The AV Club’s Commentary Tracks of the Damned running feature includes the category “inevitable dash of pretension.” Which is what I immediately thought of when I read this:
The creators of NBC’s horror anthology series Fear Itself told reporters that they think president Franklin D. Roosevelt would have liked the title, drawn from his first inaugural address.
Mick Garris, the filmmaker who created the show, came up with it, producers said. (Speaking about the world’s various threats, Roosevelt famously said: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”)
“It was Mick Garris’ idea,” producer Keith Addis said in a conference call with reporters. “There was a lot of enthusiasm about the idea as soon as he mentioned it in one of the first meetings.”
Addis said of the late president, “One hopes he’d have a rich and wonderful sense of humor about it.”
It’s not as if it’s an obscure quote or anything, and it’s not like it hasn’t been used plenty of times before. I haven’t seen or heard much about the series, but I hope the rest of it is more original and less pretentious.