Ever wanted to relive your freshman year in college? Be sure to catch Overcompensating, a series created by and starring comedian/ TikTok sensation Benito Skinner based on his real life experiences. Now streaming on Prime Video, it follows a group of students at fictional Yates college as they stumble into early adulthood. Skinner himself plays Benny, a closeted football player from Idaho, struggling to accept his own sexuality and plagued by fear and self-doubt. Luckily, he meets Carmen (Wally Baram), a fellow freshman mourning the loss of her brother, who longs to find a community that allows her to be herself. The coming-of-age dramedy blends the real and the fantastical as Benny and his peers begin to find out who they are and what they truly want in life.
Over the course of 8 episodes, Benny and Carmen connect, confide in each other, fight, make up and ultimately reveal their true selves to one another against the backdrop of a wild freshman year. While Benny’s and Carmen’s friendship is the center of things, the supporting players often steal the show. Take for instance, Benny’s prickly sister Grace (Mary Beth Barone), who is also on a journey to discover the person she wants to be. A former goth/alt kid, Grace goes to Yates and becomes involved with the self-involved, arrogant Peter—who is part of the campus’ secret society called Flesh & Gold. Under his influence, Grace molds herself into his perfect girlfriend.
“Benny and I have worked together for a long time and he is always pushing me to go outside my comfort zone,” said Barone during a virtual press day. “As a standup comedian whose performance is very controlled and dictated by me, this felt like truly like letting go.” Thanks to Benny and some new/old friends, Grace—while never losing her acidic humor—starts to discovers her own self-worth and realizes that her own interests (My Chemical Romance, The Twilight Saga) are important. “Over the course of the season, you really start to learn why Grace is the way that she is,” said Barone.
Another standout character is Miles (Rish Shah), a British student whom Benny finds himself crushing on. As the two form a friendship, Benny longs for more, but is unable to read if Miles feels the same way. In another series, the role of a potential love interest could have been poorly drawn, but Skinner and Shah imbue Miles with his own insecurities. “Everyone wants to fit in, and Miles is just another kid who’s just lonely and lost,” said Shah. “He’s not just the boy next door or some mysterious guy. He’s a real human being.” While Shah often felt he was in his “own bubble with Benito” because the majority of his scenes are with Skinner, he believes viewers will “empathize with Miles as the season goes on.”
Benny wrestles with accepting his sexuality, and he has several fateful encounters with George (Owen Thiele), a member of the campus’ LGBTQ alliance. It’s clear to George that Benny is closeted, and Benny knows that George knows he’s gay, but the two never discuss it outright. George is a mentor that Benny desperately needs, even if Benny doesn’t always treat him the way he should. When asked if Thiele modeled his performance after anyone in his life, Thiele said he “didn’t actually have a mentor growing up who [he] could look up to.” “I feel like growing up, I was watching a lot of That’s So Raven, not even realizing that [star] Raven-Symoné was queer,” said Thiele. “I turned to her a lot for humor and depth and to make me laugh when I should cry and make me cry when I should laugh.”
Skinner’s brilliance is also apparent in the way he imbues each character with a rich internal life and dignity—even when they are acting crazy or throwing a tantrum. No character embodies that duality like Hailee (Holmes), Carmen’s scantily-clad, materialistic, seemingly vapid, always hilarious roommate. “It’s funny because a lot of people have been like, ‘I have a Hailee in my life,’ but it’s like, I was not hanging out with Hailees in college,” said Holmes. Over the course of the series, we learn that Hailee is the ultimate girls’ girl who always has Carmen’s best interest at heart. “She loves girls more than anyone,” said Holmes. “Being into makeup and clothes and fashion doesn’t make you stupid. She’s actually really, really smart.”
Ultimately, Overcompensating tells us that “finding yourself” is easier said than done and having a community around you certainly helps. The world that Skinner and his tribe have created in Overcompensating is peopled with characters that everyone can relate to because they are going through struggles that all of us have shared and finding strength in each other.
All 8 episodes of Overcompensating are now streaming on Prime Video