Overthinking It Podcast

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Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather salute Sir Patrick Stewart, who died this week at 86. For Matt, he was Space Daddy; for Mark, a steady hand at the rudder proving that the future was in good hands.

The crew overthink the Season 5 TNG episode “The Inner Light,” in which a mysterious beam from an alien probe causes Picard to live an entire life on a dying planet in a span of twenty-five minutes. Sir Patrick did the same week after week on Star Trek, giving us a...

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Matt Wrather and Pete Fenzel delve into their 40s and their Apple TV subscriptions to discuss The Dink, a comedy film about pickleball starring the alliterated (but never duplicated) Jake Johnson. Pete plays pickleball in real life; Matt does not. The Dink falls somewhere in between.

A genre-jumping waltz with greatly varied distance from reality, The Dink is sometimes a sports comedy, sometimes a romantic comedy, sometimes a coming of age drama, sometimes a comedy of manners – wildly absurd in content but far more subdued in st...

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Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather spread the good news of The Great Pumpkin (He has sprouted!), and settle down for a chilly autumn night’s vigil over It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Pete lays out the competing exegeses of Linus’s faith: absurdist satire of religion in the form of a half-remembered druidic vegetable cult, or just a boy who mixed up Halloween and Christmas. We’ll never know, because if the Pumpkin doesn’t come, we weren’t in the “sincerest pumpkin patch” to begin with.<...

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So the New York Times polled a bunch of entertainment people to produce a list of the “100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century.” Sure, it’s bait, but we’re suckers for this sort of thing. More importantly, though, the timing of this seems to coincide with the end of a certain era of prestige TV, as legacy media players such as Warner Bros. and Paramount consolidate to gird themselves against upstart competitors ranging from Netflix to the legions of teenagers producing content on YouTube and TikTok for free...

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Mark Lee, Matt Wrather and Pete Fenzel begin with a reflexive logical identity. A horse is a horse. Of course! Of course. And no one can talk to a horse. Of course!

That is, of course, unless the horse…

The three ride back to 1961, to witness Mad Men-era psychological horror at its finest.

…is the famous Mister Ed!

Wilbur Post has an obstacle to happiness and connection in his life. And no matter how much his neighbor strives to convince him...

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Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather are not quitting the podcast, but everything else is on the table. The crew overthink giving up on a long project, and Matt has hot take: people don’t quit things nearly enough. Book readers defer to a pretend adjudicating authority in their own heads, silencing the part of the psyche that is screaming “this book sucks, man.”

Pete, for example, tried to read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell while pushing a newborn’s stroller on almost no sleep, and by refus...

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Knock knock.

Who’s there?

The Overthinking It Podcast.

The Overthinking It Podcast Who?

The Overthinking It Podcast subjects jokes to a level of scrutiny they probably don’t deserve! Hahahahahahaha!

Mark Lee came to Pete Fenzel and Matt Wrather with a problem: his son got his hands on a 120+ page book of Halloween jokes, and he was having trouble explaining why some of them worked better than others. The panel starts by dissecting joke mechanics (puns, setups, punc...

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Matt Wrather, Mark Lee, and Pete Fenzel keep a promise by overthinking Dog Man. Dog Man is a bigger deal than you think. Year-end bestseller lists for novels overall have had at least one new Dog Man book in them for 7 of the last 8 years. And the composition, themes, and artistic mission of the enterprise deserves as deep a look as we can give it. Enter the Overthinkers.

Matt, Mark, and Pete start broad, cataloguing the series’ unusual modes of style and critique, including a catalogue of...

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Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather report for the first day of school in sweatpants — a garment Matt wore religiously until the sixth grade. Matt has in fact just started a new job, an occasion his boss called “syllabus week”; the swag package waiting at his workstation included a backpack, which seemed somehow apropos.

For Pete, back to school became metaphorical upon college graduation and then stopped being metaphorical again when his kids started school. The carnivalesque revolt against the monthless calendar of adult life has given way to...

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Pete Fenzel and Mark Lee pay tribute to the artistic and cultural legacy of Dolly Parton on the occasion of her passing at the age of 80. They start with her humble origins as told through the similarly humble song “Coat of Many Colors,” noting that many of her big songs lack structural or harmonic complexity. The apparent simplicity of the compositions are of course just strong foundations upon which Parton layers her lyrical mastery, shimmering voice, and her larger-than-life persona.

Pete and Mark also celebrate Parton’s phil...

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Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather don Mets caps and set out for the Valley of the Soul — settling, in the end, for a Rhode Island beach a half-hour from home. They overthink Kyle Gordon’s “Mr Jambo,” a comic river of pastiche that wends from Paul Simon’s Graceland and its South African collaborators through the earnest spiritual filter of Toto’s “Africa.”

Time, Fenzel argues, has made the figure of an ignorant American tourist safe enough to laugh at, but Wrather wonders if (s)he even exists any...

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Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather have each read the same few dozen books aloud every night for years, to the point where each one’s consciousness has been permanently altered. You could say it’s been eaten through by a hungry, hungry caterpillar. Without even needing to overthink, they run a five-round snake draft for the ultimate children’s bookshelf.

Three strategies emerge immediately. Mark drafts for utility, opening with Hands Are Not for Hitting and praising Martine Agassi for spending most of the book o...

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Irish actor and musician Glen Hansard died in a motorcycle crash outside Dublin on July 29th, which probably should have resulted in a discussion of his most famous work, the movie Once. Instead, Mark convinced Peter Fenzel and Matt Wrather to watch The Commitments, in which Hansard only has a small part. Something you should know about Mark: when he was in college, he started a classic soul cover band. Some things you should know about The Commitments: it’s a movie about an Irish classic soul cover ba...

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Matt Belinkie, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather convene to dig into two Disney franchises most adults have never watched a frame of: Descendants (kids of Disney villains and heroes at a magical boarding school) and Zombies (Hairspray, but with the Black characters recast as the undead). Like all of Disney’s live-action musicals, these are chasing the generational high of High School Musical, which smashed television and music records and set the template for tween entertainment. That’s what let Disney bridge the gap from “Disney kid” to the lucr...

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Edit: Reposted due to some technical nonsense.

Peter Fenzel, Jordan Stokes, and Matthew Wrather overthink the critically acclaimed spy dramedy Slow Horses, where Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb commits full-out to the craft of acting by eating the hell out of some noodles. Understandably, the crew focus on Lamb, the day-drinking, noodle-slurping creature of appetite who is a terrible boss and, against all odds, a great spy. He knows the difference between winning a fight by doing something well, and winning a fight by doing nothing...

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Peter Fenzel, Jordan Stokes, and Matthew Wrather overthink the critically acclaimed spy dramedy Slow Horses, where Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb commits full-out to the craft of acting by eating the hell out of some noodles. Understandably, the crew focus on Lamb, the day-drinking, noodle-slurping creature of appetite who is a terrible boss and, against all odds, a great spy. He knows the difference between winning a fight by doing something well, and winning a fight by doing nothing poorly. And he anchors a show that knows the  c...

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Jordan Stokes and Pete Fenzel mourn the loss of Sam Neill, and celebrate his exceptional skill and technique in imbuing the impossible with a human sense of reality. As of this taping, Sam Neill’s final film project is slated to be Gozilla x Kong: Supernova (to be released in 2027); Jordan and Pete break down why of course he is the actor anyone would want for that, and trace that path through several film roles and evidence from the public aspect of his personal life.

For Sa...

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Hey, old friends. Who’s like Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather? Damn few. The crew overthink Merrily We Roll Along, and Mark offers one piece of advice: budget the full two and a half hours in one sitting, and do not, as he did, watch it on your phone in four segments while doing the dishes.

Matt posits that the backwards structure inverts the basic grammar of musical theater, where reprise should follow song. The cut frame story from 1981, a high school graduation, would ma...

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Mark Lee somehow made it through middle school, high school, and college without ever reading or seeing Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s classic 1949 play. His only context before the curtain came up at the Winter Garden Theater for the Tony Award winning revival currently on Broadway was a vague sense that “it’s about capitalism” and the SNL sketch where Will Ferrell exclaims, “I drive a Dodge Stratus!” By the end of the show, he came away shaken and quaking with anticipation to talk about it with his co...

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Matt Belinkie, Pete Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather broke the One Wish Willow and it paid off, as a slate of fresh horror comedy has captured the attention of the moviegoing public and the zeitgeist at large… but to what end?

Following on Matt and Jordan’s recent two-hander on Backrooms, Belinkie shares his take on Obsession, which has become not just the hit film of the day, but something of a popular moment of connection, speaking to something deep and current in the culture, espe...

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Peter Fenzel greets Mark Lee and Matthew Wrather with a rare “triple bang” Mike Breen impression and a report that, fifty-three years later, the New York vibes are good (give or take a flaming bus or two). The crew gaze upon a victory podium where the coach abandoned his speech to lead a rendition of “Who Let the Dogs Out” to overthink their own irrational allegiances.

Mark nurses a still-unhealed 1996 wound over Braves–Yankees; Matt, asked as a boy “what’s your favorite sport” and never “what’s your favori...

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Matt Belinkie takes the hosting chair for the first time in nearly 20 years of the Overthinking It Podcast, an event so cosmically disorienting that he and Jordan Stokes spend several minutes trying to figure out which of the regular hosts they’re each a bizarro duplicate of. And that sets the scene for Backrooms, the A24 horror film directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, adapted from an internet phenomenon that began as a single photo of a Hobby Town under construction posted to 4chan.

This movie, in so...

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Matt, Pete, and Mark donned their discursive beskar armor and swore an oath to never take off their podcasting helmets before going to the theater to watch The Mandalorian and Grogu. This is the way, we were told. And yet despite Baby Yoda’s cuteness and the surprising depth of the incredibly swole Rotta the Hutt, we all found the movie to be unsatisfying for many different reasons. Mark argues that the movie was fundamentally set up to fail after Mando was denied the samurai/cowboy path by hi...

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Pete Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather follow their discussion of Zizek’s theories of cinema and desire to a definitive practice of cinema and desire, the late 90s teen romcom classic, Ten Things I Hate About You. Discussing a movie that not so much “holds up” as “remains excellent despite its deplorably cringe rap scene,” the three celebrate the movie’s craft along with its art, breaking down its style of iconic visual storytelling that make its comic types alongside its heartfelt leads feel resonant and effortless.

Recapp...

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Peter Fenzel, Jordan Stokes (for his sins, an academic), and Matthew Wrather overthink The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, a film essay written by and starring Slovenina philosopher/psychoanalyst(?) Slavoj Žižek. Žižek has forgotten more about Lacanian psychoanalysis than Lacan ever knew, and that makes this film essay (and its spiritual prequel The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, also directed by Sophie Fiennes, sister of He Who Must Not Be Named) a wild ride. Someone get this man a Kleenex. At the intersection of film, pol...

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Pete Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather emerge from the toxic jungle to save humanity from its warmongering ways through incredible acts of bravery and self-sacrifice. Inspired by Mark’s successful family trip to the movies to watch My Neighbor Totoro, the Overthinkers turn their attention to a different Studio Ghibli film, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Although it has many more stabbings and weapons of mass destruction than Totoro, both movies do feature at least one adorable woodland creature.

The panel explores the man...

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“Let them cook,” they said. So we did, and we watched. Matt Wrather and Peter Fenzel welcome the third season of “24 in 24,” a serialized one-day reality cook-off that is both the farthest and closest distance among cooking shows from actual cooking. Inspired, they track their personal tastes and influences in cooking in life and on the screen.

From the Championship Season rise of Guy Fieri’s Tournament of Champions and the era of cooking competition it has ushered in, back to the stand and stir classics of their c...

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Matt Belinkie and Peter Fenzel gather to kick off summer movie season the only way they know how: by completely failing to talk about the movies they planned to discuss and instead spending over an hour unpacking the mythological architecture of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Along the way they ask the questions no one asked them to ask: Why doesn’t Rosalina just go find Peach? What are the stars even for? And why did Bowser let his son build a universe-destroying gun without so much as a...

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Pete Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather 10x the company stock price by announcing a pivot to the lucrative lithium refinement services sub-industry, for which they have no expertise, equipment, or preparation, figuring the market will reward them anyway.

In a week dominated by the bubbly news of former environmentally conscious shoe company allbirds announcing its quixotic and lucrative “pivot to AI,” the Overthinkers discuss pivots major and minor, personal and cultural. To ground the discussion, they consider “The City,” a new-style video from a long-running YouTube...

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Pete Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather woke up from a coma and started recording this podcast, not knowing who they were or how they got there. Thankfully they figured out in time to save the world from a mysterious interstellar organism, and along the way they became fast friends and learned a lot about themselves. That’s right, the podcast is back to its old form: tackling a movie that’s currently playing in theaters, because the Overthinkers managed to get out of their homes and see Proj...

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There are two kinds of people: those that follow the outline and those that depart a the earliest opportunity. Peter Fenzel and Matt Wrather are the second kind. They set off to do one episode, but within the first 10 seconds Matt mentions the famous handshake meme from Predator, and it’s a whole other thing. That thing includes a hypotactical discussion of parataxis, which is why the Mr. Incredible meme is different from the Galaxy Brain meme, and why the Leonardo DiCaprio at the 2026 Oscars meme is different fr...

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Jordan Stokes, Matt Wrather, and Pete Fenzel take on Fackham Hall, a 2025 comedy inspired by one of OTI’s favorite shows: Downton Abbey. Written by the the British sketch writing team the Dawson Bros. in collaboration with comedian Jimmy Carr and his brother Patrick, Fackham is a romp of dirty jokes, harmless puns, upscale production design, scathing invective about traditional British social order delivered from a literal pulpit, vaudeville-esque farcical sequences, forbidden romance, and foreboding bassoon solos.

Stokes, Wrather and Fenzel muse on who the movie is...

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Jordan Stokes and Pete Fenzel slam the revolving door on the life and works of Chuck Norris, the six-time world karate champion who became a legend, again, for completely different things. They track his trademark emotional self-possession back from his troubled childhood, through his rise as a karate master, expressed in the code of ethics of his martial art, Chun Kuk Do, and into his oeuvre of roundhouse-kick-related spectacles and tall tales.

Jordan and Pete rewatch and break down two of his films: Good Guys Wear...

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Peter Fenzel welcomes Matt Wrather back to the podcast, and the two (with their two hands) overthink all aspects of coming back, whether to a childhood home, a beloved, classic film re-released in theaters, or the weekly rhythm of… a podcast. They contend with their internalized representations of the other as they wonder shared memories shape us, and how memories that shape us are shared. Organized labor is actually the key to it all.

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When Matt Belinkie, Mark Lee, and Peter Fenzel planned this podcast, the intention was to visit a variety of topics related to winter. But once Matt started talking about the BookTok sensation Ice Planet Barbarians, it was clear that there wasn’t going to be time for anything else. This sci-fi romance novel, self-published by Ruby Dixon in 2015, was the beginning of a 21 book series that tells the story of a group of human women who are abducted from Earth and marooned on a desolate world (referred to in...

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Matt Belinkie, Mark Lee, and Peter Fenzel power slide their way into a Child’s Garden of Video Games. Partial adoption of Mario Kart World has rattled but not shattered more than a decade of global Kart unity. A toddlers become little kids, assisted gaming experiences give way to assisted ones. As little kids grow into big kids, glorified Minecraft machines rediscover that they are gaming consoles that can explore other genres.

Matt, Mark and Pete recount their decades with Mario Kart, culminating in introducing the ga...

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Matt Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, and Jordan Stokes slip through a crack in reality and wind up in the Backrooms, which started out as a posting on 4Chan about “liminal spaces.” In 2022 a 16-year-old Youtuber with a freakish mastery of computer graphics produced a found footage video bringing the photo to life. And on the day the hosts recorded this podcast, indie movie studio du jour A24 debuted the first teaser for their feature-length adaptation.

This won’t be the first internet meme to get a movie; that d...

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Mark Lee, Jordan Stokes, and Peter Fenzel answer the anthem, energized by John Tesh’s live performance of “Roundball Rock” on the court at the NBA All-Star Game. They map the history of the track, from Tesh’s early days touring with Yanni, through his answering machine revelation of a song that would change the world, past the heyday of the NBA on NBC, through the valley toward the Dave Tesh SNL sketch, and back to the modern, nostalgic day.

They expand this consideration to sports jingles...

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Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink the orthogonal cultural spectacles of the 2026 Super Bowl, considering the halftime show headlined by Bad Bunny and the perennial cultural battlefield of the commercials, this year weaving narratives of authenticity amidst a sea of grifting. The halftime show is approached first through its stagecraft and camera work which create an transporting, immersive environment for TV audiences (though probably not for stadium-goes). The presence of Gaga is debated.

And what does it all tell us about America in 2026? Maybe...

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Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Mark Lee’s slide guitar, Jordan Stokes, and Matt Wrather use the power of music to channel the ancestors, bridge the gap between the living and the dead, and also discuss the 2025 Ryan Coogler film Sinners. It’s quite possibly a masterpiece; at the least, it’s certainly the best movie musical about vampires set in the Mississippi Delta that’s ever been made.

The panelists sink their teeth into the tradition of blues music in the rural south; what it means for diff...