jessica and I the Venn diagram of our comedy, and the circles are quite close together. We know the kinds of things we think are funny, and we know how to execute on a shared idea.

Jess: We started by writing one-off songs, and then the music improv was something that we got to a little bit later. Then that became a much bigger part of what we do, and we've written more narrative songs working on musicals or projects like that. So to go back to how we started and write one-off songs that don’t need to carry a narrative, it was actually like taking a weight vest off.

Zach: So nice.

Jess: But I do think that all the improvised music, it also just gave you so many more reps at song structure. What does a chorus need to accomplish? When is song structure a gift, and when is it actually comedically good to break the structure? Which is kind of what we were already talking about, sometimes it’s gonna scratch your brain in a good way to repeat that chorus, versus no, we want to break it, shift it, move over here. And I think doing hundreds of improvised musicals has just expanded in my brain, I'm sure Zack’s as well, what a song can be, and what any comedic premise needs its song to be.

Zach: Being able to write songs in advance, though, the bar is higher for how funny and how structured they have to be. But the reps of doing ones where you throw it away and then never do it again is so useful for when you have to sit down and write one because you're like, Well, I've done hundreds of these. So whatever, let's get into it. And musically being able to tap instruments that aren't just like piano, keys, drums is hugely expansive.

Jess, you talked about going back to the start: you guys have been working together for over a decade. What has changed the most in your working relationship over the years?

Jess: Money. No… [laughs]

Zach: Money. We make more money now than we used to make.

Jess: We make any money versus zero money.

Zach: We made no money for quite a while.

Jess: What has changed the most? I think the size and scale to which we are dedicated to at least keeping a part of our career focused on the thing that we do together. When we first started, we definitely were very much just separately pursuing acting careers, and knew that this was a fun thing we could do that might keep our creative juices flowing and maybe help get other eyeballs on us.

But it was a smaller part of what we were pursuing, and it's grown over the years to trying to form a long-lasting career that is going to have a lot of different things that we can do together that involve projects of different size and scale. Of which we get paid for now, which is cool. [laughs]

Zach: Which is great to be able to do it for a living. Creative partnerships, like any sort of relationship, are complicated. And I feel so lucky that Jess and I found each other when we did.

Because honestly, I can say we have been locked into the way in which we work for many, many, many, many, many years now. Like probably a decade since we really changed the manner in which we work. I think that our standards are much higher now, because unfortunately, the more you write, the better you get, and that sucks, because it means you have to work harder. I know more about producing music and that sucks, because it means things have to be better, and I know all the things that I can do now. And I know really talented musicians that we can like, make a demo, put our voices on it, and then actually give it to the real guitar players to do their real guitar on. 

The result of that is these nine songs that we are so proud of and sound so good and legitimately, all of them have been stuck in our heads and members of the crew's heads. Someone from the crew has come up to me for every single song and been like, this is my favorite. That's so rewarding to us, to be like, Oh, cool. People actually like these. They're not just like joke songs, they’re songs you would like to listen to.

Beverage Girlie has been stuck in my head for days, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw that influencer making a video with it soon, Jess.

Jess: Dropout is a really exciting, awesome place to work. It does a really smart thing, which is creating inherently funny content that they want to put their stamp on that they feel good about. But it doesn't pretend that we're not in a world where you have to market on social media. There's an awareness to like, well, you can fight that we have algorithms that send out our stuff, or if it serves you and it doesn't break the thing you're making, you might as well work smarter, not harder. 

So when we were thinking of this giant list of songs that we were cultivating, there were conversations that we should have at least one that plays into this idea of how stuff gets looped on TikTok and how that's a modern way that people consume music. It would be weird for us to pretend that that's not how a lot of music gets shared, you know. Beverage Girlie is probably the one that we really specifically tried to do that for. That song was particularly crafted to be like every girl making their dirty soda DIY can like put this song in the back. And I'm not shy about it, that's part of its DNA.

Zach: It's our gift to people that feel like this, to have that song specifically for this thing. Taylor's not going to make that song.

Jess: It's a real thing, though. My sister and I talk all the time about having so many beverages. My nickname in my college improv group was Jessie Two Drinks. It’s still from a genuine thing that I think is funny and relatable. 

Zach Reino recommends: Go to the Woods by the Wolves of Glendale

Our buddies, the Wolves of Glendale, have a new album out called Go to the Woods. It’s their second album, and it rocks. It’s very, very funny. They opened for Tenacious D a while ago. I'm trying to think of how to describe them. They're a comedy band, but like they're a capital B band. Going to their concerts feels like going to your favorite rock artists because they are so fun to see live. Their new album, Go to the Woods, is great. And if you are reading this, then I suspect you might also like it.

Jess McKenna recommends: Gilded Age and Medium Build

Here’s what I’ve recently been obsessed with. I just got into the Gilded Age and I cannot wait for season four. And I’ve also been listening to Medium Build lately, I’m really enjoying it and going to see him next week. As we've talked about, you can listen to music of all time, and sometimes I find myself not finding new artists, so I've been really trying to put an effort into that. Fontaines DC is another band I’ve been listening to a lot, but I think a lot of people are talking about them right now, so I'll say Medium Build. I'm very excited to go see him live.