enito Skinner’s Overcompensating, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, is a show that wants to be many things at once. It wants to be a queer coming-of-age tale, a satire of college culture and a glossy, stylised look at masculinity in crisis. Unfortunately, it does not succeed at being any of those things.

On the surface, the show follows Benny Scanlon, a closeted former high school football star from Idaho who enrolls at the fictional Yates University and attempts to camouflage his queerness under layers of frat-boy posturing and performative masculinity. He is paired off with Carmen, a sarcastic Jersey transplant. She is the self-appointed emotional anchor of the series, as the two move through chaotic parties, pseudo-intellectual class discussions and an elite secret society. However, what begins as a promising setup quickly devolves into a series of loosely connected scenes, often held together by aesthetics rather than story.

The first and most glaring issue is the miscasting. Nearly every actor playing a freshman in college appears closer to 30 than 18, making it hard to believe their roles. Despite moments of vulnerability, Skinner himself is never quite convincing as a sheltered teenager still figuring out his identity. When surrounded by actors who look equally mismatched in age and attitude, the effect is less coming-of-age authenticity and more community theatre in couture.

More critically, Overcompensating struggles to establish a clear dramatic spine. What is the core conflict? Is it Benny’s internalised homophobia? Is it his relationship with his family; his uneasy friendship with his sister’s boyfriend? The show flirts with all these ideas but never commits to any of those. The pacing is uneven and without a clear story moving forward, each episode feels like a flashy repeat of the last, with only small changes. By the halfway point, one begins to wonder where it is going. More importantly, why should one care?

Character development is alarmingly thin. Most characters are reduced to archetypes. Carmen as the sarcastic straight-talking sidekick; Miles as the dreamy but underwritten love interest; and Grace, Benny’s sister, as the high-functioning cool girl. None are given the room or complexity to evolve. Their motivations feel vague at best and fabricated at worst. The dialogue sounds more like TikTok script: quippy, self-referential and emotionally hollow.

The show may look polished, thanks to its well-executed visual design, but that can only go so far. The plot drifts, characters stay flat and the story leans too hard on trends without offering anything meaningful in return.

Comedy is another sore point. Overcompensating is surprisingly low on genuine laughs. There are moments, particularly from Hailee Matthews, Carmen’s erratic, scene-stealing roommate, played with magnetic eccentricity by Holmes, where the show finds its rhythm. Hailee is the rare character that feels both unpredictable and emotionally grounded. Yet she is largely relegated to comic relief and given little to no arc of her own.

Likewise, Carmen, played by Wally Baram, occasionally carries the show’s emotional weight. However, she slips into an unnatural vocal cadence in a single episode, a shift that is never repeated and draws attention to the show’s uneven execution. Perhaps if the show had more characters like Hailee, it might have found a stronger comedic voice.

For a show so fixated on breaking boundaries, the reliance on clichés is bewildering. Overcompensating does not just use familiar tropes of queer storytelling, it leans into them without much of a twist. Its depiction of college life feels more like a BuzzFeed listicle than lived experience: parties laced with glitter and nonsense, characters referencing existentialism one minute and vomiting tequila the next. It is cringe-worthy, not because it dares to be bold, but because it dares so little beyond mimicry.

One might wonder whether Overcompensating was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence, not as a commentary on authorship, but because it follows a predictable formula. It throws together queer themes, glitter, Gen Z lingo and TikTok stars but forgets to include a heart. The result is a show that feels less like a story and more like a curated aesthetic.

The show may look polished, thanks to its well-executed visual design, but that can only go so far. The plot drifts, characters stay flat and the story leans too hard on trends without offering anything meaningful in return. The final episode is especially jarring. It ends so abruptly and with so little payoff that it feels like the writers gave up or lost track of the point entirely.

Hailee Matthews may be the only reason to keep watching. She brings energy when the rest of the show lags behind. But even she cannot salvage a series that doesn’t seem to know what it’s trying to be.

The bottom line is: Overcompensating is background noise, something mildly entertaining, but ultimately hollow.

Zehra Batool is a freelance writer