Benny Scanlon, the protagonist of the new comedy “Overcompensating”, is the kind of boys that mothers do not know to warn their daughters. Large, beautiful, and polite, Benny – played by Benito Skinner – checks an almost comic number of boxes: promotion, football player, return king. The Prime Video Series opens onto the first day of Benny University, where it instantly clicks with a girl named Carmen (Wally Baram) to orientation. It is impatient to do so, but his driving motivation is not lust or connection. Benny is a closed gay who wants to accept hetero guys – he therefore brings Carmen back to his dormitory and fantasy on a boy at home in order to be excited by the daughter half naked in front of him.
“The compensation” concerns the immense temptation to maintain such an act, even if the lack of authenticity becomes corrosive. Skinner, who created the series with elements taken from his own life, is a particularly lively satirist of the relentless police of masculinity by other men. Knowing properly running a Bro-Y handshake is treated as a question of life or death; In an introductory class to cinema studies, each male student claims one of the films “godfather” as his favorite. Small conversation among the guys – even foreigners – allows you to ask if the other part A, obtain or plan to obtain it. (Subject to such a question, Benny quickly affirms that he is on the case, declaring, in the language that no one who really has sex would use: “It will be a pigst.”)
The pressure to comply with traditional masculinity is not a new field, but the queer television cannon is still thin enough for the ideas of “overcompensor” to be fresh. The comedy joins a small group of shows, including “Fellow Travelers” of 2023, which explore the double -edged closet privileges, which allow people inside to participate in homophobia and misogyny to strengthen their own status. Benny is not a bad guy, but his despair of integrating into the duct to lie on his night with Carmen and to avoid miles (Rush Shah), the pretty film buff on which he crushes. Skinner, perhaps better known so far as an internet actor, smuggling in his commentary on relations between sexes and sexuality via absurd sequences and impressive joke density. The series “ Semi-Camp, the semi-sincon tone is embodied by the use by the pilot of the Britney Spears 2000 track “Lucky”, with her recurring refrain: “She is so lucky, she is a star / but she cries, cries in her lonely heart, thinking / ‘if nothing is missing in my life / So why do these tears come at night? “”
The biggest idea of ”overcompensor” is that, for many young people, sex has become such a desirable thing for be doing that it is almost impossible to have fun TO DO. Carmen and Benny both gain a level of cachet around the campus to have (ostensibly) sleeping together, but the meeting itself is a Slapstick disaster. And although he and Miles have made his eyes, Benny’s friendship with Carmen appears as the true love story of the season in eight parts. Halfway through the season, he opens with his attraction for guys, and Carmen, in the middle of his own boy problems, decides to distract himself by becoming Benny’s Guide to Queerness. (Her first research on Google: “Being an ally of a gay with whom you have somehow connected once but came to you.”) Benny is too happy to let her take the lead, even leaving her a potential message on her anonymous grindr profile. Her clumsy attempt to have sex with a man for the first time, in which his gay baby explorations are quickly overshadowed by the psychosexual drama between man and her husband, makes the most funny series of a very funny series.
“Overcompensating” gradually goes from a simple sexual comedy to something richer emotionally. A large part of this depth comes from the growing accent on Carmen. She had spent her years in adolescence to Thrall to her older brother, Michael – kissing everything, of her lifestyle by sharing her love of a violent video game in which the objective is to “kill all the Berlin sluts” – in order to be cool for him and his friends. Her death in a car accident before arriving at college, let her reluctantly to tackle her shortcomings or to individualize: boosting herself to be the daughter of a guy, she finds it difficult to relate to one or the other sex on her own conditions.
Benny is the exception, and the chemistry between Skinner and Baram helps paper on some of the weakest aspects of the series – namely the clumsy pace and the time dislocation of the show, which is apparently defined today but flooded in the pop -cultural references of the aughts and the beginning of the twenties. (Skinner first declared “overcompensor” as an individual show in 2018.) But if there is a little trouble in the procedure, there is also an open one, because it quickly becomes clear that the title of the program describes more than the main characters. Once Benny stops pouring all his energy into maintaining his gold character, he realizes that almost everyone is suffocating also behind a mask – and finally begins to breathe easier. ♦
