What to watch this weekend: New series Overcompensating on Prime Video and Bet on Netflix have one (Canadian) thing in common | Canada Voices

Overcompensating, Prime Video

This gem of a new half-hour American comedy now on Prime follows a young gay jock from Idaho named Benny (series creator Benito Skinner) as he attempts to stay in the closet in college. Not wanting his new bros to catch on, he quickly asks out Carmen (the wonderful Wally Baram), who is emotionally vulnerable after the death of her brother; the relationship between the two becomes a complex mix of deception and genuine connection.

While Benny is definitely prone to overcompensating in his attempts to appear straight – the source of some of the humour of the show – all the young characters are performing to the imagined expectations of others in one way or another, whether trying to be bigger partiers, or seem more political aware, than they really are. Carmen’s bleach-blonde roommate, played by a very funny actor known simply as Holmes, made me guffaw when she asked: “Are you La Tinks?” (She’s was trying to say Latinx.) Shot at the University of Toronto, Canadian cameos abound from Andrea Martin to Boman Martinez-Reid. Oh, and Charli XCX, an executive producer, pops by, too.

Bet, Netflix

This new Canadian but definitely not Degrassi teen show – also shot at the University of Toronto; location scouts love the Collegiate Gothic architecture of Hart House – is a live-action English-language adaptation of Homura Kawamoto and Toru Naomura’s popular manga Kakegurui. Expelled from her high school for compulsive gambling, Yumeko (Miku Martineau) is sent to St. Dominic’s Prep – a boarding school populated by the children of international criminal elite, where poker and betting games of all stripes are how the social hierarchy is established. Secretly, however, she is on a quest for revenge. Martineau, a rising star, really holds the campy comic-book series with her beguiling bluff of a performance; time will tell if the Netflix teens will embrace her as they have Wednesday‘s Jenna Ortega.

Duster, Crave

While we breathlessly await the Hot Wheels movie J.J. Abrams is supposed to be making for Mattel, here’s a new Max crime drama from the prolific American TV/film producer and director with a car as its star –seen in a toy version doing loop-de-loops in the opening credits. Created with LaToya Morgan, Duster is named after an orange Plymouth Duster that getaway driver Jim (Lost‘s Josh Holloway) races around Arizona on behalf of a local crime kingpin in this 1970s-set romp. Competing for screen time with this vehicle is a Black FBI agent named Nina (Rachel Hilson) – “the rookie who thinks she can take back the Southwest Al Capone,” a colleague says snidely – who finds impediments to her investigations within and without the bureau. The costumes and the chases are the most appealing elements of the pulpy pilot episode landing on Crave May 15, ahead of weekly Thursday drops.

Abroad, Omni

Back for its fourth season on Sunday (8:30 p.m., OMNI 2, OMNI BC and OMNI Alberta), this sketch comedy series finds fresh ways to make fun of common diasporic experiences through a Filipino-Canadian lens. The season premiere is built around a sci-series parody that imagines raising kids in an intercultural household as a clash of cultures similar to that between Vulcans and humans on Star Trek. Isabel Kanaan is Abroad‘s likeable star, but the main laughs come from ensemble members such as Nicco Lorenzo Garcia, playing a Filipino uncle who asks all the politically incorrect questions. This unique series – subtitled in Tagalog or English depending on what language is being spoken in a scene – is currently nominated for five Canadian Screen Awards for its last go-round.

First Cow, CBC Gem

This Kelly Reichardt film, which shared top spot on Globe and Mail film critic Barry Hertz’s best-of-2020 list, was on the big screen in Canada for one and a half days before the pandemic shut down cinemas – so you’re forgiven if you missed out on it then. Set in a region of Pacific Northwest during the 19th-century beaver-fur trade, the movie – added to Gem May 16 – tells the story of the first cow to colonize that part of the world; a nomadic cook nicknamed Cookie (John Magaro) and a Chinese immigrant named King-Lu (Orion Lee) steal its milk and integrate it as the secret ingredient in their baked goods. In his review, Hertz wrote: “It is a film intent on exploring struggle and potentially futile determination, and in Cookie and King-Lu’s oily-cake empire, Reichardt finds an intriguing new avenue and world to explore themes that have long anchored her work, from 2008’s Wendy and Lucy to 2013’s Night Moves: economic struggle, the anxiety that is living on the fringe of society and America’s default urge to exploit.”