There are no working artists in Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus. Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), the show’s protagonist, used to be a successful romantasy novelist, but then a virus of unknown origin swept across the globe, killing millions and uniting its infected survivors into a kind of peaceful, planetary hive mind. Carol was inexplicably spared, along with 12 otherwise unrelated individuals, but she hasn’t really been in a writing mood since the end of the world/dawn of the utopia. The hive mind—which is what I’ll call the shared consciousness of most of the other people on Pluribus—is keen on advancing scientific research as well as pursuing innovations in logistics. But, at least in our limited view of them, it doesn’t seem that the hive mind has any interest in composing symphonies or painting landscapes or, say, writing prestige streaming series. Members of the hive mind methodically gobble up the nutrients they need to survive; the individuals order food and products and services from an essentially limitless menu that the hive mind is eager to fulfill for them. But no one is creating anything. Everyone on Earth is a pure consumer now.
If there’s no new art, that means there are also no critics. This is a point the show spends a relatively significant amount of time demonstrating to us. In the fourth episode of Pluribus, Carol sits down with a hive mind member named Larry (a perfectly cast Jeff Hiller). “Do you like my books?” she asks. And Larry replies, without hesitation, “Oh, we love your books.” But Carol is unsatisfied:
Carol: What do you love about them?
Larry: Everything. Your books are an expression of you, and we love you.
Carol: Need you to be more specific. Character arcs, plot turns …
Larry: Oh, yes, yes, we love the character arcs and the plot turns …
Carol: Which ones?
Larry: All of them.
Understandably, this exchange makes Carol suspect that the hive mind hasn’t actually read her work. But Larry easily demonstrates that he’s done the reading. The problem isn’t that these pod people are inattentive or disingenuous—quite the opposite!—it’s that they don’t have any kind of taste at all. As an amalgam of every consciousness on Earth, they are a single, networked being comprising every opinion, experience, and memory anyone has had, but no sense of discernment. Larry explains that when they think about Carol’s writing, they “experience it through many eyes, many hearts.” The only thing that matters, to the hive mind, is that somebody, somewhere felt something about Carol’s work. “How would you say my work compares to Shakespeare?” Carol asks. “Equally,” Larry replies. “Equally wonderful.”
Like many things about the world of Pluribus, it’s unclear whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. On one hand, it’s a utopian fantasy about a world governed by acceptance and love, which judges things based on their value to the people who consume them rather than against some abstract and fickle cultural hierarchy. At the same time, it’s a dystopian fantasy of a world without critics and, by extension, a world devoid of any kind of aesthetic experience that isn’t blandly generalizable. These guys like everything!
“Criticism isn’t a search for truth,” wrote Jed Perl in a November New York Review of Books essay, “but for a particular person’s truth.” I kept coming back to this notion of criticism while watching this show and thinking about why Carol is so frustrated with the hive mind. As Perl describes it, reading criticism is not about searching for a consensus, or, more vulgarly, deciding what to consume and how. Criticism is about seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. “We see how their minds work,” he writes of good critics, “and that helps us see how ours work.”
In this sense, Pluribus is itself a kind of critical experiment. Every frame is a vast field of detail to excavate, a specific aesthetic experience waiting to unfurl. And every scene is animated by the kinds of philosophical questions that might bring us to a new understanding of ourselves. It is a patient, provocative, and at times profound show. It’s also a bit of a snooze.
As I hinted above, Pluribus is never completely sure whether the catastrophic event at its center is a catastrophe or not. The spread of the hive mind—which the show calls The Joining—has created a world without conflict, without poverty, destitution, or loneliness. Everybody plays the part they’re needed to play—performing complex surgery, cleaning up a mess, acting a role in someone else’s sex fantasy—in every moment, and they do so with a beatific smirk. The members of the hive mind are transcendently connected, and they find a kind of ecstasy in that connection. The hive mind is so happy, in fact, that prolonged exposure to negativity—Carol’s, in particular—poses a mortal risk.
But, then again, there’s also all that death. As Carol repeatedly points out, while all the members of the hive mind seem quite content, that contentment was purchased at a dear cost, and without consent. Carol lost her longtime partner, Helen, who was infected by the virus and passed away. That Helen’s thoughts and memories managed to be taken up by the hive mind adds insult to Carol’s injury. Anyone on Earth can tell her intimate details of her and Helen’s life together, but none of them are Helen. Gilligan and his writers are smart to keep Carol from talking about this explicitly too much, but her quest to save the world, whatever that means, reads always as a prolonged gesture of personal grief, not for humanity, but for Helen. This virus murdered Carol’s great love, leaving her not just alone in their shared home, but alone on Earth.
As the critic Kathryn VanArendonk noted, in a review aptly titled “Pluribus Is About Everything and Unlike Anything Else,” the range of interpretations of Carol’s predicament is broad and diverse. This tale of a homogenized, averaged-out human consciousness is perhaps an allegory about AI. Or maybe it’s an elaborate metaphor for the isolating experience of depression. Perhaps it’s about selling out, mass audiences, the dimness of crowds. Like basically everything else right now, I would propose that Pluribus is a little bit about the cultural experience of Covid-19; it’s a parable about environmental sustainability; it’s a self-conscious meta-critique about two decades of prestige antihero TV; it’s a fantasy of wealth redistribution in the Mamdani Era of ascending leftism; it’s a fantasy of surveillance and compliance in the Trump Era of creeping fascism; it’s about America; it’s about consumerism; it’s about veganism; it’s about the supply chain; it’s about art; it’s about criticism.
Gilligan and company go about crafting the world of the show with care and openness. From Breaking Bad to Better Call Saul, Gilligan and his team of producers, writers, and directors have established a singular style that emphasizes deliberate pacing. There’s sumptuous cinematography that treats the interiors of featureless office buildings with the same lavish attention as the desert landscape of New Mexico. And the show has the confidence to dwell in silence rather than crowd the frame with talk or incident. Gilligan was always the formalist of the TV revolution, and Pluribus is about as extreme an example of his televisual point of view as we’ve seen.
At times, this can be thrilling. The calmly propulsive intercontinental tracking shot sequence that opens the second episode is one of the finest pieces of TV filmmaking I think I’ve ever seen. And the show’s slow, undistracted visual style works to great effect to make us feel Carol’s loneliness, especially in the middle episodes of the season. But Pluribus also dedicates a lot of space to the slow progression of quotidian events—we spend a lot of time watching Carol watch Golden Girls DVDs, for instance. In Breaking Bad, the necessity that we participate in every step of Walter White’s crimes gave viewers a seductive and terrifying sense of complicity; likewise, in Better Call Saul, the elaborate accounting of Jimmy McGill’s schemes made us feel the weight of each of his moral compromises in real time. When a show is as rich with quick-trigger moral quandaries as Gilligan’s have been, this type of stretched-out storytelling has an intensifying effect.
That crawling proceduralism, however, is less revealing in Pluribus. Perhaps used to painting prodigies, Gilligan, in his first real swing at an ordinary protagonist, can feel condescending, dull. Seehorn is exceptional playing an everywoman unsuited to her world-historical role, but Carol remains more a plot contrivance than a person. Every scene of undivided attention that Pluribus pays to her only manages to add density, not complexity, to her character. Her queerness—and her pre-Joining public closetedness—are introduced and quickly abandoned as subjects of interest, and the show doesn’t take her writing seriously in the way it does Walt’s scientific genius or Jimmy’s Barnumesque virtuosity. And so the show spends a decadent amount of time documenting the granular, moment-by-moment existence of a woman it finds to be not all that interesting.
Vince Gilligan famously pitched Breaking Bad as a show about how one man transforms from “Mr. Chips to Scarface.” The comedy writer Michael Schur once described his pitch for the mockumentary sitcom Parks and Recreation as the story of how a local government turns a pit into a park. In this way, both of these beloved late-aughts series share an obsessive A-to-B narrative approach. They are shows about long, arduous processes. And their drama comes, not from big splashy twists—although there are plenty in both shows—but from our accumulated investment in the characters as they change. This change is alternately beautiful and terrifying as we come to appreciate its intricacies.
It’s notable, then, that both writers, who’d made their bones by offering extended, lovingly detailed televisual answers to material questions, eventually turned their gazes to the philosophical. Both Schur’s The Good Place and now Gilligan’s Pluribus are built around, essentially, unanswerable existential questions. Their high-concept methodology is the same—patient, glacial, attentive—though the result is dramatically different. While The Good Place became the most crowd-pleasing Philosophy 101 lecture on TV for four seasons, Pluribus takes a more radically detached approach to the audience. Rather than pepper its viewers with prompts and thought experiments, Pluribus sets up its premise and then, quite literally, just gives its viewers time to think about it.
In one episode, a guy we don’t know much about goes on a long drive and then a long hike. In multiple episodes, we watch that same man write consecutive numbers in a notebook, set a timer, and then cross out the number he just wrote down. In another episode, we watch Carol self-administer thiopental sodium and then, upon awaking from the resulting slumber, watch a video she recorded of herself self-administering thiopental sodium. All we can do is wait and wonder, filling the show’s many silences with our own projections and interpretations. It’s a valiant gambit—one that makes Pluribus one of the most formally adventurous shows on the air, and one of the sleepiest.
