REVIEW: ‘Overcompensating’ Gets College And Coming Out Right

Coming out isn’t easy for everyone. When you’ve been raised to be the absolutely perfect child, molded into a jock or arm candy for a future business man, moving away from that path in anyway, even it just means being happy, weighs on you. And that’s when you start, well, overcompensating. Created by Benito Skinner, who also stars as the series protagonist, Overcompensating (2025) is a TV show with gross humor and great heart.

The new Prime Video television series, produced with A24, Overcompensating (2025), is an eight-episode series about going to college, having your entire life turned upside down, and what you do after that. In it, we follow Benny (Benito Skinner), a closeted former football player, homecoming king, valedictorian, and favorite child, through his freshman year of college. With only his poster of Megan Fox, that he talks to, Benny makes the choice to stay in the closet and just try to make the most out of his college experience.

To do that, though, he has to sleep with a girl the first day of school, and you know what, just maybe he’s not gay. That’s where Carmen (Wally Baram) comes in. An all-around outcast who’s dealing with the death of her brother and a boyfriend who is most definitely sleeping around, her invasive roommate pressures her to try to get some good luck going by sleeping with someone, her first night of college. You see, they’re a match made in chaotic heaven.

When their hook-up doesn’t work out for obvious reasons, Benny and Carmen wind up being fast friends. They play video games together, help each other, and ultimately try to pick each other up when freshman year’s inevitable messiness and awkwardness come to a head. The two friends choose to join a not-so-secret society where all the school’s future leaders of industry (read nepo-babies) spend most of their time. Only their experience entering the fraternity will push them both into uncomfortable situations and make them confront their insecurities.

Overcompensating (2025) is charming, grossly hilarious, and gets college and coming out right.

Overcompensating is a college dramady that doesn’t just push boundaries but demolishes them. Using the standard structure of a standard sex comedy, the series winds up blending edgy sexual humor, class dynamics, and a heartfelt story of coming out. The series is a hyperbole when it comes to a lot of the ways that it calls on the real world.

From frat life to school concerts, and even playing video games, it’s all an exaggeration, but at the same time, for anyone who has struggled being who they really are while also being forced to find out who they want to be, Overcompensating (2025) nails all of those messy terrible feelings.

For starters, Benny pushes himself further and further into his masculine act. He binge drinks, he disrespects women, and he gives in to their homophobic traditions and jokes. He is overcompensating. Benny is trying so hard at every turn to just be the perfect straight boy that eventually his conscience starts eating at him, invading his every thought to the point he thinks everyone knows.

In this, he leans on Carmen. When Benny is with her, he can take off the macho mask and just be himself. At first, the awkwardness is because Carmen is crushing on him, and he quite literally can’t get it up. But once that passes and she forgives him for a lie that casts her as an easy lay, their friendship is messy, but it’s theirs. This only grows when Benny accidentally comes out of the closet to Carmen.

Benny and Carmen are the heart of the Prime Video show, but a Season 2 needs to add more to Carmen’s character.

In return for his candor, Carmen does research. Very, very hilarious research that involves RuPaul’s Drag Race, who might as well have been an Overcompensating (2025) sponsor, setting up a Grindr profile, and some very poorly used phrases that neither of them knows is wrong. But Carmen is the only one who knows that Benny is gay, and more importantly that he’s in love with his frat brother Miles (Rish Shah). When he gets his heart broken, Carmen sets out to get Benny his first kiss which leads a comedy errors.

Carmen and Benny’s relationship is adorable. While the world around them thinks that they’re dating or, at the very least, sleeping together, they’re instead finding reprieve in their dorm rooms, a space where they can be themselves. When the duo goes to Benny’s house for Thanksgiving Dinner, Benny gets to confront his past, apologize for his mistakes, and ultimately punch a bigot in the face.

Benny is trying to love himself, especially while his perfect family is crumbling, his best friend is having sex with his sister’s boyfriend, and his crush is sleeping with random girls. Everything sucks for him, but slowly, he starts to open up in the back half of the season he even comes out to one of the member of the LGBTQ+ club on campus. George (Owen Thiele) is more than happy to help Benny, and they become friends too. Only, the overcompensating doesn’t stop just because he’s starting to find pockets of kindness in his life.

Benito Skinner captures humor and vulnerability excellently in Overcompensating.

He destroys his friendship with George, lies to Carmen even more, and keeps Carmen’s secret from his sister. Not to mention, he’s just ghosted Miles as a friend because of his own emotions. Benny is conflicted, and no matter how good he feels when he doesn’t have to hide who he is, he just can’t seem to break through his fear of being ostracized by the guys at school, that he was raised to be.

Overcompensating (2025) charts Benny’s character growth like a yo-yo instead of a linear path. He grows and accepts himself, and then at the mere chance of being on the outs, he shrinks back. So much so that in the season’s end he’s gotten close to alienating the friends he ha left in order to appearances.

As much as the show embraces a sex comedy structure, the drama the show lets bubble up from the moments in between get to the core of Benny’s vulnerabilities and his fear. And as the show continues toward its finale, even the good experiences of coming out can’t undo the amount of damage he’s carried with him since he played George of the Jungle on repeat.

Benito Skinner’s performance as Benny is throughful and hilarious. His ability to create a mask for his character and drop it too help build up an experience that feels extremely relatable. It doesn’t matter if the people who care for him accept him if he refuses to accept himself. Benny’s journey of self-discovery while also being thrust into adulthood and life on his own offers a fresh take on a college comedy.

But it’s not just Skinner’s performance that makes Overcompensating (2025) stick out in a croud of streaming television show. Where series like Cruel Intentions last year were trying deeply to be shocking or offensive or sexual, Overcompensating handles sex, drama, and edgelord jokes with a humility and reverence for what each moment is representing. Thoughtful comedy doesn’t always mean prim and proper, it can also be brash and loud and that’s where the series thrives.

Overcompensating shows that college girls are just as confused as the boys.

When it comes to Carmen, despite being thinly written, her story revolves around a deep need ot not be alone. As she notes throughout the series, she’s not sure if she’s ever had real friends other than her brother. So, Carmen’s relationships are all trying to find out who she is and if people can love her. However, when you haven’t had healthy relationships, nothing looks like a red flag. Which leads her to sleep with Peter (Adam DiMarco). The leader of the fraternity, an absolute dunce, and womanizer, who also happens to be Benny’s sister, Grace’s (Mary Beth Barone) boyfriend. Yeah, Carmen is messy.

Both Benny and Carmen do things that they can’t take back. They hurt people they don’t mean too and theiy’re selfish beyond everything. While they can bring out the best in each other at times, they’re also just not great people. Unlikable protagonists are hard to do right, especially when you pack your television series with them. Overcompensating (2025) however gets the balance between “hurt people hurt people” and vulnerable little bean just right for the characters you’re meant to feel for. While letting someone like Peter flounder in his narcisim.

While Emiy has far fewer scenes in the show compared to Carmen, her character arc is the only one that doesn’t show bits of regression. She wears fake eyelashes, she hides that she loves My Chemical Romance, she stopped hanging out with her wueer high school friends, and she’s just trying to be the perfect future wife of a future business man. And while she does all of that, she can’t help but grimmace.

Throughout the eight episodes, Grace starts to allow small parts of the real her to peak out underneath the veneer of polite society that she’s taken on. While all of her actions devalue Benny, much of that is because he represents the perfect child. But that puts an unbearable distance between them which makes even just doing something nice like buying a handle of vodka for Benny a whole event.

All we need now is an answer as to whether or not Overcompensating Season 2 is on the way.

Ultimately though, Overcompensating does something that comedies rarely do, even in a post-Bridesmaids landscape. And that’s showing young women being just as eager for a hook-up with no strings, forcing others around them into fitting a stereotype, and ultimately being just like guys. In fact, when you look at the people around Carmen and Grace, the mean girl trope is applied to a frat boy lens and you quickly realize there really is no difference between them.

Like many of the Prime Video series I’ve review recently however, Overcompensating (2025) just ends, and on a cliffhanger no less. At only eight episodes, I want more immediately. Unfortuantely, I can’t help but worry that thes show will just end here and an Overcompensating Season 2 won’t be a reality. This is the closest that audiences have gotten to a series like MTV’s Undressed in quite sometime, but with significantly more jokes. It captures the messiness, the angst, and the bad decisions we keep making even when we don’t want to hurt people.

Overcompensating (2025) has each of its characters juggle bad decisions, horrible hook-ups, binge drinking, and miscommunication to great effect. The series captures the awkwardness of adjusting college life, the fear of breaking under familial pressure, and the process of coming out after you’ve tried to reject your queerness for much of your life. Benny is a gay man learning how to find peace with who he is and that he doesn’t have to perform his queerness or his masculinty to anyone else’s expectations.

Overcompensating (2025) is streaming now, exclusively on Prime Video.