Benny Scanlon, the protagonist of the new comedy “Overcompensating,” is the kind of boy mothers don’t know to warn their daughters about. Tall, handsome, and polite, Benny—played by Benito Skinner—checks a near-comical number of boxes: valedictorian, football player, homecoming king. The Prime Video series opens on Benny’s first day of college, where he instantly clicks with a girl named Carmen (Wally Baram) at orientation. He’s eager to get it on, but his driving motivation isn’t lust or connection. Benny is a closeted gay guy who craves the acceptance of straight dudes—so he brings Carmen back to his dorm and fantasizes about a boy back home in order to get aroused by the half-naked girl in front of him.

“Overcompensating” is about the immense temptation to keep up such an act, even as the lack of authenticity becomes corrosive. Skinner, who created the series with elements drawn from his own life, is a particularly sharp satirist of the relentless policing of masculinity by other men. Knowing how to execute a bro-y handshake correctly is treated as a matter of life or death; in an Intro to Film Studies class, every single male student claims one of the “Godfather” movies as his favorite. Small talk among guys—even strangers—amounts to asking if the other party’s got some, getting some, or planning to get some. (Subjected to one such interrogation, Benny is quick to assert that he’s on the case, declaring, in language that no one who actually has sex would use, “It’s gonna be a porkfest.”)

The pressure to conform to traditional masculinity isn’t new terrain—but the canon of queer television is still slim enough that “Overcompensating” ’s ideas feel fresh. The comedy joins a small group of shows, including 2023’s “Fellow Travelers,” that explore the double-edged privileges of the closet, which allow those inside to participate in homophobia and misogyny to bolster their own status. Benny isn’t a bad guy, but his desperation to fit in leads him to lie about his night with Carmen and to studiously avoid Miles (Rish Shah), the cute cinephile he’s crushing on. Skinner, perhaps best known until now as an internet comedian, smuggles in his commentary on gender relations and sexuality via absurdist sequences and an impressive joke density. The series’ semi-camp, semi-sincere tone is embodied by the pilot’s use of the 2000 Britney Spears track “Lucky,” with its recurring refrain: “She’s so lucky, she’s a star / But she cry, cry, cries in her lonely heart, thinking / ‘If there’s nothing missing in my life / then why do these tears come at night?’ ”

“Overcompensating” ’s timeliest insight is that, for many young people, sex has become such a desirable thing to have done that it’s nearly impossible to have fun doing it. Carmen and Benny both gain a level of cachet around campus for having (ostensibly) slept together, but the encounter itself is a slapstick disaster. And though he and Miles make eyes at each other, Benny’s friendship with Carmen emerges as the eight-part season’s real love story. Midway through the season, he opens up to her about his attraction to guys, and Carmen, in the midst of her own boy troubles, decides to distract herself by becoming Benny’s guide to queerness. (Her first Google search: “being an ally to a gay guy who you sort of hooked up with once but just came out to you.”) Benny’s all too happy to let her take the lead, even letting her message potential matches on his anonymous Grindr profile. His bumbling attempt to have sex with a man for the first time, in which his baby-gay explorations are quickly overshadowed by the psychosexual drama between the man and his husband, makes for the single funniest scene in a very funny series.

“Overcompensating” gradually shifts from a straightforward sex comedy to something emotionally richer. Much of that depth comes from an increasing focus on Carmen. She’d spent her teen-age years in thrall to her older brother, Michael—embracing everything from his hard-partying life style to his love of a violent video game in which the goal is to “kill all the sluts in Berlin”—in order to be deemed cool enough for him and his friends. His death in a car accident before her arrival at college leaves her reluctant to grapple with his shortcomings or to individuate herself: having prided herself on being a guy’s girl, she finds it difficult to relate to either gender on her own terms.

Benny is the exception, and the chemistry between Skinner and Baram helps paper over some of the series’ weaker aspects—namely, the awkward pacing and temporal dislocation of the show, which is seemingly set in the present day but awash in pop-cultural references from the aughts and the early twenty-tens. (Skinner first débuted “Overcompensating” as a one-man show in 2018.) But if there’s an ungainliness to the proceedings, there’s an openheartedness, too, as it soon becomes clear that the show’s title describes more than just the main characters. Once Benny stops pouring all his energy into maintaining his golden-boy persona, he realizes that almost everyone else is suffocating behind a mask, too—and finally starts to breathe more easily. ♦