If nothing else, Overcompensating has the right title. All four of its main characters have secrets and traumas, and almost every storyline is about the efforts they go to to mask and bury them. And it really is overcompensating; what distinguishes the first season of this show from others I have seen is how tenaciously the leads cling to their constructed identities. It’s the defining choice of the show, and how you feel about it will probably determine whether Overcompensating works for you or not.

Our leads are Benny (series creator Benito Skinner) and Carmen (Wally Baram). Carmen and Benny meet on their first day at Yates College and quickly pivot to being BFFs after a failed hookup. There is a reason the hookup failed: Benny is gay. Carmen meanwhile is struggling to define herself following the death of her older brother and de facto best friend. We also follow Benny’s sister Grace (Mary Beth Barone), a junior, and her senior boyfriend Peter (Adam DiMarco). Grace’s problem is that Peter is a dudebro asshole with no redeeming qualities. This is Peter’s problem as well.

Of all of these stories it is Benny’s that moves the slowest. A golden boy in high school, he is still deeply closeted. While he eventually does come out to Carmen, it doesn’t happen until half way through the season, and any time he starts to fear that anyone else might clock his sexuality he retreats to performative masculinity. It’s very frustrating, though probably a fair representation of the gravitational pull of the closet for many a former Best Little Boy in the World. Carmen and Grace get better and more dynamic stories, though unfortunately both of them revolve around Peter, who is a real piece of shit. There are a couple of feints mid-season towards giving him a little more dimensionality, but, no, he’s just a piece of shit.

While the character based drama of Overcompensating is a qualified success, the comic elements are… a more qualified success. That comedy takes two forms: satires of campus life in the 2020s and generic hard-R sex and gross out material. I’m the wrong person to judge the sharpness of the campus stuff, but I’d say it’s generally a mixed bag. The first time we see an overly enthusiastic acapella group performing for a disinterested audience it’s good for a giggle. The other five times – not so much. And while I liked most of the dirty jokes, those are obviously very much a matter of taste. I do want to shout out Carmen’s roommate Hailee as one of the show’s most reliable laugh generators. The seemingly vapid fashionista who is actually both smart and wise has been done before (they made a couple of movies and a Broadway show about it), but Holmes (from Welcome to Flatch) puts her own spin on the type to surprisingly become one of my favorite characters.

So what’s the verdict? If you go into it prepared for how painfully incremental the characters’ progress is going to be there is a lot here to enjoy. Wikipedia says that Skinner came out his senior year in college, so as frustrating as it is I think there is an honesty to the speed of Benny’s journey. That honesty is further reflected in his relationships with Carmen and Grace, both of which are messy in believable ways. That said, I hope that if the show is renewed it doesn’t take seven more semesters to give Benny some gay friends and lovers he can be similarly close with. It’s one thing to try to inject a little more realism into the typical TV dramedy coming out story, but at a certain point if you stretch it out too far you’re just overcompensating. 

Stray Observations

• Yates College seems to be intended as third-rate Yale (i.e. Yale) and a secret society called Flesh & Gold is a pretty big part of the plot, but that was easily the worst part of the show so I’m glossing over it.
• There’s a good bit of nudity if that’s your thing. One tertiary character’s only role seems to be to comically hang dong in a couple of scenes.
• Of course the actors are way too old for the characters they play. 31-year-old Skinner actually does wide-eyed guilelessness quite well, but he’s still ridiculous as an 18 year old.
• The show probably doesn’t need a trigger warning per se, but some of the Flesh & Gold hazing stuff might get close to the line for some people.

Overcompensating is available on Amazon Prime.