‘Pluribus’ explores world of enforced happiness

Vince Gilligan made one of recent television’s most acclaimed and beloved universes. His show, Breaking Bad, was about an Albuquerque, New Mexico, high-school chemistry teacher who, after a cancer diagnosis, turns his talents to methamphetamine cooking to secure his family’s future.

It first burst onto screens in 2008. Since then Gilligan’s further exploration of the origins story of Breaking Bad’s eccentric, shady lawyer Saul Goodman (Better Call Saul) –and his movie sequel El Camino – have kept him firmly in the dark, morally ambiguous, narratively rich belly of the beast, for which, as he admitted in a recent interview, will be etched on his tombstone.

But Gilligan, a soft-spoken, charming, Southern, nice guy from Virginia, didn’t begin his television writing career in the world of drug kingpins and meth-heads hustling under the blazing New Mexico sun. From 1996 to 2002, Gilligan served as a writer and a producer on one of that era’s biggest network shows, Chris Carter’s The X-Files, which provided plenty of conspiracy theory fuel for a generation of disbelievers of the US government – and believers in the idea that there is something out there.

Pluribus is Gilligan’s new, much-anticipated show. The show returns its creator to New Mexico in a form that’s closer to his X-Files origins in its premise, if not in tone. It’s so secretively protected that the critics granted preview access were required to agree to such a long list of spoiler points that they can’t reveal much.

Gilligan said that the idea for Pluribus first began to emerge while he was working on Better Call Saul, as a sort of anti-pessimistic take on the dystopian, post-apocalyptic, sci-fi genre of popular, fan-favourite series like The Walking Dead and The Last of Us. All Gilligan really knew at the time was that he wanted the show to explore the idea of a new world that emerges in the wake of a global cataclysmic event, in which peace and solidarity have enveloped the planet and everyone is creepily nice to each other. He also knew he wanted the hero of his show to be played by Better Call Saul’s breakout star Rhea Seehorn, whose performance as Goodman’s partner in crime and girlfriend, lawyer Kim Wexler, earned her two Emmy nominations.

Apple, the studio that’s become the go-to-home for inventive creators looking to turn sometimes very expensive ideas into genre-bending television, proved willing to open its doors and its cheque book to Gilligan – with Pluribus receiving a two-season deal straight off the bat. With the popularity of its Ben Stiller-created, hard-to-define workplace, dystopian sci-fi-drama, Severance and the lavishly realised, epic, Isaac Asimov adaptation Foundation, Apple seemed like the right place to develop Gilligan’s futuristic, sci-fi drama.

Seehorn plays Carol Sturka, a bestselling romance author – curmudgeonly, cynical, dissatisfied and unimpressed with people in general. She hates her books, she detests her fans, and nothing her beloved partner Helen (Miriam Shore) can do seems to make her happy. When the world is changed forever in an instant, after a global disaster that’s so out of left field you don’t see it coming, Carol and her misanthropy become of surprising wide-scale concern to a new world whose guiding principles are peace, prosperity and kindness.

Carol’s struggle to find personal happiness and peace only gets harder once the world is happy and peaceful, and to quote the series tagline, she’s now “the most miserable person on Earth”, tasked with “saving the world from happiness”.

Though Gilligan has always maintained that he’s an apolitical creator, it’s hard not to see in Pluribus – Latin for “of many” – echoes of his recent, publicly voiced concerns about what’s happening in real-world America. Earlier this year, in an acceptance speech for a Writers Guild of America lifetime achievement award, Gilligan said, “We’re living in an era where bad guys, the real-life kind, are running amok. Bad guys who make their own rules, bad guys who, no matter what they tell you, are only out for themselves. Who am I talking about? Well, this is Hollywood, so guess.”

How Carol’s journey will progress over the next two seasons of Pluribus is under wraps but it’s easy to see in the character some of the heroic traits Gilligan believes are needed in popular culture if the depressing attacks on it by the Trump 2.0 era are to be challenged and overcome.

While Pluribus is set in a future world philosophically removed from our current one, Gilligan told Time Magazine in a recent profile that he hopes a show about “people struggling to do the right thing” can at least help toward the greater goal of helping Americans find a way “to talk to each other”.

Humanity may not be perfect but there must be enough good in it to make it worth defending so we can positively evolve. That’s not a message you’d expect to be the driving force of the Gilligan who created Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul – or the Gilligan who served his time on The X-Files. It is, however, a message you can be sure he’ll deliver in the sardonic, dry, absurdist and perplexed manner in which only he knows how.

Pluribus is streaming on Apple TV+