Dr. Horrible or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate Nerd Culture and Myself

An adventure in hate-watching

I strongly suggest watching the three episodes of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog before reading this. They have been edited together as one forty-minute short film here.

---

In our media-saturated lives, it’s natural to view socio-political changes and progress through the movies, television, and music we guzzle down like Big Gulps. While shows and albums don’t actually create the historical trends which dominate their eras, they can and do reflect what’s going on in ways both flattering and not. Consequently, academia from the eighties onwards moved away from its intense focus on works of “high-brow” art (the classic “dead white male” canon, bar the occasional Virginia Woolf or Richard Wright figure) towards an analysis of “popular art.” Initially, this trend was spurred as much by transgressive novelty as anything else (“What if we treated Dallas or Thriller in the same way as Shakespeare?”) but quickly became rampant in the humanities, with its theories dripping down in increasingly bastardized form from ph.d candidate theses to prerequisite undergraduate classes to the bowels of Tumblr and Reddit.

Unfortunately, this has created a glut of cheap video essays and articles by attractive-but-vacant twenty-somethings with titles like “Queering Nemo: A Decolonial Analysis of Shark Tale” and “Nancy Drew, Carceral Girlhood, and the Death of Third Places.” While there is certainly a time and place to consider the ways formulaic cartoons and young adult novels reflect and perhaps subtly critique the issues of the day, in its YouTube/Substack format it’s mostly reduced to classic clickbait self-prostitution, bereft of genuine thoughtfulness, wide as a puddle and just as shallow. I, personally, don’t want to self-prostitute myself in such a fashion, and the idea of becoming a so-called “cultural commentator” fills me with a distinct, lingering nausea. Yet sometimes, something does capture the zeitgeist and reflects something not only about its own era but the greater story of contemporary life. It’s even better if the object of analysis has been rendered half-forgotten by the vagaries of the Discourse. I’m referring, of course, to Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.

The good doctor’s antics were unleashed upon the world in July 2008 — an interesting time, at least in the sense of the apocryphal Chinese proverb. Self-funded by Whedon, the three-episode, web-only miniseries was written during the 2007-08 WGA Strike as a way to produce something he was passionate about without violating the rules of the strike. It debuted in the midst of a total economic meltdown, as millions were in the process of losing their homes, businesses went under on a weekly basis (including the supposedly “too big to fail” financial firms who created the whole mishegoss in the first place), and an entire generation of college students graduated into a world with almost no jobs available. George W. Bush was the most crippled of lame ducks, a man whose party was almost certain to lose the White House in November (and, of course, did). The massive Iraq troop surge was tapering off, and Americans were increasingly tired of fighting wars in the Middle East while things went down the shitter at home. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight dominated the box office; its vision of a quasi-anarchist Joker glorying in chaos and societal collapse while fighting against a militarized city government struck a chord among a generation of young people seeing their futures evaporate before them.  

Simultaneously, the nerd’s status in mass culture rose exponentially. Alongside the aforementioned Dark Knight, Jon Favreau’s Iron Man was a surprise smash hit, inaugurating the MCU, which would spend the next decade or so gradually suffocating the life out of mainstream American cinema. While Nolan’s Batman movies were relentlessly dark and edgy, Iron Man had a cheeky sense of humor and rapid-fire dialogue which placed it in a realm of escapism — just the thing for a recession-and-war-weary audience (notably, subsequent superhero movies — both MCU and non-MCU — would largely follow in Favreau’s footsteps rather than Nolan’s). The Big Bang Theory debuted the previous year, and while its depiction of “nerd culture” (not to mention autistics) was widely derided, it was a mammoth success and alongside a culture of techno-optimism fueled by the debut of the iPhone and the ascent of Facebook turned the nerd from an object of derision into an aspirational figure. 

Joss Whedon was perfectly situated to profit handsomely from this situation. He had already achieved status as a “nerd god” who managed to become incredibly successful while still being a nerd at heart (never mind that he was a third-generation TV writer), loading shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel (shout out to Philly’s own David Boreanaz) with quippy references to nerd culture and meta discussions of fictional tropes (which is inherent catnip to nerds, who like feeling superior to the things they enjoy). Only four years after Dr. Horrible — and with a new, ostensibly more progressive president at 1600 Pennsylvania  — Whedon himself joined the MCU by directing The Avengers, a goliath success which truly ushered in the MCU’s stranglehold on the box office. Whedon himself is now disgraced; he wasn’t MeToo’d so much as MeanToo’d, similar to Ellen DeGeneres. Whedon play-acted as a male feminist ally raised by a feminist mom who supported liberal political causes, but he was privately harsh and bullying to the actors and writing staff on his shows and movies — especially if they were women; he also carried out a series of turbulent relationships and affairs marked by manipulation and ghosting. By his own admission, Whedon’s mother — while brilliant — was also controlling and struggled with personal boundaries, and it seems to me like he’s the BPD son of a BPD mom whose carefully cultivated public image as the rare man who “gets” women’s struggles primed him for an eventual downfall when his private indiscretions and tantrums were exposed (I encourage everyone to read this article, which is nearly Shakespearean in its scope and content).

Given Whedon’s own personal life and the conditions of the world c. summer 2008, it’s not hard to see Dr. Horrible as some kind of weird watershed moment. The plot itself is simple: Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris) is a wannabe supervillain who wishes to join the prestigious and exclusive “Evil League of Evil”; in ordinary life, he disguises himself as Billy, a socially awkward everyman. He vies for the affections of Penny (Felicia Day), a cute girl and advocate for the homeless he sees at the laundromat, with Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion), an attractive and beloved but empty-headed superhero. Penny chooses to date Hammer rather than Horrible, sending the latter into a jealous tail-spin ending with him accidentally killing Penny while trying to take down Hammer. Horrible then receives entry into the Evil League of Evil, but at the personal cost of killing the woman he loves. 

Additionally, the miniseries is a musical — hence the “sing-along” part of the title.

Dr. Horrible has dated quite badly. Some of the gags are amusing, but the whole thing is smothered by the “well, that just happened” style of millennial/Gen X humor which Whedon helped make ubiquitous and is now treated with derision by zoomers. The songs, too, aren’t necessarily all bad, but since the social standing of the theater kid rose in tandem with the nerd (although with less social respect — perhaps because there are fewer theater kids in San Jose and Cupertino, relatively speaking), the cringier lyrics don’t seem just out of place but downright embarrassing. Dr. Horrible’s melding of the nerd/theater kid aesthetic is almost total; Harris has Broadway experience, while his sidekick Moist (again exploiting another tired touchstone of late aughts/early tens humor) is portrayed by Simon Helberg, best known as Leonard from the aforementioned Big Bang Theory.

It’s odd, looking back from our 2024 vantage point — mired in the kind of crisis, despair, and severe nihilism which even Heath Ledger in his Joker-inspired, heroin-fueled death hallucinations couldn’t imagine — that Horrible is the ostensible protagonist of the series. Much like Whedon, he’s publicly a funny-but-shy nerd but privately angry and bitter, but the general depiction of him is positive; he’s a sensitive soul who actually understands Penny, goddamnit, unlike that dick-swinging, macho Captain Hammer who just uses her and probably can’t even spell his own name! In the age of incels — where redpill ideology seems increasingly mainstream, and the “nice guy” is an object of almost universal derision (even — especially? — by the aforementioned incels), Horrible doesn’t come across like a tortured artist; he seems more like Elliot Roger, an angry little man who resents the woman he desires even more than his romantic rival. Hammer’s just doing what he’s allowed to do because he’s a Chad blessed by genetics; it’s Penny who’s the dumb bitch who’s not intelligent enough to understand greatness when she sees it. Given Whedon’s pop-deconstructionist tendencies, it makes perfect sense that he’d cast Harris — who, despite being gay, was reaching his “ladies’ man” apotheosis as How I Met Your Mother peaked in popularity — as a quirky dork with a dark side. It’s as if Whedon needed to publicly embarrass others to feel confident about himself and then pass off the obvious psychological issues as metacommentary.  

Yet we forget just how stupid Dubya era pop culture was. Today, it’s easy to look back at things like Idiocracy, American Idiot, The West Wing, and the Jon Stewart-era Daily Show and cringe a little bit: God, we think, this shit is so arrogant and immature. Why was it even popular to begin with? This mentality only makes sense in the post-Obama era, when nerd and theater kid culture became absolutely mainstream, when board game cafes sprouted in gentrifying urban neighborhoods and Hamilton was a Broadway-and-Spotify smash. Even if many of them were at heart resentful and pretentious, the nerds and theater kids stuck out like a sore thumb in an age where the president was a Texas frat boy surrounded by a coterie of bloodthirsty warhawks and evangelical whackjobs, where gay marriage was only legal in a handful of states and legalization nationwide still appeared like a far-off possibility. Culture wars primarily revolved around what anger over modern science: intelligent design, STEM cells, and the Terri Schiavo case were all prime fodder for cable news verbal slugfests. The tragedy of 9/11 was weaponized and an atmosphere of extreme us-versus-them patriotism ruled the day; support for the Iraq War — whose casus belli was complete horseshit — was near-universal (even in liberal quarters) until it became clear that Dubya created a new Vietnam; the (Dixie) Chicks’ condemnation of the president led to their blacklisting from the country music industry and their designation as “unpatriotic” or “traitorous.” Hell, this was an era when many businesses — including the Congressional cafeteria! — changed the name of “French fries” to “freedom fries” because France refused to participate in the invasion of Iraq.  Pop culture highlights included butt rock, Call of Duty, 24, Family Guy, and a slew of reality television and competition shows. In this universe, the works of Aaron Sorkin and Mike Judge — or, indeed, Joss Whedon — came off as positively erudite and “intellectual” in an age of such crudity.

Even the show’s format captured the zeitgeist. Each episode featured vlogs from Dr. Horrible, chronicling his frustrations at his failed attempts at global conquest and lack of romantic success with Penny. While vlogging is now a ubiquitous form of parasocial bonding for atomized zoomers, in 2008 it was truly novel and appeared potentially groundbreaking, allowing for a level of emotional honesty and directness not previously found in other forms of media. The now half-forgotten Ze Frank was a genuine internet celebrity with a strong offline fandom, and the Vlogbrothers channel boosted John Green’s profile enough to make those “Okay? Okay.” Fault in Our Stars sweatshirts annoyingly ubiquitous in my high school c. 2014-16.

I really resented Dr. Horrible and I watched the whole thing half-embarrassed, but I’m nearly certain that embarrassment was as much with myself as the show’s content and format. Like most elder zoomers, I came of age at a time when millennial nerd/theater kid culture was at its apex, with other teen subcultures were tarred as “edgy” or “exclusionary,” running counter to the self-indulgent “let people enjoy things” ethos of the day. If you were a weird kid, your two options were to either join the Lazytown meme edits crew, the Cartoon Network watching crowd, or both (i.e. me). Once the pandemic and subsequent backlash against all things “soy” and “nerdy” came — as it inevitably would — the same wannabe nerds and theater kids began drooling over David Lynch and Elliott Smith rather than GradeAUnderA and Dear Evan Hansen. The deepest shame — theirs and mine — is remembering hanging out with people who watched h3h3 videos in class and self-identified as “Hamiltrash.” I hate Dr. Horrible because when I look at him I see me and all the weird ex-friends I haven’t spoken to in years. I hate looking at Joss Whedon’s plump, Woody Harrelson-esque countenance and noticing we both have red hair. I hate the entire concept of a “sing-along blog” because I resent that I was forced to pretend that Stranger Things and Magic: The Gathering were cool for even a solitary second. I hate Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog because I can see how in the depths of despair it created the future, and that future was terrifying.

Nathan Fillion’s actually got a decent singing voice, though.