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‘Overcompensating’ Review: Benito Skinner’s Amazon Coming-of-Age Comedy Delivers College Hijinks with Laughter and Heart
‘Overcompensating’ Review: Benito Skinner’s Amazon Coming-of-Age Comedy Delivers College Hijinks with Laughter and Heart
It’s been several years since I graduated from college, so I’m unqualified to say with certainty whether or not it’s a regular occurrence for today’s savvy students to bond over their love of Ashlee Simpson, whose last album came out before some of them were born.
This unexpected celebration of the “Pieces of Me” auteur is one of several moments in Benito Skinner‘s new Amazon comedy Overcompensating that feel not exactly “wrong,” but more appropriate for juvenile millennials than Zoomers. Almost every pop culture reference in Overcompensating, including extended nods to Twilight, Glee and the reappropriated Megan Fox classic Jennifer’s Body, comes across, at best, as a thing that the main characters might have discovered from their much older siblings. Or parents.
Overcompensating
It all fits because the cast of Overcompensating projects, top to bottom, as several years older than the characters they’re playing, a mixture of freshmen and seniors at the fictional Yates University in Some Location, USA.
This is bog standard for college (and high school) TV shows: For every Generation or Skins, which counted members of the depicted cohort among their creators, you get 50 shows featuring 30something actors with receding hairlines complaining about their introductory college classes or packed with references that would have been cool for members of the writing staff several years earlier.
And the bargain we make is that if the writing, however dated, is sharp and if the cast, usually still unknowns, is charming enough, we’ll eventually stop obsessing over these matters.
Fortunately, Skinner’s Overcompensating eventually earns its suspension of disbelief.
Overcompensating doesn’t rewrite the playbook for coming-of-age comedies, or specifically coming-out and coming-of-age comedies. It doesn’t do anything you haven’t seen in Heartstopper or Love, Victor or The Sex Lives of College Girls or Grown-ish or Gen V (or Greek or Undeclared or Dear White People), but it quickly takes its place among the solid entries in the familiar genre.
It’s a confident and generally funny series-creating debut for well-regarded content creator Skinner, and the cast is packed with breakout performances from lesser-known co-stars, amusing turns from more familiar stars and cameos aplenty.
The concept is at least semi-autobiographical for the 31-year-old Skinner, who plays Benny, a high-school football star who moves from Idaho to wherever Yates University is supposed to be, hoping for that key thematic offering at the heart of nearly every college show: reinvention. College offers young people the chance to become who they want to be or at least the best version of themselves, leaving behind the restrictions imposed by high school and demanding parents (Connie Britton and Kyle MacLachlan appear in two episodes — one a very good Thanksgiving chapter — as Benny’s parents).
In high school, Benny was a jock and went through the masquerade of heterosexuality, but he arrives at Yates reasonably sure that he’s gay. He’s distracted by the attractive British classmate he keeps passing in classes and the quad (Rish Shah’s Miles) and feels drawn by the booth for the school’s gay student alliance. But whatever he’s feeling inside, Benny isn’t ready to come out, much less to kiss a guy, so he turns his attentions to the optics of hooking up with Carmen (Wally Baram), a fellow freshman driven by the need to get out of the shadow of her deceased brother. Fooling around, but then a very particular kind of friendship, ensues.
The ensemble of reinvention includes Benny’s older sister Grace (Mary Beth Barone), who has successfully evolved her previously unsatisfying image by losing weight, getting rid of her old friends and latching onto boyfriend Peter (Adam DiMarco, of The White Lotus season 2), a dickhead with business aspirations and a connection to the school’s most secretive fraternity. Carmen’s roommate Hailee (Holmes) hopes to sexually experiment her way into popularity and, like many of the characters in many a college show, she sees that process through a prism of regular episodic parties and concerts and class projects that offer an easy episodic structure.
Skinner, who wrote or co-wrote most of the season, has a clear affection for the genre he’s working in and has built Overcompensating as one of those shows that maintains a precarious balance between coarse — the language is very graphic, the sexuality semi-graphic and there’s at least one character whose defining trait is his regularly exposed penis — and big-hearted. He adds the additional complication, an awareness that when most people are in the process of figuring out their transition from one persona to the next, that unfinished persona in the middle can be a bit of an a-hole.
It’s got something to do with the narcissism required to identify and become the person you want to become, and Overcompensating is filled with characters who want to be good people and probably believe they’re good people, but in thinking primarily of themselves, they’re not really at their best. Basically, everybody in Overcompensating is constantly accidentally hurting everybody else, which doesn’t always make them likable as characters, but it surely makes them relatable as humans. (It helps that they’re constantly making pop culture references that I, not a Zoomer in case you haven’t guessed, recognize).
The effort to keep these characters as flawed as possible may alienate some viewers, left searching for somebody to “like” in an uncomplicated way, but it produces the desired discomfort across the eight-episode first season. While a show like Netflix’s new adaptation of Forever is fueled by romantic misunderstandings that don’t make much organic sense, the betrayals, ill-considered secrets and callous insults that fuel Overcompensating can easily be justified under the heading of “They’re bad people who might grow into good people.”
Now in this respect, it doesn’t help that Skinner looks like he’s already grown into whoever he’s going to become and probably should be a resident on a medical drama instead of a teen. But for a star/creator/writer/producer with this much clout on a project, he has refreshingly little ego when it comes to making Benny look as imperfect and silly as the show’s dramatic stakes require. He waffles between dorky and over-confident convincingly.
Baram, whose previous credits include writing on Betty — great show, watch it — and What We Do in the Shadows, almost immediately becomes the show’s heart, and she’s charismatic and human enough that I wish Overcompensating spent a little more time on Carmen’s recent tragic past. Barone seems stuck with the character the show has the least empathy for, but especially in the last two episodes, she finds ways to make poignant sense of Grace’s grouchiness.
Of the main characters, Overcompensating is less successful at making Miles into much more than an enticing object of affection for Benny, while the whiplash attempts to develop Peter don’t do DiMarco any favors.
Skinner, showrunner Scott King and directors Desiree Akhavan and Daniel Gray Longino have very quickly populated the show’s secondary universe with a lot of briefly memorable parts, including for Kaia Gerber — who continues to carve out a niche as a remarkably good deliverer of deadpan scorn — and a bunch of cameos I won’t spoil other than to say that Charlie XCX is unsurprisingly great at playing an outsized version of herself. Even the recurring people in the background — the couple that won’t stop kissing, the girl who keeps having a breakdown in the library — give Yates the feel of a real place, even if this most definitely was not a show filmed with ample access to a believable, real-life college campus.