It might be a bit of misnomer to call Boots Riley’s I’m a Virgo a superhero series, but it’s also accurate when you consider Jharrel Jerome’s Cootie is a comic book obsessive who worships Walton Goggins’ creator and billionaire Jay Whittle, who also “defends” the streets of Oakland in a suit of armor while quite literally calling himself The Hero, it isn’t untrue.
That’s just one of the many genres at play in the entirely unique seven-episode show, though, with Riley further establishing himself a singular voice in filmmaking having finally made his return five years after breakthrough hit Sorry to Bother You. Trying to distill I’m a Virgo down to its essence is a tough task given all that it has to say, but what can be stated with the utmost certainty is that it’s exploded out of the blocks on streaming.
Per FlixPatrol, the absurdist coming-of-age comedy about a 13 foot-tall teenager getting to grips with the real world having finally stepped foot into it has wasted no time in becoming the number one most-watched episodic project on Prime Video amongst subscribers in the United States.
Hilarious, heart-warming, cringeworthy, incendiary, inflammatory, and so much more in the space of a single scene never mind an episode, a 97 percent critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes is entirely deserved, and if it doesn’t go down as one of the finest small screen efforts of the year, then it’s going to take an awful lot to usurp it as the most unique of 2023.