I’m A Virgo review: Boots Riley makes a wonderfully weird TV show
The mind behind Sorry To Bother You cooks up a freewheeling, ultra-stylized series for Prime Video

Weirdos, rejoice, for the age of subtlety is passing from this world, and a new era is dawning: the time of the bizarre and the baroque. It began with HBO’s Watchmen and carried through to shows ranging from I Hate Suzie to I May Destroy You to Mrs. Davis. These kinds of high-concept, imaginative projects were once dismissed as mere “genre”; now, they’re rapidly changing what the powers that be view as prestige television.
The latest—and most audaciously strange—example of this phenomenon is
I’m A Virgo, the freewheeling, ultra-stylized, wonderfully messy new Prime Video series from Boots Riley (out June 23). Incredibly, it’s only the writer-director’s second project. The first was 2018’s equally over-the-top Sorry To Bother You, which helped launch the careers of LaKeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson.
Like that film, I’m A Virgo takes the concepts of Black subjugation and runaway capitalism to their logical extreme, swinging wildly between satire and drama and back again. It’s both a critique and a loving homage to the superhero genre, mashing together influences including, but not limited to, Roald Dahl, Do The Right Thing, and The Boys, plus authors ranging from Karl Marx and Jean-Paul Sartre to James Baldwin and David Foster Wallace.
I’m a Virgo centers on a (quite literally) big idea: What happens when a 13-foot-tall Black man comes of age and ventures out into the wider world? That’s the plight—or, depending on how you look at it, the gift—of Cootie, played by When They See Us Emmy winner Jharrel Jerome.
Cootie grows up in Oakland, sheltered from prying eyes by his Aunt LaFrancine and Uncle Martisse (Carmen Ejogo and Mike Epps). His issues with fitting into a world not built for him range from the practical (“When you take a shit, I gotta take a coat hanger and chop the shit down in the toilet,” his uncle grouses) to the existential: Isolated and lonely, Cootie’s only window into larger society is TV and comic books.
But inevitably, like Candide did before him, our protagonist steps out of his cage and into the unknown, a wide-eyed innocent who has no idea what the world has in store for him. He makes fast friends with a group of kids from the neighborhood who accept him with open arms: Felix (Brett Gray), a guy in love with his car; the sweet, cartoon-adoring Scat (Allius Barnes); and Jones (Kara Young), a radical community organizer dedicated to liberating the neighborhood from the bonds of capitalism and racism. Along the way, Cootie falls hard for Flora (Olivia Washington), an ambitious fast-food worker who is gifted and cursed with a superpower of her own.
Outside his social circle, Cootie is both feared and revered, objectified by a slimy commercial agent and giant-worshipping cultists, turned into a symbol of liberation by his community, and demonized by racist white people. His nemesis is an eccentric billionaire who styles himself as simply “the Hero,” a Robocop-esque vigilante played with unhinged flair by character-acting great Walton Goggins. Beneath it all thrums the steady beat of the media juggernaut, from pundits to big businesses to a Simpsons-esque cartoon that’s both nihilistic and profoundly moving.