Amelia Allwarden & Todd Downing On Capturing College Anxiety and a Mini Charli XCX Concert for ‘Overcompensating’

There is nothing like going to college. The freedom away from your parents. Meeting new people. Learning about yourself in ways you couldn’t imagine. The anxiety…oh, the anxiety. Benito Skinner’s Overcompensating proves that we still need coming out stories, but this Prime Video comedy has sincerity in spades. For editors Amelia Allwarden and Todd Downing, they relied on the arcs of the characters as much as the humor to make everything ring true. Plus, a Charli XCX concert certainly helps for your freshman year.

One of the most marvelous things about this first season is how easily we recognize ourselves in Skinner’s Benny and Wally Baram’s Carmen. I don’t care how popular you were in school, we have all waved at the wrong person or thought we heard someone say something when they said something different. The editing of Overcompensating really hones in on how self-conscious we can all be. Allwarden and Downing let the camera linger as these college newbies meet new people.

“There’s so many characters in this series that you can relate to for all different reasons,” Allwarden says. “We tried to approach editing the storylines from the perspective of each character. For Benny, he’s a [college] freshman and he’s been lying for so long about who he is, and the things that feel so crazy to him are things that we have to feel. When you tap into that from a storytelling perspective, you can, as an audience, feel like you’re in his shoes and you’re feeling that silliness that comes with that age. But you’re also feeling the weight and the tragedy of figuring out who you are.”

“These are things that, when you’re young, feel like the end of the world,” Downing says. “If you don’t get alcohol for a party, your life will be over. It was like we were taking weirdly small stakes, but we made them so big since they feel big to that person in the moment. If you’re older looking at it, you can also remember that feeling.”

“One of my favorite parts of the pilot that Todd cut is that if you don’t have sex with someone the first night of college, you’re going to be in the improv troupe,” Allwarden says, with a laugh. “Those are the only two choices, but it feels like an irreversible thing.”

“To this day, I am still traumatized by the bro handshake,” Downing adds. “I read it in the script and it reminded me of me when I was that age, and I had no idea what the fuck I was doing.”

Overcompensating employs split screens throughout to show parallels between Benny and Carmen, but it serves another thematic purpose. Because they are two friends who withhold information and feelings from one another, we sometimes feel like we can see the other one thinking about the other side of the screen. If you think about the emotional implications of two sides of the same screen, you get an even deeper appreciation for the arcs of the characters.

“I’ve worked with Scott [King] before, and he loves split screens,” Downing says. “The first one we did was on an episode that Amelia cut when they are getting ready for the pregame, and she did it so beautifully. I saw what she did and kind of ran with it. Some of it is scripted.”

“With Benny and Carmen, their experiences are so similar in a way, because they’re just both trying to be someone who they think they should be.” Allwarden says. “Carmen is walking around campus, and we push her into the library. That was the first one that I developed editorially. Now that we established that intentionally, let’s really feel the juxtaposition of these two characters. I love when we did a split screen later in that episode when she’s at the library and she realizes that he didn’t invite her to the pregame. We didn’t have sound from either of those spaces and we let score take it away. They both feel left out.

It was fun to get to play with on this show, because Scott does love them so much. He goes for interesting pitches and the way to feel the story the most–that’s what the beauty of this series is. You can be in the middle of a ridiculous scene where a girl is crying with a neck brace on, and Carmen has a huge case of pink eye while she’s trying to write the story of Buck the Cowboy. You understand her, and you feel bad for her.”

“You got all of Crying Girl, Amelia,” Downing says. “Maybe I will get her in second two?”

If your college hosted Charli XCX on campus, you would be as obsessed as these students. Episode four features a sequence where XCX’s “Boom Clap” is used to hilarious effect as some bathroom antics force people to miss out on the raucous concert. The episode also shows the differences in hazing for organizations for young men and women. Downing was surprised by just how perfect XCX’s music enhanced the emotions of the season.

“When I edited Daisy Jones and the Six, and it was a lot less about the performance more about how each character was looking at each other on stage,” Allwarden says. “That was more about how they would sing and how they held the microphone. With Overcompensating, I approached it where I cut the concert first as its own thing. I knew I wanted to establish where we see Charli the best and then I layered on all the story beats on top of it. I wanted to put them in best moments of the music to mirror when the characters were feeling the most emotional. What makes that challenging is to make sure everything has to fit within the structure of the story. It was all different rhythms.”

“The other great thing about her music that I realized when we were working on it is how much it resonates with our characters,” Downing admits. “We might put in a Charli song here or there and then we’d be surprised that the lyrics exactly mirror what the emotional beats of the characters are. I remember in episode five that there’s a sad moment and when I lined up the song, the lyrics that you hear are, ‘Sorry I made you cry.’ She taps into young love emotion more than I realized when we first started editing.”

Allwarden reveals how much of a gut punch the editing and mixing gives her.

“Oh, it always makes me cry,” she admits.

“We really ripped the song apart,” Downing says. “We would loop parts and tear it out, and then I thought, ‘Oh, god, I hope Charli XCX doesn’t get mad at us for remixing her song like this, but she liked it.”

Overcompensating is streaming now on Prime Video.