In Boots Riley’s world, the surreal has an agenda. I’m a Virgo’s 13-foot-tall teenager hides from the world, preparing for a potentially catastrophic future in a custom-built home. A tech billionaire who moonlights as a nighttime vigilante ensconces himself in a concrete tower that can elevate itself above its neighbors, reminding them who dominates the social hierarchy. A TV show popular with the local teens hides a melancholy, almost nihilistic worldview behind its Adult Swim-like animation. But even in this alternate reality where Riley’s wildest visual and narrative impulses can roam free, capitalist strictures still dominate and subjugate. Riley wants us to feel both sides of it — to be excited by possibility and enraged by constraint.
I’m a Virgo, the writer-director’s first television venture, personifies this ambition in Cootie (Jharrel Jerome, charming with an easy kookiness), his oversize body epitomizing the ways Riley pushes boundaries and bristles at restrictions. Inside an Oakland teetering between absurdism and realism, Riley experiments with forced perspective, animation, puppetry and miniatures to center a young Black man whose physical largeness nods at pervasive racial stereotypes and whose sincerity drives the series’ interest in what make a hero. In the most straightforward example of I’m a Virgo’s audacity, Riley takes aim at corporations like Amazon while the series itself airs on Prime Video. The only thing the show doesn’t make space for amid its elaborate mise en scène and dense political theory is subtlety.
Across seven half-hour episodes (all premiere today), Riley tackles centuries of American myths, from the nationalistic foundation of exceptionalism and individualism to the 20th-century phenomenon of comic books and today’s omnipresent superhero cinema. These classics aren’t complicated Greco-Roman odysseys or lesson-filled parables; they’re quite often stories for children about the black-and-white nature of right and wrong, where those with special, chosen abilities are worthier than others (great power, great responsibility, all that jazz) but also perpetually face ostracization — leading to a cycle of persecution and retribution, martyrdom and righteousness. Riley delves into the consequences of this theology, his protagonists evoking Superman and the the X-Men and a baddie who brings to mind Batman. Instead of embracing familiar the-world-is-in-danger stakes, Riley stays inside his hometown, within a family and group of friends who are trying to make their community better. That concentration keeps the story from sprawling too wide, even as Riley takes on bigger and bigger ideas — the legitimacy of cops, the indignity of our health-care system, the need for cross-industry solidarity — that fit the immensity of his vision, including the giant at its center.
The series begins with a crisp bit of table setting: Cootie has been raised in secrecy by his uncle Martisse (Mike Epps) and aunt LaFrancine (Carmen Ejogo), who maintain a strict regimen for the boy — lots of reading and exercise, very little TV, absolutely no fast food — and keep him inside at all times. They fear the public’s reaction to his outsize frame (“People are gonna try to figure out how to use you, and when they can’t use you no more, they’re gonna try to get rid of youâ€) and forbid him from going outside before he turns 21. But Cootie ventures out two years earlier than planned, drawing attention that only exacerbates his guardians’ concern. Nicknamed the “Twamp Monster†by the neighborhood, Cootie gets lessons in friendship, flirtation, and activism from new friends Felix (Brett Gray), Scat (Allius Barnes), and Jones (Kara Young), and he catches the eye of fast-food worker Flora (Olivia Washington). But he’s also immediately objectified and targeted, nearly universally by white people: an agent who signs him to an unfair deal, a clothing designer who asks him to model in a fashion show that traffics in prejudiced clichés, a cult that believes he’s their prophesied polypheme. The most dangerous of these foes is Jay Whittle (Walton Goggins), a tech billionaire who is also the publisher of Cootie’s favorite comic book, The Hero. Whittle dresses up like the titular character each night and flies over Oakland, surveilling neighborhoods for people to arrest.
Cootie idolizes the vigilante, repeating his catchphrase (“Get your mind right, halfwitsâ€), and argues with his friends and family about the man’s motives, a tension that becomes more central as the season progresses. That’s not to suggest I’m a Virgo starts off slow with its ideas; Riley and co-showrunner Tze Chun pack the plot with various character details and subplots from the beginning, and episodes almost frantically careen between concepts — Cootie’s mysterious parentage, the Hero’s violence, varying approaches to activism. The cast is universally solid, but Jerome and Goggins are particularly good foils, the former’s guileless curiosity bouncing off the latter’s unyielding temper. The efficient production design and cinematography enhance our understanding of Cootie’s otherness through contrast, first with tight shots emphasizing his height and tendency to hunch, then going wide as Cootie sees the night sky and skyscrapers for the first time and realizes his comparative smallness. As Cootie’s self-awareness grows, so does the series’ inventiveness; thought bubbles float over his head, and a sex scene winks at our expectations for his anatomy. The hero’s journey is vivid and chaotic, and I’m a Virgo uses amplification — of the color palette, of Oakland’s geography, of tragedy — to move us along this coming-of-age voyage.
Some of Riley’s preoccupations from Sorry to Bother You show up as symbols of racial and economic divisions (disembodied voices, elevators), but with more time than a feature film, I’m a Virgo tries on all manner of genre conventions. A creature-feature moment in which Cootie’s gigantic arm reaches over the fence to hit a joint; the sci-fi flourishes of Whittle’s compound, complete with an AI voice modeled on Bill Cosby; a rom-com meet-cute between Cootie and Flora, who recognize in each other’s preternatural abilities their connection as kindred spirits — these are effective markers of a made-up world, vivacious and unfettered. Certain elements of the show, like the speed with which Flora and Cootie fall for each other, feel thin under this otherwise-maximalist touch, but when I’m a Virgo makes the figurative literal, the series has gripping immediacy: How would the world respond to an inexplicably gigantic person? What kind of “criminals†would a white man with endless resources and tools actually chase down in a majority-Black community? How does one make peace with a mysterious transformation that alters their physiology? And, in a capitalist system, who gets to draw the line between hero and villain?
If that final query feels like a jarring turn from imagination back to practicality, congratulations, you’re watching a Boots Riley project. Sympathy with workers, skepticism of the ruling class, and encouragement to step outside your ego and embrace collaboration are givens, and Riley swathes these messages in a delirious creativity. In reminding us that all fiction is born out of material conditions and a status quo to which we become accustomed, I’m a Virgo turns into an origin story and recruitment pitch for a new kind of America. This time around, Riley wants you to be bothered enough to care.