The Comedies of Now: 'Adults,' 'Overcompensating,' and the Genius of the Quarter-Life Crisis
By Natalie McCarty
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There’s something happening in the undercurrent of TV comedy right now that’s subtle and intimate, and, ultimately, revolutionary. Two shows, Adults and Overcompensating, have emerged this summer as emotional artifacts of an age group still figuring out what growing up even means. Rather than a traditional sitcom, they each uniquely gesture at something more abstract: the inner lives of young people who are overstimulated, underemployed, deeply online, and unsure how to distinguish between love, codependency, and shared bedroom spaces.
Together, Adults and Overcompensating manage to depict early adulthood in a way that I’m not sure it has ever been understood by a media example, and that’s exactly what makes both shows so addictive and so necessary.
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Adults: A Study of the Strange Ritual of Growing Up
There’s something deeply comforting about how Adults refuses to make a case for itself. It doesn’t try to justify its existence or deliver some tidy thesis on “what it all means.” Instead, it simply shows you what it’s like to live in that hazy space between graduation and whatever’s supposed to come next, and lets you decide how to feel about it. There’s no forced plot, no moral arc, no tidy character development. The drama is small because, in your twenties, everything feels both microscopic and massive. A misinterpreted text is a tragedy. A casual kiss can unravel your entire friend group. And yes, sometimes you do accidentally have a serial killer’s location on Find My Friends because you’re a friend slut. I mean, it happens.
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The genius of Adults lies in what it doesn’t overstate. It’s a portrait of domesticity in flux set in a world duct-taped together by convenience, dysfunction, and the rare magic of interdependent friendship. These people are living essentially for free in someone’s parents’ house, living a shared life together. The show doesn’t dress it up, and that’s the true beauty of it.
Everyone’s a little unbearable, a little too self-aware, and a little (a lot) too much inside each other’s business, which is quite literally the best part of your twenties. These are the only years where your closest friendships function like chosen family, where no one’s really dating but everyone’s definitely making out, where you go in on a Costco pack of Plan B and maybe get married for a green card or divorced to marry someone else later (for financial gain). It’s all normal, if you’re 20-something.
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The characters are so recognizable: You know these people. You were—or, most likely, are—these people. They flake, they fight, they fall into bed with each other out of boredom, affection, convenience, or unresolved trauma. And, somehow, it never gets weird.
Adults is so funny in an atypical way, but in the way I wish all TV shows would be funny. Not in the conventional, cue-the-laugh-track sense, but in the kind of humor that sneaks up on you because it’s built from recognizable and niche life experience.. The writing mimics the rhythm of real conversations, with all the detours, stumbles, and passive-aggressive subtext intact.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a media depiction nail my friend group this well. Been there. Done that. Loved it. Binge-watched the whole show in one day, but I might have to rewatch already.
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Overcompensating: The Witty Precision of Benito Skinner’s Generation-Specific Meltdown
If Adults is a lived-in portrait of becoming, Overcompensating is the spiritual examination of every college student who’s ever tried to self-actualize via Instagram stories and intellectual overcorrection. It’s a sharp, strange, deeply felt piece of television, and Benito Skinner has somehow crafted something both ultra-specific and painfully universal.
Set in a college landscape that feels so accurate to memory, Overcompensating is so authentic while also managing to be heightened, theatrical, and often surreal. Which, in many ways, is college. Skinner’s characters are neurotic, over-performative, charmingly insufferable, and yet so true to the characters I met, and love(d), my own freshman year. Undoubtedly, this has got to be the most original and best piece of college-aged television I’ve seen.
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Every episode is a dissection of performance: identity as a curated product, queerness as both liberation and branding tool, self-awareness as a form of manipulation. It’s not always comfortable to watch, and that’s intentional.
Skinner dares you to admit that you already relate. And while many shows would crack under that kind of intellectual weight, Overcompensating floats. It trusts its audience to be smart, socially fluent, and emotionally complicated. And in doing so, it creates something rare: a comedy that doesn’t chase relevance because it already lives there.
The cast is so fresh and so good; I was devastated that there wasn't more to watch.
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The Golden Age of Ambivalence & the Comedy of the In-Between
What unites Adults and Overcompensating, besides Owen Thiele, is their tone. Both shows exist in the uneasy liminal space of “almost there,” where youth hasn’t quite ended and adulthood hasn’t fully begun. They understand, innately, that in your twenties, nothing ever really ends: everything just lingers.
We’re watching characters lie to themselves and each other with alarming fluency. We’re watching the tension between irony and sincerity unfold in real time. And in a culture increasingly allergic to ambiguity, these shows dare to dwell in it.
There’s something subversive in how unheroic these characters are, how unmonetizable their crises, how absurd and raw their coping mechanisms, but how human and relatable they are. In reaching adulthood, they’re simply trying to survive its inevitability–more of this in shows, please! In this day and age, Adults and Overcompensating just offer something radical, which is the notion that it’s okay to not be okay, or impressive, or to know where you’re going, or what you want, or how to be.
Ultimately, these shows offer recognition, and maybe, in this golden age of ambivalence, that’s the most generous thing a show can do.
