The New Sex Comedy ‘Overcompensating’ Is A Late 20th Century Throwback in the Most Satisfying Possible Way
Last week, The Discourse spent a couple of days being dominated by a New York magazine article with a title as stark as it was alarming: “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College.” It turns out A.I. tools make it so easy for students to let robots write their papers that any moral qualms they might have about it go flying out the window. But before you fall into a terror spiral about future bridges you may want to drive on being designed by engineers who got their degrees thanks to ChatGPT, consider soothing your nerves with a college sitcom in which no one is using A.I. to plagiarize their homework because homework barely comes up at all.
Overcompensating may be set in the present day and revolve around a closeted queer kid, but it’s a late 20th century throwback in the most satisfying possible way.
Overcompensating was created by and stars Benito Skinner as Benny, an incoming freshman at the fictional Yates University. In high school, Benny was a football hero, Homecoming King, his class valedictorian and the star of his family. Benny also came very close to kissing a male classmate (Lucas Gage) at least once that we see in a recurring flashback. While a lot of students come to college with a plan to reinvent themselves surrounded by people who don’t know them, Benny has chosen to enroll at the same school as his older sister Grace (Mary Beth Barone), and is so determined to stay the course of being the person everyone has always thought he is that one of the first things we hear him say, practicing in the mirror, is “I’m Benny, I love pussy.”
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As the season goes on, Benny’s relationship with Carmen (Wally Baram) goes from hookup to friend, which he needs to discuss his possibly attainable crush object Miles (Rish Shah); Benny also evolves on the question of how much effort he wants to expend keeping his big secret. No less an eminence than A24 produced the show; among its executive producers is Jonah Hill.
Skinner is better known as @bennydrama7 to his 1 million+ followers on Instagram, where his comedy clips blew up during COVID. His status as a viral comedy hitmaker landed him (for instance) a promotional video for Jennifer Aniston’s hair care line starring Aniston herself alongside Skinner, the latter playing Jenni The TMI Hair Stylist.
Overcompensating operates on a deeper level than an online sketch, though. Like the show’s “Benny,” Skinner arrived at college closeted and remained that way until his senior year, and the show’s loosely autobiographical elements give Skinner touching vulnerability in the role. While shows like Glee (which gets name-checked in the second episode) and Degrassi portray queer adolescents surrounded by enthusiastic allies, Overcompensating feels like a more realistically complicated version of a teen’s tentative, agonized coming-out, slowed way down by the weight of Benny’s parents’ expectations and his own internalized homophobia.
Though this probably makes the show sound oppressively heavy or off-puttingly twee, Skinner and the rest of the credited writers — which include Mitra Jouhari (Big Mouth), Jordan Mendoza (Ziwe), Pat Regan (Hacks) and Scott King (a former head writer at MadTV) — bring us brilliantly filthy idiocy at every possible turn. When he’s trying to hook up with Carmen, Benny can only achieve an erection by imagining himself and Miles swinging on vines like Brendan Fraser in the formatively horny movie George of The Jungle. Carmen gets pink eye and suffers a terrible Edward Fortyhands injury. Both Benny and Carmen miss the better part of a Charli XCX (as herself!) show on campus when they separately have world-historical digestive issues and end up together voiding the contents of their GI tracts in the same men’s room. Both Grace’s boyfriend Peter (Adam DiMarco, who as a White Lotus alumnus is probably the cast’s biggest name) and Benny’s roommate Trey (Austin Lindsay) are fully nude on camera nearly as often as they’re clothed. Even hookups that are going well tend to include a hard fall or moderately serious contusions.
This is a show made by people who understand that the best college comedies are about making huge, hilarious, but ultimately inconsequential mistakes: Animal House and Back to School aren’t exactly sensitive (or even cognizant) of the queer experience, but their spirit runs through Overcompensating anyway.
Overcompensating also evokes the comedies of yesteryear in that their teen characters are played by actors who are comfortably in their 30s. I’m not here to body-shame anyone, but Benito Skinner has deeper crow’s feet than I do, and I was actually alive (BARELY) when the elderly Rydell High Schoolers of Grease first hit the big screen. Maybe it’s my bias as an aged person myself, but I feel like the cast we do have brings their life experience to their roles, adding dimensionality to their characters. Benny’s sister Grace seems like a one-note jerk when we first meet her, but as the season goes on, we find out how her reputation at home and her clearly being her parents’ distant second favorite child have made her settle for crumbs from Peter. For his part, Peter reads as a college celebrity destined to ruin the world once he lands his inevitable job in finance, but he’s also keeping corrosive secrets, and the mentorship he’s getting from the likes of alum Charlie (James Van Der Beek) is worse than useless. Carmen is still healing from the death of her beloved brother Michael — the first anniversary comes early in the season — making it all the more crucial for Benny to be a true friend to her. Even Carmen’s flighty roommate Hailee (scene-stealer Holmes) turns out to be secretly a biochem major and academic dynamo.
As Benny’s crush Miles, Rish Shah is the least charismatic of the series regulars, but that might be down to the fact that the story requires him to be a big enigmatic and hard to read; it’s possible that he could bring more to the proceedings once the story progresses past the cliffhanger the Season One finale leaves everyone on. But that is probably my biggest issue with the season: It’s only eight episodes long, and feels like it’s barely gotten started when we find ourselves, way too quickly, at the season finale. I know this is the way of things in the streaming era, but I wanted more. The least a show called Overcompensating should do is deliver us a season that feels big.
