Given everything that’s happened this year, we’ve decided not to publish our usual gift guide. It’s a fun tradition and a great way to support Overthinking It, but if 2020 has taught us anything it’s how fragile any number of institutions and industries have proven to be, and how many things need support besides our little website.
Instead, we put our heads together to overthink of the most Overthinking It cause we could put our support behind. We settled on The Actors Fund, a national non-profit organization benefitting everyone in entertainment. The Actors Fund provides a range of services—workshops and training, social services, low-cost housing, a care home—as well as direct financial support to anyone in the entertainment industry who needs help. Given that these are the people who produce the work that nourishes and sustains Overthinking It, it’s the perfect way for us to give back during the holiday season.
Here’s what you do
Join your smart, funny friends from the Internet and make a contribution to The Actors Fund on his page. Give generously!
Overthinking It will cover credit card processing fees and pool individual contributions into one (hopefully) large donation.
And that’s not all. Overthinking It will match the your gift 1:1 (up to $1000 total) to double the effect of our community’s support.
And here’s what Santa will bring you
For every $25 the overthinking it community contributes, we will watch one (1) bad holiday movie and write or podcast about it.
That’s right: We’ll start at the beginning of the 2020 Hallmark Christmas Movie catalog and take it right through Netflix’s A Christmas Prince VI: The Undiscovered Fictional Country That Has a Developed Economy But Is Somehow Still A Monarchy. We’ll travel with high-powered lawyers back to the small towns that reared them; we’ll get snowbound in a mountain chalet with nothing but a curiously attractive ski-bum for company; we’ll seem to neglect our families until an adorable puppy introduces us to Santa Claus and teaches us the reason for the season. And we’ll produce a review of each movie—and, who knows, maybe a bonus podcast about the experience. Magical things happen this time of year.
If together you contribute $250, that’s ten holiday movies. If the community makes it to $500, that’s twenty. God help us if we raise $1,000 (which we’ll double to $2000) — we’re going to have to quit our jobs and do nothing but watch the Hallmark Channel until 2021 puts 2020 out of its misery.
Thank you for your generosity. And Happy Holidays.