After a year and a half of waiting, Overcompensating writer, creator, and star Benito Skinner has revealed the release date of the show’s second season, alongside a taste of what fans can expect from the coming episodes. 

The show, which parallels Skinner’s own experiences of coming out in college, follows Benny, whom he plays, as he balances new and confusing undergraduate atmospheres and relationships with coming to terms with his sexuality. 

In an exclusive with Vanity Fair, Skinner announced that Overcompensating Season 2 will be released on February 16 via Prime Video, picking up where the show’s explosive cliffhanger left off. At the end of the first season, Benny’s friend Carmen (Wally Baram) accidentally outs him as gay to his sister, Grace (Mary Beth Barone). Heading back home for winter break, he now has to navigate coming out to his family.

Skinner told Vanity Fair that “this season is about family, and trying to reintroduce yourself to your parents after starting to become yourself.”

He explained that Benny’s dad, played by Kyle MacLachlan, finds out, which leads to a very tense situation between the two characters. 

“That relationship between gay men and fathers, I think, is always fraught and confusing… I just wanted to make it as honest as possible,” Skinner said. 

He also promised the magazine that the show’s second season would be even gayer than its first: “We’re creeping out of the closet,” he told them. 

The show delivers a new love interest for Benny this season, played by stage actor Tom Francis, who received a Tony Award nomination for his performance in Sunset Boulevard. Francis is slated to play Declan Bishop, the captain of the crew team that Benny joins in hopes of strengthening his now-fragile relationship with his father. 

Skinner teased that there would be “a couple scenes that are definitely going to be off-limits for the family,” but whether they feature Francis, Lukas Gage as Benny’s complicated ex, Sammy, or the character’s first season crush Miles (Rish Shah) has yet to be determined. 

However, we do know that those steamier scenes are still going to follow the tune of what makes the comedy’s first season so beloved. 

“I think our show is about trying to be sexy and then it going wrong, or feeling like you start to come into yourself but you get made a fool,” Skinner said. 

The second season, he explained, has more to do with understanding and exploring the very real and complicated experience of coming out of the closet, and the realisation that there will always be another person to tell. 

“I get to be even more specific about coming out and also tell a story that I think I haven’t seen yet done in this way, which is the complication of coming out — how you can take 10 steps forward, a hundred steps back,” he said.