Amazon and A24 Made a Buzzy New Show With a Rising Star. It’s Not What I Was Expecting.
Watching all eight episodes of Overcompensating—the new Amazon Prime Video comedy drama created by and starring social media star Benito Skinner—several questions crossed my mind. For instance: When exactly is this supposed to be set? We’re told right away that Skinner’s character Benny, a closeted gay college freshman, had his sexual awakening watching a loincloth-clad Brendan Fraser swing through the trees in George of the Jungle (1997), and that he’s around 9 in the year 2000 when Britney Spears’ “Lucky” was still in the countdown. By my math, that should mean Benny is heading off to college around 2010. Yet at one point in the show, Charli XCX—who is, along with Jonah Hill, among the series’ executive producers—shows up to inexplicably perform at this fictional college, singing songs that she released in 2012, 2014, and 2017. That would make Overcompensating … not a show that takes place today? But also not a specifically millennial period piece? It’s all very puzzling.
The bigger and more profound question, though, is not about Overcompensating’s time period, but about its core: Who, exactly, is this for? The show follows Benny, a former high school football star, valedictorian, and homecoming king, as he starts college and is quickly drawn to Carmen (Wally Baram), another outsider with whom he’s determined to have sex in order to quash his nascent homosexuality. Somehow, the show manages to be both too gay for straight audiences and too straight for gay audiences. It’s not current enough to hold a mirror up to Gen Z viewers, while it’s arrived too late for millennials who have zero desire to relive their college days. It’s simultaneously too self-serious to be a strict comedy and too surface-level to contain any great dramatic heft. What we’re left with, ultimately, is a show that is as confused as its repressed protagonist.
Perhaps it’s most useful to think of this production, a collaboration between A24 and Amazon MGM Studios, primarily as a vehicle for its star. Skinner, also known online as “BennyDrama7,” has built an audience of more than 2.7 million TikTok and Instagram followers through his celebrity impressions and sketches in which he regularly plays a variety of divas wearing a variety of wigs. (I first encountered him years ago in a series of skits in which he would terrorize his boyfriend’s astonishingly willing mother.) Unlike many other content creators or influencers, Skinner’s chief charms lie not in his looks—although he is blessed with a glowing complexion and a jaw that could cut glass—or in any particular lifestyle or aesthetic he’s trying to pitch. Mostly, he’s simply funny and fabulous, and boasts a sharp eye for celebrity culture. But as his following has grown, Skinner has clearly outgrown his outsider roots—you’re now just as likely to see him splashing in pools with bestie Charli XCX or on the red carpet at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party. Overcompensating is his big foray into Hollywood, a dream that he’s evidently had his eye on for years while building his following.
The problem is the product itself. After several years of development, Overcompensating arrives at a time when Skinner is 31 years old and can no longer plausibly pass for the teenage version of himself. (At certain points in the series, he looks more out of place than Ben Platt did playing a teen in 2021’s Dear Evan Hansen.) As Benny, Skinner is stiffer and his voice is lower than we’re used to on TikTok. Through a perpetually clenched jaw, he says things like, “I love pussy.” (Overcompensating was inspired by Skinner’s time studying at Georgetown University, where he didn’t come out as gay until his senior year, meaning there’s a strong chance there was a bit of method acting going on here.) Yet Benny is also a walking red flag for, as my friend’s aunt once put it, having a little sugar in the tank. He can’t quite master the straight-guy shibboleth of the “bro handshake-hug” and says suspect things like how he thinks Lorde is sexy. Skinner’s best episodes are when his character gradually begins to entertain the possibility of being his authentic self, especially as he falls deeper in love with classmate Miles (Rish Shah). It’s in these moments that we get all-too-brief flashes of the Skinner we know and like: looser, happier, maybe even a little camp. Don’t get me wrong: I know from experience that coming out takes time, but as a viewer I’m much more interested in what a story about that version of Benny might have been like.
As a show, Overcompensating shares a lot of DNA with The Sex Lives Of College Girls, the comedy that was recently canceled after three seasons on Max. But where that show had four central characters to care about, Overcompensating really only has two leads, Benny and Carmen, so it naturally feels smaller in comparison. That’s not to say there aren’t other people floating around (especially a bunch of TikTok stars in what may be a nod to Skinner’s roots—or it may just be him showcasing his famous friends). The mononymous actor Holmes is particularly strong as Carmen’s ditzy roommate Hailee (one of the show’s few truly funny characters), while Owen Thiele brings a quiet dignity to the role of George, the leader of the campus LGBTQ alliance, who can see Benny before he can even see himself. Adam DiMarco, from Season 2 of The White Lotus, is ever present as Peter, the frat boyfriend of Benny’s sister Grace (Mary Beth Barone), but he’s also emblematic of what’s wrong with Overcompensating: Spending any time with him at all, let alone eight entire episodes, can feel like a deeply unpleasant experience.
Skinner is talented. He is charismatic. He looks like a human Ken doll (complimentary), and I hope he has a big career ahead of him. But while Overcompensating is no doubt a deeply personal project for him, it fundamentally feels like the wrong one to launch him as a comic actor. Why not instead follow the path of, say, Issa Rae, who managed to parlay YouTube fame into Insecure, a much better comedy in part because it reflects who its creator was when she made it, not who she used to be? Lena Dunham did something similar when she gave the world Girls. As it is, though, Overcompensating has the weird distinction of being a show centered around a gay character that is somehow almost entirely about straight people. It is exhausting to spend hours and hours listening to frat boys, and yet by virtue of Benny’s desire to hang around these people, that is almost entirely what Overcompensating serves up. There are only so many utterances of “titty fuck,” “bitches,” “puss puss,” “bazinga,” and “tell the whores to roll through” that I can take—and, of course, the ubiquitous “No homo,” a message that Overcompensating seems weirdly insistent on delivering.
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