Overthinking It Podcast

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Peter Fenzel, Matt Wrather, and Jordan Stokes overthink past New Year’s resolutions, and past New Years Resolution episodes of this podcast. Pete emphasizes the importance of planning (Matt calls it “scaffolding”) to support ambitious resolutions. But Jordan thinks the dominant strategy is shrinking the resolution to fit the scaffolding you’ve got, and aligning your resolutions with yourself rather than an idealized future super-self. Even the most longed-for self improvement is likely to fail if achieving it involves becoming someone that you’re not.

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Episode 912: I Don’t Remember the Movie; I Do Remember the Mr. Pibb 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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Matt Wrather returns to the Overthinking It podcast after a legendary wrestling match with Los Angeles traffic to join Jordan Stokes and Peter Fenzel in a discussion about finding an honest way to relate and experience overplayed Christmas pop songs. To do this, they chart the history of acting method and Constantin Stanislavski’s three major apostolic traditions: that of Lee Strasberg, that of Stella Adler, and that of Sanford Meisner.

The Overthinkers consider repetition: how in some situations it seems to sap words of all meaning, and in others it provides tiny crack in the door that might be forced open toward honesty with great personal emotional effort – or perhaps through singing at half speed and then speeding up the tape so we sound like anthropomorphic rodents. And there is no greater pursuit they might apply these techniques than The Reason for the Season.

When we sing what we sing, do we mean what we mean? How does ritual bring into being the acting of our own values in real life? Do we, in fact, know it’s Christmas time at all? Do we want a lot for Christmas? Do I still want a hula hoop? Do you still want a hula hoop? I still want a hula hoop. You still want a hula hoop? I still want a hula hoop.

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Episode 911: Spoilers for The Seagull 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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Jordan Stokes and Pete Fenzel take on the traffic-waylaid Matt Wrather’s challenge in our now-annual holiday literary episode: contrast the forms of knowledge in two enduring 1890s holiday classics. Jordan and Pete take on the New York Sun editorial commonly known as “Yes, Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus” by Francis Pharcellus Church, and the Sherlock Holmes holiday adventure “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

On one hand is faith, feeling, and phenomenology, and on the other, observation, measurement, and deduction. In both cases the mentor moves the mentee from ignorance to knowledge, though of different sorts, and from thence, to the Christmas Spirit, be it childlike innocence or goose-oriented Victorian mercy.

Marvel as Stokes calls for the triumph of human investigation over every dark corner of material reality. Stir as Fenzel invokes faith even in Sherlock Holmes’s assurance of a happy ending. Revel seasonally in the moral philosophy of Santa Claus.

As a bonus, the two also tackle Pursuit to Algiers, a latter Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes feature – perhaps the Fast & Furious 6 of 221B Baker Street. In this, they reflect on the middle career of clinical psychologist Marjorie Riordon, who between modeling for war bonds and her study in speech pathology took a few special moments to sing and play piano with Dr. Watson on an international steamboat thick with campy assassins.

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Episode 910: The Tooth Marks on the Milk and Cookies 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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Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink the work of Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born English playwright. He seems like a playwright designed in a lab for Overthinking It, and the guys dive into Arcadia (1993), a play about thermodynamics, academia, history, poetry, sex, uncertainty, and time. What matters, the individual scientist or poet, or the work they create? The answer is “yes.”

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Episode 909: Tom Stoppard was an English Playwright 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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The Phantom of the Opera is by most measures the single most successful piece of musical theater of all time. Somehow it’s escaped the scrutiny of the Overthinkers, until Mark Lee returned from a visit to the immersive reimagining of the show, Masquerade, as a changed man, utterly obsessed, driven to madness, and wearing a porcelain mask covering half of his face.

Enchanted by Mark’s newfound enthusiasm for Phantom, Pete Fenzel and Matt Wrather followed him to the underground lair to make the Podcast of the Night. The panel explores how a sense of place undergirds both versions of the show, the many different ways the “problematic” character and actions of the Phantom can be interpreted, and whether or not the show is any good at all—or if it’s all just a noisy maximalist thrill ride (DUN DUN DUN DUN DUUUUUN). Spoilers for the immersive version, in particular its ending, which radically recontextualizes the Phantom and his relationship with his own sense of self worth.

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Episode 908: This Is Porcelain AF 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 overthink intrinsic and instrumental hats. From a toddler’s hilariously putting diapers on their head to a king solemnly doing the same with a crown, they weave experience, history, and philosophy into a tapestry that is, in the end, extremely silly.

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Episode 907: The Childlike Urge to Hat 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 overthink series 16 of The Great British Bake Off, a reality competition show that takes place in a comforting world swaddled in gingham, where the stakes are as low as a soggy bottom. With one contestant so dominant, this year’s competition was nearly devoid of suspense; and the presence of a Ukrainian baker nearly forced the show to confront a world with a tragedies many times worse than the collapse of a cake.

They puzzle out how the show tries to make meaning through its casting and through the relationship between the hosts and the judges, and try to imagine what the show must mean to its intended (British) audience, playing on both nostalgia for a simpler time of village fêtes and the contemporary diversity of modern Britain. In the end, everyone can agree: Alison Hammond has made the show’s flavor’s pop.

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Episode 906: Hero Flavour 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 the world of decision-making outside of the voting booth—a world where each vote might have a decisive effect on your future voting power. (Matt, for example, is never allowed to chose the movie again, after Phantom-gate.) They touch on decision theory, Pareto efficiency, and economics, ultimately deciding it’s the right move to hold onto your tickets for Hidalgo, even if you’re going by yourself, and throw away your tickets to Highlander: Endgame.

But how to make decisions in that ultimate kid-tatorship, the family. Do you Matrix your kids or let them experience the vertigo of unlimited choice? And how can Dads stay cool? They join a casual rock band, where enthusiasm outweighs consensus every time.

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Episode 905: Bayesian Democracy 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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With the French crown jewels still in the wind after the recent daring daylight robbery at the Louvre, Mark Lee, Matt Wrather and Pete Fenzel turn from the sparkly to the skeletal, to overthink the grand seasonal decorations on display in their urban and suburban communities.

Among its many moments of horror, 2020 saw Home Depot release “Skelly,” a 12-foot plastic lawn skeleton with glowing LCD eyes, to amaze your neighbors and terrify their children. Like or unlike other trends from that year, Skelly and his ilk have advanced in the years since, unceasing. This year, the Depot released an entire “Boo Crew” of additional family for the boney bachelor, and Mark, Matt and Pete have seen not just Skelly, but similarly large and ostentatious Halloween display ramp up in a multi-year grand ornamental Dance of Death.

The Overthinkers tackle the cultural or psychological significance of grand Halloween displays, alongside other over-the-top carnivals of the cursed, such as the continued wearing of the Koh-i-Noor diamond in British coronations. They also muse on Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 16th century panel painting “The Triumph of Death,” how to consider the changing meaning of “cheapness,” and the provenance of Dolly Parton in the cultural importance of spangles and rhinestones.

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Episode 904: Skelly Extended Universe [REPOST] 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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The year is 2025. The United States has devolved into an authoritarian, dystopian society where violence is used as a form of social control. In a stunning act of defiance, three brave podcasters–Pete Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather–fight back by analyzing the 1987 version of The Running Man, just in time for the Edgar Wright re-adaptation of the original Steven King novel to hit the big screens. We haven’t seen it yet, but it’s safe to say it will be very different from the quip-and-kill Schwarzenegger version that doesn’t really have anything coherent to say about the use of violence in entertainment, except, perhaps, “this is awesome.” But it does come down super hard against floral print button down shirts.

The panelists compare the movie to other notable examples where violence as spectacle is front and center: Gladiator, Robocop, and The Hunger Games. They also try to rationalize the role of the show in-universe as a method of social control, but mainly find that the world-building just doesn’t hold up as well as its higher quality contemporaries. But what the movie lacks in coherence and cohesion it makes up for with physicality and spectacle.

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Episode 903: How Can You Run a Dystopian Government If You Don’t Know What Gilligan’s Island Is? 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)]