Now he’s best known for the crime-fueled duology of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, but when Vince Gilligan was first starting out in television, it was in the realm of sci-fi. Over seven years he penned a number of classic episodes of The X-Files, ranging from a monster-themed spoof of Cops to a bizarre high-speed car chase that was his first collaboration with Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston. And now he’s back in the genre with the upcoming Apple TV series Pluribus, which starts streaming in November.
But Gilligan tells me that, while he had been itching to return to sci-fi, actually getting there was a bit of an accident. “I didn’t make a conscious decision to make another sci-fi show,” he tells The Verge. Instead, he came up with a specific idea and discovered no other genre would do. “I realized there was no other way to explain the happenings other than science fiction.”
Pluribus follows a woman named Carol (Rhea Seehorn, who previously worked with Gilligan on Better Call Saul) who finds herself thrust into a very strange world. It seems that everyone on the planet, save for Carol and a few other individuals, is infected with a never-ending form of happiness. Not only are they perpetually smiling, but it seems like they’ll do whatever it takes to both make Carol happy and eventually subsume her into their cheerful mania.
It’s a story that Gilligan has been toying with for the better part of a decade. While working on Better Call Saul, he would take long walks on his lunch break, which is when the concept started to germinate. “It almost started like a daydream,” he says. “I was thinking of this guy and he was living in a world where everybody was nice to him all of the time. And it’s not that he was a particularly good guy, or particularly special. He was just a normal dude. But suddenly he wakes up one day and everybody loves him. And that idea tickled me; it never went away.”
He continued to mull over the idea, and in the ensuing years he also developed a strong appreciation of Seehorn’s work. So when Better Call Saul was approaching its conclusion, he made the decision to rework the Pluribus concept with her in the lead role. “Something about Rhea stood out where I thought, I want to work with her again. Just like years ago when I was doing X-Files, I knew I wanted to work with Bryan Cranston again,” Gilligan says. “I basically tailored the part for Rhea. I wanted her to be a star, I figured it was long past time for her to be number one on the call sheet, and I wanted to be the person to get her there.”
“I basically tailored the part for Rhea. I wanted her to be a star”
One of the trickiest parts of Seehorn’s character is that she’s largely unhappy even prior to the events that set Pluribus’ story in motion. That feeling is only exacerbated when she’s confronted by an unrelenting wave of cheerfulness. This creates the potential for a very unlikable lead, a lone source of negativity in a sea of happiness. For Gilligan, that meant Carol required a careful balancing act that Seehorn was uniquely equipped to handle because of her background in both drama and comedy.
“Carol is snarky and sarcastic and a bit of a misanthrope, but it’s just because of the way she sees the world,” he explains. “And suddenly this terrible thing happens in the first episode and she’s on her own and desperately wants the world back. She decides she’s going to have to take matters into her own hands and be a hero, and I love the idea of a reluctant hero.”
The lead-up to Pluribus’ premiere has been filled with mystery. It started with cryptic teasers, which were followed by trailers that only hinted at the extent of what’s really going on. Gilligan says that “we’ve done such a good job being secretive that part of me can’t wait for it to be revealed to the world.” But he also notes that this level of restraint is a key part of how Pluribus unfolds — and it’s something he probably could only pull off at this stage of his career.
“I don’t think I would’ve had the confidence that I could leave a lot of it for the audience to figure out,” he says. “Ten, 15 years ago I probably would’ve felt an overwhelming desire to explain everything. And now I realize — and Rhea has helped me realize — that it’s amazing how little dialogue you need sometimes when you’re watching really great acting. Of course, with something like Pluribus, there are rules you have to explain. But the older I get, the more confident I get, not in terms of my abilities but in the wisdom of the audience. The kind of shows that we create attract really smart viewers.”
In addition to Seehorn, there’s another element that will be familiar to fans of Gilligan’s previous work: the setting. Just like Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, Pluribus takes place in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Gilligan says the decision was made primarily so he could stick with the same crew, some of whom he’s worked with going on 20 years, spanning two shows and a movie. And while this choice may set internet sleuths searching for a connection between all of Gilligan’s series, he insists that Pluribus is its own universe, so they’d be searching in vain.
“Don’t hold your breath,” he says. “You’ll turn blue.”
Pluribus starts streaming on Apple TV on November 7th.