Overcompensating has a lot of heart beneath its mile-a-minute jokes and dangling dicks
Anyone who went to undergrad will tell you that freshman year is basically a two-semester cringefest. But that’s what you get when you liberate a thousand-odd baby birds from their nests and leave them to fend for themselves.
Recent co-ed TV comedies like Max’s The Sex Lives Of College Girls have attempted to capture the anxious, horny spirit of this time, but have instead delivered artificial, constructed worlds that feel too shiny by half. Enter the new Prime Video sitcom Overcompensating, which conveys the messiness and awkwardness of early-college years—and is probably able to do so because it’s a personal project for creator Benito Skinner.
Skinner is better known as Benny Drama, the star of delightfully anarchic TikTok videos that took off during lockdown. So it’s extra satisfying to see him drop the act to play a version of himself at 18: a corn-fed Idaho hunk whose golden-boy veneer conceals an insecure guy crouched deep in the shadows of the closet. But when he’s left to his own devices at the fictional Yates University, Benny finds it harder and harder to pretend he didn’t grow up lusting after Brendan Fraser’s rockin’ abs in George Of The Jungle.
Desperate to prove to his queen-bee older sister, Grace (Mary Beth Barone), and her entitled, brotastic boyfriend, Peter (Adam DiMarco), that he’s straight as an arrow, Benny tries for a one-night stand with a fellow frosh named Carmen (Wally Baram). And though the sex is a no-go, the two become fast friends. She’s also a lost soul, struggling to figure out who she is beyond the family tragedy that defined her teen years. But Benny’s heart eyes are reserved for Miles (Rish Shah), a dreamy Brit he can’t stop crossing paths with.
Over the course of eight episodes that go down like spiked punch, Overcompensating pulls out all the stops. The sex is sweaty, the abs are chiseled, the drama is dramatic, and the comedy is greased lightning. But there’s clearly a lot of heart—and pain—behind the mile-a-minute jokes and dangling dicks. You feel hard for Benny whenever he lets himself be eaten alive by the alpha-male machine, or every time Carmen puts her trust in someone only to be betrayed. (The guest-star roster is ace, too, and includes Kyle MacLachlan, Connie Britton, Bowen Yang, James Van Der Beek, and Lukas Gage—and that’s not to even mention the drop-ins by the likes of Megan Fox and Charli XCX.)
As a millennial gay man who came of age in the Heartland, Skinner has a lot to say about enforced heteronormativity. Overcompensating is over-the-top by design. (In one scene, a gang of straight dudes rip their shirts open and beat their chests while objectifying women and smoking literal cigars.) But it also has a surprising amount of empathy for a character like Peter, the very model of a modern white bro. Though the show never excuses his loathsome actions, it hints at the better man he could have been if he hadn’t been brought up on a steady diet of toxic masculinity. (Much of that is thanks to smart writing and a layered performance by White Lotus alum DiMarco.)
As Benny, Skinner is equally as willing to debase himself for laughs as he is to bare his tender soul—and the catharsis is real. Like his character, he’s effortlessly charismatic; even at his worst, it’s impossible to stay mad at him. Baram, who’s written for shows like Shrinking and What We Do In The Shadows, matches Skinner in vulnerability and slapstick chops, which is doubly impressive considering this is her acting debut. Despite all the romantic drama, Overcompensating is ultimately a platonic love story about two outsiders finding a home in each other. Meanwhile, Barone (who, like Skinner and Baram, comes from the world of stand-up) is unafraid to peel away Grace’s matching cardigan set to reveal the vulnerable heart beating beneath.