Let’s get one thing straight — or rather, gloriously not straight — Benito Skinner is not here to play it safe. He’s here to make us laugh, cry, and yes, scream into the void about the state of queer television. With his new series Overcompensating lighting up Prime Video like a glitter bomb at a frat party, Skinner is showing us just how funny, frustrating, and deeply real the closeted college experience can be.
But when he talks, you hear more than just a creator proud of his work. You hear someone still smarting from the scars of shows past, like Queer As Folk — the 2022 reboot he appeared in, which fizzled out after just one season. Despite a stacked cast that included Kim Cattrall and Juliette Lewis (yes, we’re still bitter), and glowing reviews, the plug was pulled early. Why?
“I wish I knew,” Skinner told Attitude, sighing like every gay viewer who ever fell in love with a series that was yanked away before it had the chance to thrive.
And then he dropped the line that’s going to be on tote bags, stickers, and maybe tattooed across a few collarbones:
“A cynical side of me is like, God, will people just not fucking promote gay things?”
Speak it, sister. We’ve seen it happen again and again: shows by us, for us, about us, disappearing faster than a poppers-fueled hookup at 3AM. Skinner’s exasperation is not just personal, it’s universal. It’s the sting of watching brilliant queer narratives pushed to the sidelines, left to fend for themselves in an industry that still seems to prefer its queerness coded, or at the very least, market-tested into oblivion.
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“Naturally people come to it with snark and are like, ‘That’s not my original Queer as Folk’, and it’s like, ‘Yeah, we never said it was? That’s not the point.’” Skinner says, invoking the ghost of reboot resistance.
It’s a fair critique — our community can be fiercely protective of its classics — but as Skinner so astutely points out, that’s not the point.
He adds, with the kind of honesty that feels both refreshing and quietly devastating,
“If I knew why, I’m sure it would make me sick, so maybe I won’t dive into it too far…”
But while Queer As Folk may be six feet under, Overcompensating is out here thriving — and it’s doing so with unapologetic gay chaos. Skinner plays Benny, a closeted college freshman so determined to pass as straight you’d think Grindr came with a witness protection program. Think Sex Education meets Broad City, if Broad City were set in a college dorm full of confused jocks and suspicious RA’s.
And then there’s the glittering cast: Bowen Yang, Connie Britton, Lukas Gage, Adam DiMarco, Matt Rogers, Kyle MacLachlan, and queen of the queer pop kingdom herself, Charli XCX, who also executive produces. (Yes, the same Charli who gave us “Vroom Vroom” is now helping bring gay coming-of-age angst to your screen — justice.)
Skinner credits the creative freedom he was granted to a rare alignment of good queer karma and supportive execs.
“I was recently asked if anyone asked me to tone it down, and I never got that note at all, which I feel really lucky about,” he says, and frankly, that’s the dream.
“I felt really championed by A24 and Amazon and [production company] Strong Baby and Charli to tell my story.”
When queer stories get to live, really live — without the notes, the censorship, the budget cuts, the premature cancellations — they do more than entertain. They remind us we’re here. We’re complicated. We’re allowed to be messy, hilarious, vulnerable, and gloriously over-the-top.
Overcompensating isn’t just another gay comedy. It’s a reclamation. It’s Skinner staring down the entertainment industry and, with perfectly glossed lips and a middle finger raised, asking,
“Will people just not fucking promote gay things?”
Let’s hope this time, they do.
Source: Attitude