In "Overcompensating," millennial memory is made meaningful

If you’re a certain kind of millennial, a specific type of gay guy, or a distinct combination of both, part of your Thanksgiving holiday is reserved for rewatching “Gossip Girl” holiday episodes. These 42-minute bombshells are just as delicious as a Turkey Day dinner itself (if not more, depending on the color of your aunt’s green bean casserole when it finally completes the hour-long shaky car ride to its destination). The Thanksgiving episodes are shocking and absurd, packed with scathing one-liner digs and soapy melodrama; feasts so good that you can’t help but come back for more.

It’s no secret, then, why Benito Skinner’s new Prime Video series, “Overcompensating” — about a college freshman (Skinner) trying to hide his sexuality at his new school — so freely borrows the punchy structure of this specific sect of “Gossip Girl” episodes. Skinner is a gay millennial, and in the run-up to the release of his television debut, the internet hasn’t let him forget it. The series’ first trailers and even some of its initial reviews faced a wall of unfair digital homogeneity. Most of the responses online were about how the cast looks too old to be in college, an objective fact that’s perfectly easy to overlook in a show that’s already semi-farcical. (Never mind the fact that the “Gossip Girl” actors were in their mid-20s during their “college” years.)

But with “Overcompensating,” left-of-center realism is the whole point. The series’ title is a meta double entendre referencing the strife we put ourselves through just trying to keep up appearances, as well as Skinner’s creative style. The show is semi-autobiographical, and as its creator, writer and one of its executive producers, Skinner overcompensates for all of the things the closeted version of himself loved but was too afraid to be honest about growing up. Lady Gaga was sexy, but Skinner couldn’t like her music. Likewise, knowing every lyric of Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass” would be a dead gay giveaway. And forget being able to publicly prioritize the annual “Gossip Girl” Thanksgiving episode over a football game.

So, in one of the first season’s pivotal episodes, Skinner creates his own version of a “Gossip Girl” Thanksgiving, complete with all of the drama worthy of an Upper East Side holiday — this time, in Idaho. The episode is a celebration of all of the cultural references that make up our creative oeuvre, the kind that stay with us long past our most formative adolescent years. In “Overcompensating,” Skinner makes up for lost time by proudly wearing his influences on his sleeve, and the result is a refreshingly funny and honest look at how important it is to honor every version of ourselves, no matter how cringeworthy those versions are when we look back.

By the time the holidays roll around for Skinner’s character, Benny Scanlon, in Episode 7, college life has already proven itself full of surprises. He’s dropped most of his business courses to pursue film studies instead; his sister Grace (Mary Beth Barone) has broken up with her deadbeat frat boy beau Peter (Adam DiMarco) and made it everyone else’s problem; and Benny’s freshman orientation buddy Carmen (Wally Baram) has become his best friend and the first person he’s come out to. But Benny and Grace’s flighty, overbearing parents, Kathryn (Connie Britton) and John (Kyle MacLachlan), don’t know a thing about any of this. As far as they’re concerned, Benny is rushing a frat and working toward becoming a hedge fund bro, and Grace’s seemingly perfect ex-boyfriend is still softening her hard edges. When the kids tote Carmen along for a Scanlon family Thanksgiving, it’s only a matter of time before everything blows up in their faces.

Kyle MacLachlan, Benny (Benito Skinner) and Connie Britton in "Overcompensating" (Courtesy of Prime). Anyone familiar with a “Gossip Girl” holiday knows these beats perfectly. The seeds are planted throughout the first part of the season, and the drama is reaped just in time for fall harvest. In the original CW version of that show — we don’t discuss the abhorrent two-season HBO Max reboot in this house — there were disgraceful letters left in coat pockets, bland sweet potatoes, druggings made to look like accidental overdoses and teen angst flareups leading to bulimia relapses. Season 1 even featured Leighton Meester’s Blair Waldorf in a frenzy because her own recently out father wouldn’t be home for the holiday. The histrionics would often play themselves out with a major music moment, like broken families coming together over Vanessa Carlton’s “Nolita Fairytale” or the epic dinner table reveals scored to Jason Derulo’s Imogen Heap-sampling “Whatcha Say.”

Skinner is a student of these unforgettable teen soaps. His early career as a comedian and social media parodist was rife with “Gossip Girl” spoofs that sent up the show’s most ridiculous tropes, and the promotional images for “Overcompensating” look like “Skins” ads and the infamous “Gossip Girl” cover of “New York Magazine” rolled into one. Make no mistake, Skinner has an intentional eye for detail that translates to a knack for serialized narrative writing. He understands precisely how to tee up a plotline that will be unspooled later in the season, and knows exactly when to make that reveal the most satisfying it can possibly be for viewers. All of the pieces are in place. Skinner just has to move them around the board. And when he does, they collide with all of the same calamity found in the best, bawdiest teen soaps from the mid-aughts.

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But “Overcompensating” is a comedy first and foremost. The laughs have to be served before any of the delectably dramatic desserts. Finagling MacLachlan and Britton is a major coup for a small-but-mighty show like this one. Both actors love an inane, scene-stealing role — think MacLachlan in “Portlandia” or Britton in “American Horror Story” and “Nashville” — but here, they get to really chew scenery. MacLachlan’s doting dad, John, is handling retirement by trying to work on himself, specifically with Invisaligns, garbling his speech. Kathryn, on the other hand, is filling up her days with a part-time position at the local mall’s J.Crew outlet and taking care of eight chow chow puppies she’s named after Maroon 5 songs. (Britton excitedly exclaiming, “That one’s ‘Payphone!”’ got one of the season’s biggest laughs out of me.) “Overcompensating” doesn’t necessarily need this duo’s star power, given that the series boasts cameo appearances by Charli XCX and Megan Fox, and features a slew of cast members with significant online followings. But Britton and MacLachlan certainly help draw an audience. For an original streaming show in its first season, viewership is pivotal.

Wrangling that audience is half the battle, and when he has them in the palm of his hand with a quick succession of punchlines, Skinner flips the script to show off his dramatic chops. “Overcompensating” deftly balances its innate absurdity with a whole lot of earnestness, creating a silly, strangely gripping rhythm that makes the show uniquely watchable. Skinner might be a 31-year-old making a show about college-aged teenagers, but he mirrors the collegiate experience with a vulnerability most contemporary sex comedies haven’t quite been able to master.

"Overcompensating" (Sabrina Lantos/Prime)The night before Thanksgiving, Benny, Grace and Carmen use their fake IDs to hang out at a bar where all of their former high school classmates are doing the same. These are the people who made the siblings’ lives hell. Benny was forced into the closet by the homophobic jocks that gleefully threatened to gaybash anyone who didn’t adhere to the heteronormative hierarchy, and Grace got slapped with the nickname “Disgrace” after a nude photo was spread among the same crowd. As Carmen watches them navigate the bar, she sees firsthand how the conservative Idaho environment they grew up in turned her hosts into rigid conformists. But Benny and Grace don’t live in their small town anymore. They made it through four years of high school hell, and with a few months of freedom under their belt, their resentment for all the lost time reaches a simmer.

Like those “Gossip Girl” Thanksgiving episodes, Skinner works up to a spectacular grand finale, one sweeter and more surprising than one might expect from “Overcompensating.” At the bar, Benny runs into Sammy (Lukas Gage), an old friend who was, once upon a time, almost Benny’s first romance with another boy. A moment of straight guy, testing-the-waters flirtation nearly culminated in a kiss until Benny shoved Sammy off of him, too cowardly and closeted to follow through. Now, he has the chance to make things right. And at the same time, Grace has the opportunity to stick it to everyone who taunted her until the day she left for college.

Recalling a poster of My Chemical Romance’s “Welcome to the Black Parade” she saw on the ceiling of Grace’s childhood bedroom, Carmen puts the song into the bar karaoke rotation under Grace’s name. After some initial hesitation, Grace realizes she has nothing to lose and takes to the stage, ready to give the song her best Gerard Way, full-throated glottal enunciation. Barone goes for broke performing, and when her rendition is intercut with Benny leading Sammy into the bar bathroom to share their first gay kiss, the climactic scene becomes electrifying. The sequence is a tribute to the feeling of pure liberation that comes with stepping into who you really are for the first time, as Grace and Benny do together across the bar. The scene is as ridiculous and knowingly corny as it is genuinely moving. And by using a classic song from his and Barone’s own adolescent experience, Skinner imbues the track with all of the same emotional resonance you’d feel screaming it in the car with friends, desperately wishing it could soundtrack those big moments in your life that just haven’t happened yet. In “Overcompensating,” these songs can be the soundtrack, they can be the fantasy. Here, “Welcome to the Black Parade” is Skinner’s (semi) real life, molded into his very own “Gossip Girl” Thanksgiving episode needle drop.

The moment ends, of course. Nothing so great can ever last forever, but the high persists well after the fact, when Benny swings at a football player for calling Sammy a f*g. The next day, Benny’s got a shiner and Grace has a hangover, but the ecstasy from their triumphant night lingers. It’s not quite enough for Benny to come out to his mom that day, but their bad behavior does trigger some shocks from Kathryn and John, revealing just how much they’re overcompensating for their own perceived faults.

It’s a big bow on this pseudo “Gossip Girl” holiday. But by its end, this episode of “Overcompensating” doesn’t feel so much like a reverent ode to its television inspiration as it does something entirely new. All art is an amalgamation of something else that came before it, a piece its creator saw and loved in such a specific way that the feeling pushed them to create art of their own. When you’re a teenager, everything is inspiring, arousing, heartbreaking and hilarious. You sit at the edge of your emotions at all times. You don’t consume media; media consumes you. Every song, movie and television show that you love becomes an integral, inextricable part of your personality — even when you’re putting on a show, trying to act like you’re someone you’re not, as Skinner did in high school. Our influences make us who we are. Sometimes it just takes a while to figure out who that is.