Overthinking It Podcast

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Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink 2019’s HBO television series based on Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s 1980s comic book, on the anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, which figures prominently in the plot of the show. The show considers history, trauma, healing, and the role of memory in all of those.

And just in case you were wondering about the reliability of memory, Michael York wasn’t even in The Lion in Winter. In 1968, he was doing Romeo and Juliet. It was… Timothy Dalton!

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Episode 674: Old Things in New Masks originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

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Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather revisit 2001’s DreamWorks animated feature Shrek, finding a movie stranger and more timeless than the one we expected to find. They overthink the meaning of the swamp, Shrek’s developmental journey, the Romance that develops in to a romance which governs his relationship with Princess Fiona, and what may be the only justified use on film of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

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Episode 673: Somebody Once Told Me originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

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Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather have enjoyed nothing so much over the last week as the reemergence of “Bennifer” as a cultural phenomenon. It takes the back to the heady days of the early 2000s, and they overthink what has changed between then and now, and why a person might want to back and look at that formative moment.

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Episode 672: Don’t Be Fooled by the Rocks that You Got originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

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Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather have been watching a lot of shows where an expert comes in to “fix” a “failing” “business.” The fun ones are with restaurants and bars. They overthink the genre and its features, wondering about why these experts are so attractive when at the moment expertise is generally denigrated in the public sphere, and about what these shows tell us about agency, psychology, political economy, and calculus.

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Episode 671: All the Chairs are Very Heavy originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

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Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink Tenet, Christopher Nolan’s remake of the Beverly Hills Cop franchise, except dour and joyless.

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Episode 670: I Put My Thing Down, Flip It, and Reverse It originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

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Ben Adams, Peter Fenzel, and Matthew Wrather team up to overthink The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which tackles the fishing industry and race relations in America. It is definitely not about terrorists unleashing a super-virus, but it is, in some ways, a plot line out of pro-wrestling.

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Episode 669: John Walker, Black Label originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

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Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather continue the discussion of acting, using performance as a lens to diffract the perspectives of the practitioner and the appreciator, which is to say the perspectives of the artist and the critic. Lots of culinary metaphors.

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Episode 668: Quod Erat Deliciousum originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

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Peter Fenzel and Matt Wrather have spent literally hundreds of episodes overthinking different movies and TV shows, but have never really turned the overthinking on acting itself. So they try. But what’s their motivation?

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Episode 667: Is George Clooney Really Batman? originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

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Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather, having warned future (or alien) archeologists to take what they say with a grain of salt, overthink April Fools Day 2021, what makes something a joke, and what makes something a prank.

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Episode 666: Joke Not a Joke originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

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Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather continue their occasional series of paging through the program thumbnails on HBO Max and stopping on something that looks interesting. This time, it’s Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop, which we analyze as a Shakespearean tragi-comedy, which it isn’t not. Like a lot of these older movies we’re watching, it’s pretty interesting how it exceeds expectations: it’s is what you think and a little bit more.

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Episode 665: Are We Talking about Hamlet or Axel Foley? originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]