Pick of the Week: The Twenty-Something Panic
Two new TV shows graced our screens last month: Overcompensating on Amazon Prime and Adults on Hulu. If you weren’t paying close attention, you might’ve mistaken them for the same show. They are both created by or starring internet personalities, are about that 18-24 age bracket everyone loves to hate, and essentially have the exact same poster. Easy mistake.
As an unabashed lover of all twenty-something media, especially if it’s about friendship, I’m ashamed to admit my first instinct was to disavow these two shows. There’s a mean-spirited part of myself that hates to see internet- or social media-famous people venture into traditional media. So when I heard about Overcompensating, which stars Benito Skinner and Mary Beth Barone who are both popular social media comedians, I expected it to be at the very least embarrassing. Oh, how I was wrong.
Overcompensating is written by, directed by, and starring Benito Skinner—a thirty-one-year-old known as Benny Drama online—who based the show on his own college experience. It follows eighteen-year-old Benny as he starts at the fictional Yates University and struggles to navigate the uncharted territory of new friendships, secret fraternities, and casual sex. Up until this point, Benny lived to please his parents: he was an all-star athlete, straight-A student, and willing to compromise on just about anything to keep the peace. Benny’s only problem? He’s gay and nobody knows. He barely even knows it himself. Naturally, when faced with the unadulterated freedom of college, he realizes he has no idea who he is or what he wants in life. Chaos ensues.
Think Sex Lives of College Girls meets Felicity, except more gay.
Mary Beth Barone plays Benny’s sister, Grace, who attends the same college and has the worst boyfriend known to man. Grace is hands-down my favorite character. Her bitchiness is a mere mask hiding the lonely emo kid she is inside. Per the title, every character in this show is overcompensating for something. Just as we are apt to do in college.
Overcompensating is definitely not for everyone, but would likely ring particularly untrue for older audiences. Despite how well it’s written and produced, the show feels very of its time—that time being specifically 2015-2025. Lots of Charli XCX, cyberbullying, gratuitous sex jokes, etc. It’s pop TV. Quick, trendy, fun, and largely mindless. Until the last two episodes…Those pack a punch. And it ends on a brilliant cliffhanger that cinched the deal for me. I will be eagerly awaiting the second season.
Within a week of finishing Overcompensating, I learned about the existence of Adults and realized the two were, in fact, not the same show. They do share one cast member in common: Owen Thiele, who may very well be the voice of our generation. I first saw him in Theater Camp (2023), which is one of the funniest, most original films I’ve seen in recent years. Anyway, Adults has a similar feel and dynamic as Overcompensating, if the characters were aged up a few years and acted only marginally more secure in themselves.
If I may, for a moment, go on a brief tangent: I’ve been shouting from the rooftops for years that my generation needs post-grad media like how Gen X had Reality Bites (1994) and Friends (1994-2004) and Millennials had Post Grad (2009)* and Girls (2012-2017). Each generation deserves representative media about fucking up in your twenties. Finally, Gen Z is starting to get some! I’ve also been begging for a resurgence of friends-based shows, like Friends of course, but also Sex and The City, How I Met Your Mother, and New Girl. TV execs care too much about plot these days…I just want to watch a friend group hanging out! This, more than anything else, is why I love and appreciate Adults. It’s exactly that: a friend group hanging out.
Adults follows Billie, Samir, Anton, Issa, and Paul Baker, five friends who live in Samir’s family home in Queens. They are all spottily employed, trying and failing to have a love life, and teetering on the tail end of 18-24. When they turn 25 will everything start miraculously working out? When is it too old to be living in your parents’ house? But is it too young to be dating a 40-year-old? These questions and more are explored in season one of Adults.
The showrunners are Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw, who I believe are a couple in their mid-twenties that got their start writing for The Tonight Show. If creating the Friends of your generation with the love of your life isn’t a dream job, then I don’t know what is. Also, somehow Nick Kroll was involved in the making of this show? He directed a few episodes and is credited as an executive producer. There is definitely a vague Nick Kroll aura about the show (complementary).
Not that two beautiful things should be pitted against each other, but I would argue Adults is better than Overcompensating. The cast chemistry is incredible; it feels very relevant and necessary; and it kept surprising me. I’m not often surprised by TV these days. Thus, when a show makes me genuinely gasp or my jaw drop to the floor, it immediately wins my respect and adoration. Adults has me excited about life and TV in a way I haven’t been in a long time.
And for my Phoebe Waller-Bridge fans out there, it bears a striking resemblance to her show Crashing. Let that be all the praise you need to hear.
*Not enough people are talking about Post Grad (2009) staring Alexis Bledel and Zach Gilford. It’s hilarious and totally holds up. It actually holds up so much so that I’m practically living the plot of the movie right now.