This Week

• My favorite new TV show of the week. 

• My favorite character on TV.

• Michelle Obama roasts people now. 

• The new ad that will give you heart palpitations.

• The Cannes video I can’t stop watching.

Finally, a Horny Coming Out Series 

The new series Overcompensating opens with a young child’s sexual awakening. He’s watching Brendan Fraser swing around in a loin cloth in George of the Jungle, rewinding the scene over and over again. He doesn’t know why he’s intrigued; he’s far too young. But he’s spellbound. 

Eventually, the other boys at his sleepover get annoyed at this looping of perfect, glistening abs, so he puts on something else. The booming opening notes are instantly, euphorically familiar to any gay millennial: He cued up the music video for Britney Spears’ “Lucky.”

The underrated anthem blasts as we’re transported 10-12 years into the future, where now-18-year-old Benny is a closeted jock on the way to his freshman year of college. I’ve never seen a more relatable opening to a TV show. It still can feel rare, as a gay man, to feel seen on TV. It’s even rarer to see your child self reflected. And for it to be this funny, too.

Overcompensating was created by and stars Benito Skinner, a comedian known for his viral videos for whom this Prime Video series, out now, is a huge break. 

The show essentially has Skinner, who is 31, acting out his own experience coming to terms with his sexuality while at university in the early-to-mid 2010s. (Overcompensating doesn’t place itself in a specific year, but the references—from sheepish admittance to liking Glee to…sheepish admittance to liking Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass”—are brutally recognizable from that time.)

I’m [redacted] years older than Skinner, but there’s a familiarity to his endearing skittishness and messy performance of “straightness” that immediately endeared me to the show. As in, from that opening scene. 

There are arguments that a college coming out story that might have been profound 10 or 15 years ago is tired in 2025, but I reject that.

There should be a variety of stories about the gay experience being told, and they shouldn’t all focus on a traumatic coming-out journey. We’re lucky that we’re at a place where those other stories now do exist in TV and film, but that doesn’t mean we need to erase this other aspect. Has there been a plea to stop making straight rom-coms just because we’ve already explored that? Should we stop making mob movies because Scorsese’s already covered it? I don’t understand the exasperation. 

Now that my insufferable little TED Talk is over, back to Overcompensating. What makes it work is both the most basic thing—it is hilarious, with a whiplash joke pace and a stacked cast of quirky scene-stealers—and something that’s new for the genre: It is incredibly horny!

The straight ones, the gay ones, the questioning ones: They’re all having sex, and thinking about it when they aren’t. The show doesn’t divorce coming to terms with sexuality from college hormones. Yes, there’s a desire to live openly and truthfully. There’s also a desire to get laid, preferably with the gender you’re actually attracted to. 

So many series about coming out are woefully chaste about it. With all of its characters, including Benny’s best friend Carmen (Wally Baram), the complicated nature of learning who you are while navigating a burgeoning libido is a devastatingly resonant aspect of Overcompensating. 

A lot of attention is being paid to the fact that Skinner and several of his co-stars are in their thirties and playing college students. Is it weird that, generally, I’ve never cared about that? Of course, it’s effective—and vaguely traumatizing—when, on a series like the original UK run of Skins, the teens were being played by actual teens.

But I’m a student of Stockard Channing’s Rizzo. Older actors playing high schoolers and college students is such a tried-and-true Hollywood tradition that I feel rather anesthetized to it. Plus, it makes me feel better about wanting to see the actors’ butts. And thank God Skinner understands what gays what from a show like this. They want to see the butts, and Overcompensating delivers.

The show’s not perfect. It will be a lightning rod among gay people, and fairly so. Seeing ourselves on screen is still fairly new, and it’s an affront when we don’t think we’re being represented in a way that reflects our own experience—or what we want other audiences to see about our lives and lifestyles. I get it. 

But also…it’s fun. It’s sweet, sexy, and a breeze to watch. A four-hour binge well-spent, plus you get to hear Britney Spears’ “Lucky.”

Today’s Top Entertainment News 

• Pedro Pascal’s ‘Eddington’ Is a PTSD Trip Back to COVID Insanity
• Honey Boo Boo Tells All: Mama June’s Abuse and ‘Cycle of Pain’
• Lauren Sánchez Reveals Who Went to Her Bachelorette Party

My Favorite Character on TV Right Now 

Hacksis the best show airing on TV right now, and if you’re not watching it, I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe you need to love yourself more. Choose joy. Come see what life is like up here out from under that rock. 

One of the greatest delights of this season has been “Dance Mom,” the cringe middle-aged TikTok star who is brought on to Deborah Vance’s (Jean Smart) late-night show in a naked appeal to lowbrow Middle America. To everyone’s chagrin, her cheesy dances to sunny pop songs—variations on grapevines, step-touches, finger guns, and jazz hands while Katy Perry’s “Lifetimes” plays—actually work. America loves her.

When Dance Mom, played hilariously by Julianne Nicholson, is introduced, she’s invited out to Los Angeles to audition for Deborah’s show, she gets excited: “Like the L.A. episode of Sex and the City!” Girl won my heart then and there. 

But Dance Mom isn’t as Pollyanna as she first seems, as this week’s episode reveals. Managers Jimmy (Paul W. Downs) and Kayla (Meg Stalter) are brought in to reel her in after she goes on a sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll bender, opening the door to the $25,000/week mansion she’s renting from Adam Levine with her robe open and doing whip-its.

She was introduced as a kind of Katie Couric/Hoda Kotb acolyte, but transforms more into the second coming of Courtney Love.

From embarrassingly basic cringe queen to whirling dervish of depraved and perverted chaos, it’s an exceptional arc. And it’s one that only a show like Hacks, with such a detailed understanding of its tone and how to undulate between groundedness and outlandishness, could pull off. Not to mention one that only an actress like Nicholson could embody believably.

Michelle Obama, Roastmaster 

The groan that “everyone is starting a podcast” used to refer to, like, your most annoying coworker and their frat brother, or the two loudest friends that you have. Now it extends far beyond that, to A-list celebrities and former first ladies. 

But give Michelle Obama credit where it’s due: She’s entering her podcaster era with exactly the right IDGAF attitude. It’s yielded great rewards, too. For example, I don’t think I laughed more at anything this week than Obama making fun of short people on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast.

She refers to short people, like Poehler and Quinta Brunson, as pocket people, and coos about how they can just fit in the nook of her armpit. “You make noise when you move,” she says, continuing the teasing and then actually making the noise while miming a short person trotting around with her fingers on the table: “Ting ting ting ting ting.” When Poehler protests that short people don’t make sounds when they walk, Obama interrupts: “I thought I heard squeaking.” 

Michelle Obama, comedy queen? Not the weirdest part of 2025.

The World Simultaneously Hits the Cold Shower

The zoom-in functions on iPhones all over the world were tested to their limits this week. 

Dolce & Gabbana released the official campaign for their Light Blue fragrance, featuring a commercial and photo shoot starring White Lotus star Theo James and Italian fashion model Vittoria Ceretti.

They are on a boat, alternating between writhing around with each other and swimming under the blistering sun. 

Ceretti is pretty and all, but, uh, we need to talk about Theo James in his itsy bitsy teeny weeny almost see-through white Speedo. We need to talk about it because D&G wants us to talk about it. James in that Speedo—from the front, from the back, from above, from below—is shot in a way that I believe is intentionally meant to send me into cardiac arrest.

And the things that I have seen some people post about how good he looks in the form-fitting swimsuit... Let’s just say we have strayed so far from God’s light that we no longer have shadows. 

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I Can’t Stop Watching This 

And the 2026 Oscar for Best Short Film goes to…Emma Stone getting attacked by a bee while clutching Pedro Pascal on the red carpet at Cannes!

More From The Daily Beast’s Obsessed 

• I went to “mocktail hour,” naturally, with some of the cast of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Read more.
• Do yourself a favor and watch Bryan Cranston tripping on mushrooms in Las Vegas. Read more.
• Beatboxers performed the Mission: Impossible theme at the Cannes premiere. Read more.

• Duster: It’s about time Lost’s Josh Holloway gets to play the hunky bad boy again. (Now on Max)

• Sister Midnight: If you like puking, murder, and ghosts, have we got a movie for you. (Now in theaters)

• Murderbot: Turns out Alexander Skarsgård is a pretty funny robot. (Now on Apple TV+)

• Final Destination: Bloodlines: The next disturbing kill should be of this franchise. (Now in theaters)

• Hurry Up Tomorrow: After seeing this The Weeknd movie, you’d wish tomorrow had waited. (Now in theaters)

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