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On the front of the Great Seal of the United States – the spatchcocked eagle that adorns everything from passports to the dollar bill – are three words: E pluribus unum. It’s a Latin phrase meaning “out of many, one”, and a reminder of America’s commitment to individual rights and freedoms, and how those constituent parts create the all-singing, all-dancing whole. It is also the phrase from which Apple TV’s new dystopian sci-fi, Pluribus, takes both its name and its dread-inducing set-up.
Rhea Seehorn is Carol, a best-selling author of lowbrow smut (“Should I know who you are?” a taxi driver asks; “That depends,” Carol responds, “are you a big fan of mindless crap?”). She resides in Albuquerque with her manager and partner Helen (Miriam Shor), living in blissful cynicism until, suddenly, everyone in the world turns into a single omniscient presence (except for the people, like Helen, who died during “the joining”). Humanity has caught a virus – or a “psychic glue”, as the US Under Secretary of Agriculture tells Carol – which means they now operate as a contented, efficient hive mind. Except for Carol, who, for some reason, is immune. Why, though? Are there others like her? And can the giant obsequious organism that is the world’s population succeed in bringing Carol into their great intellectual harem?
The show is written by Vince Gilligan, the televisual auteur behind two related masterpieces, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. It marks his first return to the small screen since the latter ended in 2022 and bears the hallmarks of a visionary being given free reign (and Apple’s carte blanche). The premise is an adventurous one that might easily have been an instalment of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror. But with Severance, Apple showed a willingness to expand these nightmarish fantasies into full series, and Pluribus fits this model. The nine-episode season takes Carol on a journey from depression to defiance, from Bilbao to Las Vegas – all while grappling with the dissonance of the fact that her enemies (the billions of dronefolk) treat her as Queen Bee. It is pleasingly counterintuitive: who is the enemy here? Is there one?
Seehorn – who worked with Gilligan on Better Call Saul – is a force of nature. Carol is grimly intransigent, the last person you’d pick for the job of representing the twilight of human consciousness (the show’s strapline – “The most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness” – undersells her cushy life). She wants to drink and watch The Golden Girls, not rescue mankind. The show needs a compelling lead performance because, for much of the drama, Carol is the only person acting with autonomy and not parroting dead-eyed lines like a Greek chorus. She becomes the sole conduit for vulnerability and ambition.
This is also the show’s problem. Carol is quite a fun protagonist (flawed yet resilient, like Severance’s Mark Scout or Silo’s Juliette Nichols) but she has a lot of work to do playing against the straight-bat swarm, often represented by the immaculately coiffed figure of Zosia (Karolina Wydra). “Everyone has turned into some kind of f***ing pod person,” Carol observes drily, but this does rather limit the ensemble. Carol’s fellow autonomous outliers dip in and out of the narrative, but it remains her story. And so, the tension feels incorrectly calibrated when compared with other recent end of days survivalist dramas, like The Last of Us and Fallout, which spread the workload of their heroes and give them interesting foils. Where Pluribus could be an authorial send-up of modern America – a compelling vision of trying to stay sane in a destabilising world – it ends up being a bit listless.
Rhea Seehorn is tasked with saving the world in ‘Pluribus’ (Apple TV+)
This can happen when great writers are given too much trust. Remember Matthew Weiner’s follow-up to Mad Men, an anthology called The Romanoffs? No, me neither. Yet Pluribus is by no means bad. Seehorn is excellent, the premise is interesting, and Apple TV’s production work is as polished as ever. But it just isn’t gripping, feeling instead like a satire that’s unsure what, or who, it’s satirising.
