I’m A Virgo review: Boots Riley makes a wonderfully weird TV show

The delightful weirdness and vibrance of the series’ first few episodes give way to an abrupt and inevitable tragedy that changes the lives of the central characters forever. But Riley’s trademark humor, empathy, and trippy aesthetics live right alongside this darkness—and it doesn’t feel jarring at all. If anything, I’m a Virgo presents a hopeful vision of humanity that’s far removed from the cynicism of Sorry To Bother You.

Riley directed all seven episodes of the series; and on the writing side, he collaborated with a killer team that includes Pulitzer-winning playwright Michael R. Jackson (A Strange Loop) and Marcus Gardley (The Chi, The Color Purple).

The cast is also wall-to-wall talented. Jerome anchors the show with his winning turn as Cootie, conveying both his sweetness and his anger, as well as his unbridled delight at every new thing he encounters in Riley’s teeming, colorful Oakland. Goggins manages to conjure a villain who’s both despicable and sympathetic—and it’s clear he’s having the time of his life playing such a specific brand of oddball. (Witness him dancing in his skivvies to, of all things, Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman.”) Gray, who also starred in When They See Us, takes Felix on a vivid emotional journey from easy joy to heavy grief.

Most of the ensemble is made up of actors taking on their first major roles—and making them sing. Washington is a highlight, conveying the depths of Flora’s brilliance and complexity as she falls in love with Cootie. (“You out to lunch, boy; but it’s at the same place I eat at,” she tells him lovingly after a round of weird, wild sex.) And keep an eye on Young, a Tony-nominated actor whose turn as Jones will hopefully be her screen breakout; with her charisma, intensity, and unapologetic queerness, she evokes a young Samira Wiley.

The central concept of I’m A Virgo couldn’t be more on the nose—and that’s by design. Sometimes, the obvious metaphor is the best metaphor. Cootie is the living embodiment of white society’s greatest fear: a Black man taking up space in the world, a “thug” (an epithet famously used to describe Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin) whose sheer size carries the promise of inevitable violence. And like every Black boy who’s ever fallen prey to American white supremacy—whether they’re gunned down by the police or thrown into jail or victimized by the medical system—Cootie is simply a human being, in all his beauty and imperfection.

LaFrancine and Martisse hide Cootie from the world because, like real-world Black parents, they want to protect him as long as they can from a world they know will inevitably marginalize him, fear him, and very possibly murder him. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in Between The World and Me, “In America, the injury is not being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after.”

Riley’s brilliance is to create a fictional setting so over-the-top that it sneaks up on us how close it is to our own. It allows us to realize how outlandish our reality truly is—existence in an impossibly cruel, racist, classist system that is nonetheless marked by flashes of beauty and radical kindness from the very people it exploits.