‘Overcompensating’ navigates the confusion of college life and self-discovery

Benito Skinner, whose history is largely in bite-sized internet comedy, has broken out into old-school media, creating a standard-issue, eight-episode sitcom, “Overcompensating,” premiering Thursday on Prime Video. Skinner plays Benny, a closeted college freshman, and that his character is a late-blooming innocent from Idaho gives the series an air of old-fashioned modesty — in spite of the fact that characters are continually talking about sex and sometimes having it. The values it espouses are friendship, honesty, loyalty, kindness, being true to yourself and so to others — values its heroes will struggle to uphold in a world of “bruhs” and “bitches” and received ideas about what matters.

That Benny is gay — no one in the show knows, and he isn’t exactly sure himself — is signaled early on with a few significant glances and gulps, as he arrives in the wider world of college under the weight of parental expectations. (You know before Benny does that he is not cut out to be a business major.) Already at fictional Yates University is his sister, Grace (Mary Beth Barone, Skinner’s podcasting partner on “Ride with Benito Skinner and Mary Beth Barone”), who is not happy to have her high school hero brother invading her ivy-covered space; her boyfriend, Pete (Adam DiMarco), is in fact a business major, which endears him to Benny’s father (Kyle MacLachlan), but he is not as big a man on campus as he imagines.

At orientation, Benny meets Carmen (Wally Baram), a sweet regular girl from New Jersey, whose high school boyfriend has been posting pictures from his new life. Under pressure to become new people in college — which is to say, new people like other people — they attempt to hook up, and a confusing, close relationship begins. She’s marginally more sophisticated, or perhaps just less conflicted than he is, but both are babes in the woods and a temperamentally matched set.

Though it’s mined for comedy, there is something tragic in this denial — tragic for the character, and for a culture in which such deception and self-deception is still felt necessary — and one feels for Benny in his confusion. (It took Skinner, now 31, until his senior year at Georgetown University to come out, though one hopes the schedule will be somewhat accelerated for the series; the viewer may become impatient.)

Kyle MacLachlan, left, and Connie Britton play Benny’s parents in “Overcompensating.”

(Courtesy of Prime Video)

Skinner, who has had a few straight acting roles alongside his antic internet videos, in which he might appear as a Kardashian or the cast of “Queer Eye,” is charming as his bottled-up, crazy-making younger self. Baram, a stand-up comedian who wrote for “Shrinking” and “What We Do in the Shadows,” was promoted into the cast out of the “Overcompensating” writers room and demonstrates impressive range and depth in her first acting role. As Grace, Barone, who maintains a stand-up career, begins essentially as a cliche, easy to dismiss, but creates a character you take more seriously as she begins to take herself more seriously; it’s perhaps the show’s most moving performance — even poignant, though that’s possibly a word both Grace and Barone would reject — from an unexpected quarter. Then again, almost all of these people — the main characters and minor — are needier than they’d like to let on.

The arc of the series is involved mainly with their sorting and resorting themselves into couples, however briefly, as they navigate various youth rituals and rites of passage, like beer pong and getting fake IDs. A good deal of the season concerns a ridiculous secret society called Flesh & Gold, which Benny and Carmen have, for unclear reasons, been invited to join and seem all too eager to pledge — one would think membership more an embarrassment than a privilege. But the show gets some mileage out of it, including a guest spot by James Van Der Beek, Dawson himself, as a dissolute older member.

Skinner is already enough of a cultural personage to have tempted Jennifer Aniston into participating in a prank video; here his cultural mojo is signaled by the presence of Charli XCX (also the music supervisor) in a funny extended cameo as herself, which will excite younger viewers, as the presence of MacLachlan and Connie Britton as Benny’s parents may impress older. Other famous faces briefly seen include Andrea Martin as the school’s dean, Didi Conn as Grace’s “adopt-a-grandmother,” Megan Fox as a talking Megan Fox poster, Bowen Yang, Matt Rogers and Lukas Gage as the boy who got away before Benny knew what he was looking for. Rish Shah plays Miles, a handsome classmate with whom Benny connects, and one of the series’ more grounded persons. Barely recognizable from “Welcome to Flatch” is Holmes as Carmen’s roommate Hailee, a rococo ice cream sundae of a person, talking a mile a minute, sweet and dim; as on “Flatch,” she is quite wonderful.

Some crises, especially later in the season, can feel a bit manufactured in order to keep the balls in the air, dramatically speaking — to keep these people from settling down into a comfortable relationship. (The season ends on a note of irresolution.) How this might play out across four seasons — assuming the point is to see Benny and Carmen all the way through college — is a fair point, but Skinner is a fan of “Gossip Girl,” in which betrayals and realignments were just weekly business, so, you know, he might find a way. All in all, it’s a nice place to visit, energetic and good-natured, with lots of funny business around the edges, even as it makes one glad to have put one’s own college days in the past.