Overcompensating Is the Campus Comedy of the Year
The Sex Lives of College Girls may have ended, but campus comedy is still in session. Enter Overcompensating, a raucously funny, filthy-sweet debut from comedian Benito Skinner and showrunner Scott King, premiering this week on Prime Video. Inspired by Skinner’s own experiences, the sitcom follows Benny Scanler (played by Skinner), a closeted football player from Idaho, as he navigates his freshman year at Yates College––a fictionalized Georgetown, Skinner’s alma mater. Benny soon befriends Carmen (Wally Baram), a social outsider from New Jersey; with his sister Grace (Mary Beth Barone) and her boyfriend Peter (a spectacularly fratty Adam DiMarco) in tow, Benny and Carmen start to figure out who they are––and which cultural scripts they’re ready to leave behind.
And boy, are there scripts. Overcompensating treats heterosexuality and masculinity as performance art. It has a physical grammar, a choreography to how its characters walk, smile, touch, and dab. Scenes often veer into caricature, or as Corteon Moore, who plays Peter’s friend Gabe, puts it, “a heightened, violently passionate, homoerotic brotherhood.” Characters shout “no homo” at regular intervals, honk and holler, rip off their shirts, and make lewd gestures. It isn’t far off from the misguided, messy ways college students really try to connect and belong. “At that time in your life, everything feels like a performance,” Skinner tells Paste. “It’s a new performance for each person you’re with. That’s the game of all of these scenes.”
Benny and Carmen, both desperate to fit in, are deep in the game. Carmen, though, is bad at it. She parrots the slang she hears from other students––the secret lexicon of the Hot, Cool, Straight Girl––but it comes out garbled. Benny’s had more practice. He rehearses his straight-guy act in the mirror, lowering his voice and grinning through clenched teeth. He mimics Peter and Gabe’s howls and bird calls, delivering lines like “I love business” and “I love the night” with stiff sincerity, like a stack of children piloting a man-shaped suit. Over time, Benny starts to break character. At a party in episode two (“Who’s That Girl?”), he watches a group of students belt out Far East Movement’s “Like a G6.” He interrupts, demands they play “Super Bass” by Nicki Minaj, then raps the first verse to a stunned, silent room. Later, he tells Carmen he’s losing grip. “I’m not as good at [this] as I used to be,” he admits. Her reply: “Good.”
The closer Benny gets to Carmen, the less convincing his act becomes. Her friendship offers him a reprieve, a space where it feels unnecessary, even absurd, to do a “song and dance to prove his worth,” Baram says. That ease registers in Skinner’s performance. “Around Adam [DiMarco], I’m stiff,” he says. “The awkwardness comes from how much I’m putting on.” But with Baram, Skinner is looser, more playful. “I get to have more fun with my voice. I improvise the most in scenes with Wally [Baram], because that’s where I’m more myself.”