Arriving on a deserved wave of hype (and a Charli XCX co-sign) is Benito Skinner’s new college sitcom Overcompensating – streaming on Prime Video. You’ll ideally see plenty of yourself, your family and your friends in the show, writes Eliza Janssen.
Ah, college: a time for hooking up, finding your people, losing your inhibitions and enjoying the Happiest Years of Your Life…if you’re going by the brainwashed representation we’ve seen in Hollywood movies, that is. Everything from Animal House to Legally Blonde has promised fictional university students a new lease on life, freedom and fun that falls entirely flat once we move into our first dorm, or attend our first brain-draining lecture. Somebody has been lying to us, it turns out. Or does everyone have a miserable, socially terrifying time at college and merely tell these tall tales of campus greatness once they’ve come out the other side?
In Benito Skinner’s hilarious new sitcom Overcompensating, it turns out that even the attractive and charming American characters within these campus comedies are scared shitless: frat bros, party girls and wannabes alike are all paralysed with insecurity, the show reveals. It’s a very cute to-thine-self-be-true message, conveyed through biting cynicism, laugh-out-loud social observations, and characters who you’ll fall in love with against your best interest. Oh, and there’s a healthy dose of Charli XCX songs thrown in there, too: the Essex brat is credited as a producer, and even makes a good-natured cameo mid-season, playing herself as an arrogant diva.
We meet Skinner’s surrogate character as he prepares his own mask for college: “Hey, what’s up everybody,” he lies into a mirror: “I’m Benny, I love pussy.” The viral comedian is not the first thirty-something to play his own anxious teen self and he certainly won’t be the last, so director Daniel Gray Longino’s involvement is key, considering his work on another terrific coming-of-age comedy PEN15. A homecoming king and football jock desperate to delude himself into heterosexuality, Benny is quickly warned that those who don’t manage to bang someone on their first night of college are doomed to a fate worse than death: the campus improv team.
He beseeches the poster of Megan Fox on his wall for guidance, but further terrors abound: being discovered eating alone. Missing a high five and clumsily grabbing the recipient’s elbow instead. Flawlessly rapping Nicki Minaj’s Superbass and not realising it makes you look kinda gay. Benny’s ice-queen sister Grace (Mary Beth Barone) and her bonehead, Big Man on Campus BF Peter (The White Lotus season two standout Adam DiMarco) are peer pressure personified, and so the only salvation Benny can rely upon is his straight girl bestie Carmen (Wally Baram).
It’s wild that Overcompensating is Baram’s first screen role. Playing a gamer girl who chugs beer and wears hoodies, she could easily slip into a retrograde Pick Me position, but instead conveys warmth, down-to-earth humour and above all a sense of solace for her fellow lead Skinner.
One thwarted hookup and some intimate revelations later, Carmen and Benny become each other’s breathing space: “you are the only person I want to hang out with,” he finally admits to her, after faking it with so many awful fraternity cliques. There’s a brief stretch in the middle of the debut season where our co-protagonists aren’t speaking, and you desperately want them to bury the hatchet and get back to their familiar bitching together ASAP.
Overcompensating is not a supremely original show, in some ways advancing the catty melodrama of Euphoria or ageing up the sexual self-discovery aspect of Sex Education. It’s refreshing that all of the characters are necessarily older than those teen dramas, allowing for some adults-only hilarious setpieces (a botched threesome with Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers?!). I wish the show spent some more time developing Benny’s love interest Miles (Rish Shah) and I wish we spent more time in general with Carmen’s chaotic roommate Hailee (Holmes), just because she’s volcanically, scene-stealingly funny.
And I wish the show’s name was a wee bit less unwieldy…but you know what? The Sex Lives of College Girls faced that very same hurdle, and now it’s gone and left a notable, clever-college-comedy-shaped hole in the TV landscape!
Wicked and warm in turn, Skinner’s show confidently lays out a thesis for its first season: that everyone in college is lying, and once they realise they’re not alone in this, they might finally be allowed to be happy. To be themselves. A fabulous supporting cast of bonafide high-school movie graduates helps to bolster this idea: Grease’s Didi Conn, and Dawson himself James Van Der Beek! Did somebody say they don’t wanna wait for their life to be over?!
There’s a ripper late-season detour to Benny and Grace’s family home, too, where Kyle MacLachlan and Connie Britton play a pair of flailing middle-class empty-nesters to such an acute degree that you’ll want to call your dad right after watching. In fact, you’ll ideally see plenty of yourself, your family and your friends in Overcompensating… whether you like it or not.
