“I’m kind of a glass-half-empty guy,” says Vince Gilligan, creator of the legendary Breaking Bad, co-creator of Better Call Saul, and legendarily nice guy. “When I do interviews or when I’m in the writers room, I’m trying to be [nice], because it’s nice seeing people smile. But my real self is as much the negative stuff.”
That “negative stuff” comes through in spades in Gilligan’s new series, Pluribus, his first since the stories of Walter White and Saul Goodman ended three years ago. It is set in an entirely new world and built around a character, Carol, whom Apple TV+ describes as “the most miserable person on Earth.”
“I’m not unlike Carol, really,” Gilligan continues. “The sarcasm and the negativity and the general miserableness — that’s the easy part for me, honestly.”
That glass-half-empty approach might explain why it’s taken almost two decades for Gilligan to make something not set in what fans have taken to calling the Heisenberg universe of Walter White, Jesse Pinkman, Saul Goodman and Co. Most producers in his position would have used the clout from Breaking Bad’s success to make a dream project. But to Gilligan, who launched that series after a fallow career stretch following the end of The X-Files, where he first learned to write and direct for television, the phenomenon it became felt more than a little fluky. “I was nervous about leaving the Heisenberg universe,” he admits.
“Some people who read my biography are going to say ‘Well, this guy got real lucky real early.’ And that’s true,” Gilligan says. “But there’s some years in the wilderness where it was like, ‘I’m never going to get to where I want to be.’ And suddenly, Breaking Bad happens, and it turns into this thing that was beyond any of our wildest expectations. It still blows my mind.
“And that’s not false modesty or aw-shucks, gee-whiz performative whatever,” he insists. “I honestly feel that way. I don’t know what we did right to make it go off like a skyrocket. It was just the right actors, the right place, at the right time. If Breaking Bad had been the exact same show, but it had come out 10 years sooner or 10 years later, maybe no one would be talking about it. Timing is luck, and luck is timing.”
But now, Gilligan has finally cashed in the blank check to which he’s been long entitled. And boy, has he. Pluribus has a reported budget of $15 million per episode, five times more than what the average Breaking Bad cost. That’s not quite as high as shows like House of the Dragon and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, but those are based on proven IP, at a moment when the industry seems afraid to spend big on anything but brand names. Pluribus, on the other hand, is a wholly original concept — one so strange and specific, I’m barely allowed to say anything about it, save that, as Apple TV+ describes it, the aforementioned most miserable person on Earth “must save the world from happiness.” Our cranky heroine is played by Saul alum Rhea Seehorn, beloved by fans of the spin-off but far from a household name. Without a big star, without a familiar title, and with a premise that Gilligan wanted kept under wraps until the Nov. 7 premiere, Apple TV+ is gambling a lot of money that merely saying they have a new series from the creator of Breaking Bad will be enough to draw people in.
“When you put it that way, you kind of scared me,” says Gilligan.
He shouldn’t be scared. Pluribus is a dazzling piece of entertainment. It takes advantage of everything Gilligan learned about patient storytelling with Breaking Bad and Saul, then combines it with the high-concept ambition of X-Files, as well as the visual flair Gilligan has developed as a director on all his shows. Though the plot involves every person on the planet, the focus is often entirely on Carol, as Gilligan relies on all the things he realized Seehorn could do — tragedy, slapstick, and sheer screen presence — during her time playing attorney Kim Wexler on Saul. There are long stretches where we’re just watching Carol struggle through various tasks, like digging a grave. And it’s riveting.
Gilligan on the set of Pluribus. He says he relates to the main character Carol’s “sarcasm and general miserableness.”
AppleTV+
The sprawling premise gave Gilligan his first opportunity to film outside of North America, including stops in northern Spain and the Canary Islands. But Carol, like Walt and Kim before her, makes her home in Albuquerque. That’s not Gilligan hedging his bets. Rather, it’s him being happy with the house he and wife Holly Rice bought in New Mexico during the Heisenberg years, plus a desire to keep working with a local production crew with whom he’s developed a near-telepathic bond over nearly two decades.
While Gilligan is experimenting with a new sci-fi concept in Pluribus, he’s in an industry where an older trope of the genre — the robots coming for us — has somehow become a depressing reality. “If you really want to wake me in a cold sweat at three in the morning, AI is the stick to poke me with,” he says. “But then some deeper part of me says, ‘Human beings are always going to want stories created by other human beings. They are not going to want stories scraped by Sam Altman and his guys from the artistry and hard work of literally thousands of years of writing and painting and music, regurgitating it into something ‘new.’ ”
Hollywood’s obsession with IP — and the impossibility of anyone without Gilligan’s track record being allowed to make something this big that’s not based on a comic book or video game — feels like its own existential threat to him. “Star Wars is great. Marvel Comics is great,” he says. “I’m a giant fan of Star Trek. But at a certain point, new generations coming up need their own Star Wars. When the business gets to the point that that’s all that’s being made and there’s no room anymore for original ideas, that’s like the death of a civilization. Am I lucky that I get to do something original? I am. And it makes me sad that it’s that unusual.”
