Overthinking IT POP CULTURE BRAND
Overthinking It was cofounded by me in 2008, to cover pop culture with humor and in-depth analysis. Since then, we’ve received over 18.2 million pageviews and 1.8 million podcast downloads. Over the years I’ve written and edited dozens of articles, many of which have gone viral on social media. Below are four of my most successful Overthinking It projects.
Overthinking eurovision
This web series covers Europe’s biggest singing contest from an American perspective. We have released 91 episodes over five years, the large majority written and edited by me. The videos have been seen more than 1.5 million times on YouTube, and shared by many of the musical artists themselves.
Overthinking IT NEWSLETTER
For over a year I wrote a weekly newsletter which was sent to our thousands of subscribers. This was designed to be entertaining and informative, but also to drive engagement with the content on the site and promote paid products like merchandise and digital downloads. In addition to the writing, I did the graphic design and formatting.
‘Merica Madness
In the leadup to the 2016 election, I led a group of writers who collaborated on a book length series of essays about the greatest pieces of pop culture that have the word “American” in the title. Everything from American Idol to American Psycho was put under the microscope in essays combining history, theory, and humor.
The law & Order database
I enlisted the Overthinking It fandom to crowdsource a spreadsheet documenting the outcome of all 456 episodes of the original Law & Order TV show. My goal was to determine just how successful the prosecutors were, and whether this changed over the show’s 20 year run. It took two years of collecting data, but I was finally able to chart the show’s conviction rate and come up with some playful theories about real world factors that might have influenced it. The project garnered attention from many media outlets, including The Washington Post and Slate.