Just when you thought the superhero genre had run dry, along comes the weird, whimsical, and intermittently delightful I'm A Virgo (Amazon Prime Video). A surreal mash-up of comic-book romp and comedy, the series from musician and self-proclaimed "communist activist" Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You) is set in an alternative-universe California where caped crusaders are real but where the true villains a mega-corporations trying to flog you addictive fast food.
Setting aside the irony of a self-declared communist making a show for Amazon - the online giant representing peak capitalism at its peakiest - I'm A Virgo brims with eerie, lop-sided charm. Our hero is Cootie, a 19-year-old growing up in an African-African community in Oakland, where he has to overcome his crippling shyness - and the fact he is 13-feet-tall.
Precisely why Cootie (a charismatic, vulnerable Jharrel Jerome) is super-sized and towers over the aunt and uncle (Carmen Ejogo and Mike Epps), who have become his adoptive parents, is not explained in the first three episodes. But this is a world full of people with quirky and random superpowers, including fast food employee Flora (Olivia Washington), with whom Cootie strikes up a connection and who has the Flash-like ability to move incredibly quickly.
He's huge, she can glitch through time and space - and when they become a couple, the result is a sex scene so weird viewers may wonder if they'd fallen through a portal and landed in a late 1990s David Lynch movie. That Lynchian quality of irascibility blended with horror is dialled up further as Cootie watches queasily erotic commercials for Bing Bang Burger - a sort of hyper-evil version of McDonald's, which also happens to be Flora's employer.
As if that wasn't strange enough - and it really strange enough - Riley brings in an element of superhero critique with the appearance of a wonderfully villainous Walton Goggins as an Elon Musk-style weirdo billionaire who has a secondary incarnation as "The Hero" - an Iron Man-style crime fighter who is, in reality, a vigilante terrifying African-American neighbourhoods in historically marginalised Oakland.
This mash-up could easily have come to the screen half-baked. Instead, it uses its deranged humour as a prism to explore how US society has marginalised African-Americans.
I'm A Virgo also radiates a beguiling sweetness in its portrayal of the friendship between Cootie and Oakland teens Felix (Brett Gray), Scat (Allius Barnes) and Jones (Kara Young). He's a giant; they start as strangers who see his hugeness as a novelty - but, in a heartbeat, they're just youngsters hanging out together. For all the surrealism, this portrait of casual friendship feels grounded and real.
I'm A Virgo meanders. Riley is more interested in mood than plot, and, though the series initially seems to set up Cootie and The Hero as antagonists, the ensemble spend most of their time hanging out and bantering rather than progressing the story. And the surrealness is asking a lot of the unsuspecting viewer. In the end, I'm a Virgo is more weird than wonderful - but the stars will align for anyone with a taste for the absurd.
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