Yahoo News ‘I’m A Virgo’ TV Review: Originality Stands Tall In Boots Riley’s Small-Screen Debut
I’m a Virgo is a triumph of imagination and ideology.
A boomerang throwback to Amazon’s early streaming years when poignant oddballs like Transparent and Patriot dominated Jeff Bezos’ slate, the Boots Riley-created series that launches Friday on Prime Video is a revitalizing return to originality both for the platform and the franchise-heavy small screen itself.
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Watch it, with both eyes open.
With dead-end basketball and branding deals, societal toxicity, fast food and a faster-moving love interest played in breakout fashion by Olivia Washington, the heart of the poetic show is 13-foot-tall Cootie, portrayed in towering fashion by Jharrel Jerome. Leading the 19-year-old Oakland native’s unsure steps to the outside world after years of being hidden, the When They See Us Emmy winner ups his already considerable game to unfurl a naturalism that grounds the magical realism all around him.
Too late for this year’s Emmys, regardless of if the ceremony occurs in September or not due to the ongoing Writers Guild strike, I’m a Virgo faces the challenge of not being remembered when the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards come around in 2024. Although the comedy categories will be deep, it would be a crime to forget such a big successful swing as I’m a Virgo itself or the performances by Jerome, Washington and two-time Tony Award nominee Kara Young as the power-providing Jones.
Operating on a number of levels, as one would expect from The Coup frontman Riley, there’s a lot of metaphor at work in I’m a Virgo. From one sharp angle, this is a mixtape of Jonathan Swift, N.K. Jemisin, Samuel Becket, Kara Walker and Ralph Ellison. Yet, in a very pointed manner, the work is resoundingly soulful and skillful.
A Situationist by any other name, self-declared communist Riley has been seeding the long détournement game for years for this very moment and the seven-episode DIY I’m a Virgo. The Sorry to Bother You director, who penned a guest column for Deadline last month on his conflicting personal and professional feelings as a proud guild member about having his TV debut during the WGA labor action, treats the occasion with a seriousness that alludes many more seasoned talents.
The goofy gag scenes that populate the charged coming-of-age narrative once Cootie breaks free of the gilded cage constructed by his aunt and uncle (Carmen Ejogo and Mike Epps) come to fruition down the line across generational and economic divides. Like the best of Spike Lee’s canon, the obvious agenda-setting scenes prove foundational long after their pedagogic aura has faded.
Power outages, self-interested parenting, an unhinged billionaire anti-hero literally called the Hero (played by a delightfully wig wearing Walton Goggins), friendship, betrayal, comic book fandom, cults and lovingly awkward sex between Cootie and Washington’s Flora fill I’m a Virgo. Amidst episodes written by Riley, Michael R. Jackson, Tze Chun, Whitney White and Marcus Gardley, the series also is packed with the legacy of Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre, social disruption, local politics, an uncomfortable animated series within the series, the business of crime and capitalist critiques that postulate in another world what a Buster Keaton-Angela Davis-Preston Sturges collaboration might have looked like.
In that sense, I’m a Virgo puts American myth making to a stress test.
The result, which never turns away from what it is to be young and Black in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave, isn’t flattering to the lies we tell ourselves and the truths most turn away from — whether they are banning books and drag queen shows, attacking trans kids or the right to vote, or not. Besides a rather stomach-churning ending that screams out for a second season, I’ll just add that the overall combination, among other things, exposes the callow core of the assembly-line caped crusaders, spinoffs and revival content that has been keeping the lights on in Hollywood for far too long. This is the difference between creativity and content by committee.
What I’m a Virgo is not about, to snag a phrase from an early episode, is situationships. This show is about what’s going on, trying to see it in the moment we are in. It’s about how in America, as Jones tells Hero towards the end of the season, “the paper is a placeholder for the violence.”
Sit with that, with both eyes open.
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