I’m A Virgo is a short series (seven episodes, 30 minutes each) on Amazon Prime created Boots Riley (Sorry To Bother You), all of which became available on June 23, 2023. The primary theme is about Cootie (Jharrel Jerome), a young black man who happens to be 13-feet-tall, but it also veers into deconstruction the superhero genre and the necessity of destroying capitalism.

The chief attraction of the series for this blog is the depiction of sex between differently-sized people, and Cootie does get it on with Flora (Olivia Washington). If all you’re interested in is the big sex scene, it’s in Episode 4 (“Balance Beam”). No actual nudity is shown, but we do see topless Cootie and bare-shouldered Flora trying different positions, and the dialogue and sound effects go a long way toward illustrating what we all want to see.

No CGI was used in this series; they accomplish a lot with forced-perspective and puppets (a giant puppet for Cootie and half-scale puppets for everyone else). Cootie interacts with many half-scale sets and props, but there are also enough digital composite shots to allow all the differently-sized characters to be portrayed by actors simultaneously.

Did I mention that about halfway through the series a whole neighborhood of people wake up one morning shrunk to six inches or less? This phenomenon is never explained, and the first season concludes without any mention as to whether they remain tiny or who was responsible. The tinies get a small amount of interaction with the other characters, and one tiny man even makes a lewd advance to Flora (“It requires trust on my part”).

Apart from the sizey bits, the series is pretty good. It’s even more absurd than Sorry To Bother You, but gratifyingly so. In addition to his unusual size, Jerome has to portray Cootie as essentially home-schooled, as his (foster?) parents have kept him a secret all his life. Walton Goggins is superb as the main antagonist, showing just how criminally underused he was in Ant-Man and the Wasp. The pacing is uneven, and when the show loses focus on Cootie you wonder where it’s going. The dialogue is wonderful, however, and the art design is stunningly creative. There are no simple characters here; they all make you believe they have stories of their own (if few of them get satisfactory resolutions).

I hope they make another season. Olivia Washington has already been installed in my personal pantheon.