Need a show to binge? These are the must watch shows this spring.
USA TODAY’s TV critic Kelly Lawler breaks down the best TV shows you don’t to want to miss this spring.
College is an absolute nightmare of awkwardness, and it’s about time we saw that in its full, cringeworthy glory on our screens.
Enter Prime Video’s “Overcompensating” (all eight epiosdes now streaming, ★★★½ out of four), a rolling-on-the-floor-laughing new comedy created by and starring comedian Benito Skinner (known online as “Benny Drama”) about two lost and confused college freshmen at an elite university. There’s Benny (Skinner), struggling with a closeted sexual identity he doesn’t even understand, and Carmen (Wally Baram), a formerly shy high school outcast trying to find, as the kids would say, her “main character energy.” They’re thrown into the inferno of hormones, beer and twin beds that is the college experience, and start tripping over their mistakes and insecurities on day one.
Hilarious and deeply authentic, “Overcompensating” is set in a modern-day, Gen Z, TikTok-laden college campus, but feels like it can describe any experience of late-stage adolescence (and in fact, some of the references betray a distinctly millennial point of view in the writers’ room). Benny and Carmen are underdogs worth rooting for in a comedy that has the potential to break out this summer like “The Bear.” The series has a complete disregard for order and subtlety, just like the college frat parties it depicts. If it sometimes feels somewhat shallow, that’s just one more instance of form following function.
At Yates University, a garishly yellow campus standing in for a generic Ivy League school, Benny is ready to break free of his high school persona. He was the quarterback, the prom king and his parents’ perfect child. But he thinks he’s gay, is uninterested in the finance career path his dad (Kyle MacLachlan) has picked out for him and is finally figuring out what it means to have real relationships, platonic or romantic. He stumbles his way to Carmen, who’s also attempting to shrug off her old baggage, in this case, the shadow of her older brother’s death.
Easily influenced by Benny’s cool-seeming older sister, Grace (Mary Beth Barone) and her oafish frat-boy boyfriend Peter (Adam DiMarco), the pair, who become fast best friends, think they need to get laid and gain status to have a good college experience. But as they fumble through their first semester, they realize they don’t know what they want or need to be happy and successful. Mostly, they’re trying to make it from party to class and back again.
“Overcompensating” is a bawdy, lurid and physical in maximalism: We’re talking puke jokes, poop jokes, sex jokes, violent jokes and series producer Charli XCX-yelling-at-her-manager-when-she’s-forced-to-perform-a-concert-at-the-college jokes. Most of these are as outrageously funny as they are cringeworthy; you’ll find yourself laughing and hiding in equal measure from the cast’s antics.
Some of the series’ best moments are these laugh-out-loud gags, but it also thrives in the quieter, more introspective scenes. Benny and Carmen’s friendship is bristling with chemistry and feeling, a welcome platonic relationship anchoring the series, compared to so many more concerned with romance.
Among the excellent supporting cast is DiMarco, who was a standout in the Sicily-set second season of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” and makes a wonderfully hateful jerk who defies stereotypes (he’s actually a deeply sad kid under all his bluster). His depth is somewhat better explored than Benny’s, unfortunately, as we never quite understand the roots of the lead character’s fears about coming out beyond generic reasons. A potential second season still has plenty to explore inside Benny’s psyche.
But “Overcompensating” beats the curve when it comes to creating an environment and a feeling of college and coming of age. Every one of us has a period of naïveté and foolishness before we finish growing up. “Overcompensating” doesn’t glaze over those uncomfortable moments, and that’s what makes it feel so refreshingly real. The truth in the series is found in Carmen and Benny’s total, delectable ignorance of how the world works, or even who they are. They are you and me and every 18-year-old who ever thought they were going to conquer adulthood in a single stroke.
Give ’em a few years, they’ll turn out OK. If they can survive the show, that is.
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