At an orientation meeting on his first day of college, Benny is told, “You can be whoever you want to be here!” This is exactly what Benny wants — if only he can figure out who he wants to be. In high school, he was the star of the football team and the golden boy of his small Idaho town. But he was also deep in the closet — so deep that even in college, he can’t fully admit to himself that he’s gay.
This is the central tension of Overcompensating, the appealing new Prime Video comedy, created by and starring Benito Skinner as Benny. The eight-episode first season chronicles Benny’s first semester at the fictional Yates College, where he tries everything possible to convince the world — and himself — that he’s straight. He attempts to sleep with lonely fellow freshman Carmen (Wally Baram). He pledges a secret campus society led by Peter (Adam DiMarco), the narcissistic boyfriend of his older sister Grace (Mary Beth Barone), where it seems like half the initiation rituals are simultaneously penis-related and involve the phrase “No homo!” He goes out of his way to avoid Miles (Rish Shah), a cute boy on whom he develops an instant crush.
But he’s bad at all of this. He can’t get an erection with Carmen. His attempt at straight-guy braggadocio — ”I’m definitely gonna fuck some vagina tonight!” — is as stilted as it is gross. He can’t resist joining a film class just to be around Miles. And he’s convinced that every openly queer student — particularly George (Owen Thiele), who mans the counter at the campus store — can easily see the truth about him that he doesn’t want to acknowledge.
Like a lot of first-year comedies, Overcompensating starts out loud and broad. One of the first scenes has Benny’s father (Kyle MacLachlan) getting hit in the crotch by a frisbee while he and Benny’s mom (Connie Britton) are moving their son into his dorm. But like the good first-year comedies, it gets better as soon as it starts to relax and get to know the characters, as well as understanding the strengths of the actors playing them. By the time we get to a later episode where Benny and Carmen are simultaneously vomiting and suffering from explosive diarrhea, respectively, the gross-out humor actually feels earned because of how well Skinner and the other writers have established the two as complicated, likable people.
In fact, the series, co-produced by A24, is often at its best when it leans into its most sincere, even soapy side, and looks at how Benny isn’t the only one at school trying to act like someone he’s not. Carmen is still grieving the loss of her old brother. Grace struggles to realize her entire life has become subordinate to Peter, and that he’s an obnoxious loser who doesn’t remotely deserve her. And even Peter turns out to have more depth than it seems at first.
Charli XCX oversees the music, and also plays herself in an episode. Other notable guests include James VanDerBeek as basically the Wooderson of the secret society, Las Culturistas hosts Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang as a gay couple Benny meets when he begins experimenting with the apps, and Megan Fox as herself. Or more specifically, Fox plays a fantasy version of herself on the poster Benny keeps on his dorm room wall as part of his hetero cosplay, who periodically comes to life to help him talk through his problems.
All the big names are fun, though the show’s best and most consistent source of laughs is Carmen’s roommate Hailee (played by the actor and comedian Holmes), a larger-than-life blonde who would seem like a vapid caricature if she didn’t have periodic moments of extreme insight, and if her more superficial moments weren’t so strange. (In one episode, she tries to go viral by smearing yellow paint on her mouth and inviting Blake Lively to do the “Speak Up Bitch Challenge,” but has no idea what cause it’s for, other than spreading awareness about “silence.”)
Most of the cast is in their late twenties or early thirties (Skinner is 31), and there’s no real effort to make them look younger. But there’s also a long tradition of college and high school shows starring grown-ass adults, and the actors are charming enough to make it not really matter. (You just have to ignore that the pop-culture references tend to be much more millennial than Gen Z.) Baram is a writer (Shrinking, What We Do in the Shadows) with no real acting experience, but she and Skinner have excellent chemistry, and the show is smart about not letting Carmen be Benny’s unwitting beard for too long.
Skinner based the show on his own life. He has a huge audience on TikTok and Instagram, where he came to fame during the pandemic as Benny Drama, and where more than a million followers apiece now watch the comic sketches he writes and performs. The track record of social media stars translating their success to television isn’t great — sometimes because their material just doesn’t work at greater length, sometimes because their audience doesn’t care much about traditional television, while TV viewers don’t know who they are. Overcompensating is good enough to have a shot at bucking that trend — I’d never heard of Skinner before this, and wound up enjoying it a lot after a few episodes — and certainly has plenty of backing from more mainstream stars. (Jonah Hill is another producer, though he doesn’t appear onscreen.) With any luck, it will stick around long enough for Benny to tell the world who he really is.
All eight episodes of Overcompensating begin streaming May 15 on Prime Video. I’ve seen the whole season.
