Spoiler alert: The following contains details about the first two episodes of Pluribus, “We Is Us” and “Pirate Lady.”
In Episode 2 of Pluribus, Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) and Mr. Diabaté (Samba Schutte) — two of the 12 people worldwide who have been inexplicably spared The Joining, an alien-originated mass event that psychically glues everyone together into a perennially positive collective consciousness — spar over the newfound state of humankind.
Carol, a reclusive and disgruntled bestselling romantasy author, exhorts her reticent audience of five immune English speakers to reclaim human agency against the milquetoast, obsequious blob and join her in a quest to reverse the happiness apocalypse. But, Diabanté questions, isn’t a world without strife, oppression, war, famine, poverty and all other societal ailments what humans have been struggling for all along?
Mr. Diabaté (Samba Schutte) and Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) in Pluribus (Apple TV)
This central tension is deliberate, and what creator Vince Gilligan — the four-time Emmy-winning creator, writer, director and executive producer behind Peak TV hits Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul — wants audiences to dissect.
“I’d love for this show to be a water cooler show … I guess, probably virtually nowadays — although I’d love it even better if people got together face-to-face, just period in the world, I think we need more face-to-face and less communicating virtually — but I love the idea of people watching this thing and arguing over it, not angrily, but spiritedly,” he tells Deadline in an interview. “It was a great moment in the writers’ room where two of my writers argued over this. I just sat back, and I was just tickled, because that’s the kind of show I want to make.”
In the leadup to its debut, the Apple TV/Sony Pictures Television show has been shrouded in secrecy — a decision that lends itself supremely well to a mystery-box sci-fi thriller that is equal parts philosophical conundrum and blood-chilling horror. The series, which (understandably) resulted in a high-stakes bidding war, was given a two-season order by the streamer, with Gilligan noting that the writers’ room for the sophomore installment is already open.
As a self-described “science fiction nerd my whole life,” the multi-hyphenate was looking forward to a change following the crime- and corruption-riddled environs of the Bryan Cranston drama and subsequent Bob Odenkirk-starring spinoff. Contrary to many readings of Pluribus since its premiere, the gestation of the idea predated recent developments in generative artificial intelligence and the pandemic. Gilligan says the goal was to “hit every trope and touchstone that the sci-fi movie world presents to us.”
Of the myriad reference points, Gilligan singles out the seminal horror sci-fi anthology The Twilight Zone and 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, an apt jumping off point with its depiction of extraterrestrial “pod people.”
“I love all those tropes,” he says. “I think everybody does. We all know them. We all are familiar. We grew up with them, and I thought it’d be a fun thing to have a show where we could, one by one, turn all those tropes on their ear, change them up a little, make them different, make them fresh or for a new generation.”
Despite the change of pace in theme and genre for Pluribus, in many ways the show is a homecoming for the television auteur. The Virginia-hailing scribe returned to Albuquerque, the locale made pop culturally famous for its association with Breaking Bad, something he was initially hesitant to do.
“I actually kind of thought, ‘Gee, should we be shooting a third show here that has nothing to do with the first two, with the same actor from the second show, Rhea Seehorn? Isn’t that going to confuse people?’” he recalls. “And hopefully not. But the reason we went for it is we got this wonderful crew that I’ve worked with, some of these folks I’ve worked with for almost two decades, and I just figured, ‘Why fix it if it ain’t broke?’”
He adds, remembering the late New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson’s then-new initiative in the early 2000s: “We came for the tax incentives. We stay for the people, the crew.”
Miriam Shor and Rhea Seehorn in Pluribus (Apple TV)
And though Gilligan had initially conceived the main character of Pluribus as a man, he quickly pivoted to writing the role as a star vehicle for Seehorn, whom he describes as “the whole package,” both as a performer and person.
“I just love her,” he says, effusively praising his collaborator. “I’ve worked with such a murderer’s row of actors … I would work with any of these people again, they’re so good … I mean, she can do anything, and she makes it look easy. You don’t feel like you’re watching an actor, you don’t feel like you’re watching a performance. You’re just watching a real person.”
While Seehorn fully embodies Carol Sturka’s complexities — her ultra-relatable prickliness, fear, resentment and unwieldy emotions — Gilligan admits to having left a piece of himself in the character.
“Probably a little bit, bit of a curmudgeon,” he says when asked how much of Carol’s personality is imbued with his.
He continues, ever congenial with his Southern drawl, “I can put it on, when I’m on stage for an interview or something — I can behave like Carol Sturka does when she’s with her fans. And I think she could do that, because at the end of the day, no matter how much she may grumble, she loves her fans, but then as soon as an event like that book signing [is] over, she just wants a drink. That’s probably based on me: She just wants to be quiet for a while and then just have a Manhattan. But the idea of chasing happiness and not being that happy, that probably resonates with me.”
True to its tagline — in which “the most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness” — Pluribus sets up an unlikely hero. While The Joining — possible via the discovery of an astronomic transmission of a nucleotide sequence engineered and later leaked through lab experiments — killed an unfathomable 866 million people, including Carol’s manager and romantic partner Helen (Miriam Shor), Carol’s negative outbursts contribute millions more deaths, as the hive collectively freezes from the stress. At times, Carol’s admirable rebelliousness seems to come at the cost of self-flagellating destruction, a badge of honor to be miserable.
In his twist on the post-apocalypse zombie tale, Gilligan notes that no one watching The Walking Dead feels drawn to zombiedom. “But with this show, I like leaving open the possibility that maybe it’s OK to be an Other. I want to leave that to the audience. I love scenes of valid argument with two characters … It’s like watching a really good tennis match. I want this show to have that possibility for viewers, that they can argue over, chew over — definitely — with everything I do. I want to offer rewatchability to the audience. I want people to be able to be interested enough to watch the thing over and over again. That’s the highest compliment that a show creator or a movie creator can obtain from their audiences.”
(L-R): Sharon Gee, Darinka Arones, Rhea Seehorn, Amarburen Sanjid and Menik Gooneratne in Pluribus (Apple TV)
As such, Gilligan is tailoring his approach to discussing the ins-and-outs of the series, making sure to avoid excess theorizing to let the show take on an independent life of its own.
“I just, I wound up talking too much during the whole Breaking Bad era,” he explains. “I would say, ‘I think this means this. And I definitely, I think…’ And I listen to some of [the Breaking Bad Insider Podcast interviews] again, every now and then, and I’m just thinking, ‘Would you just shut up? It’s not yours anymore.’ When you make a TV show or a movie, or you write a novel, or you paint a painting or create music, at a certain point, it’s not yours anymore. It belongs to the people who enjoy it.”
And the resounding conclusion is that people are enjoying it — no hive mind necessary. Pluribus currently boasts a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, with IMDb ranking the pilot as among its top-rated television episodes.
“It’s freaking awesome. I’m just so tickled. I can’t even tell you,” Gilligan says of the response. “Anecdotally, hearing the goodwill people have toward the show and the positive reactions they’re having to it, I mean, it’s like being tickled to death. It’s just wonderful.”
