If you’re a certain kind of millennial, a specific type of gay guy, or a distinct combination of both, part of your Thanksgiving holiday is reserved for rewatching “Gossip Girl” holiday episodes. These 42-minute bombshells are just as delicious as a Turkey Day dinner itself (if not more, depending on the color of your aunt’s green bean casserole when it finally completes the hour-long shaky car ride to its destination). The Thanksgiving episodes are shocking and absurd, packed with scathing one-liner digs and soapy melodrama; feasts so good that you can’t help but come back for more.
It’s no secret, then, why Benito Skinner’s new Prime Video series, “Overcompensating” — about a college freshman (Skinner) trying to hide his sexuality at his new school — so freely borrows the punchy structure of this specific sect of “Gossip Girl” episodes. Skinner is a gay millennial, and in the run-up to the release of his television debut, the internet hasn’t let him forget it. The series’ first trailers and even some of its initial reviews faced a wall of unfair digital homogeneity. Most of the responses online were about how the cast looks too old to be in college, an objective fact that’s perfectly easy to overlook in a show that’s already semi-farcical. (Never mind the fact that the “Gossip Girl” actors were in their mid-20s during their “college” years.)
