Pluribus: Vince Gilligan’s new sci-fi TV series (trailer).
Just when you thought Vince Gilligan couldn’t make Albuquerque any weirder, he’s gone and done it again. Having already given us meth-cooking lawyers and morally eroding chemistry teachers, he’s now turned his lens on something even more dangerous to society: unrelenting optimism. Yes, folks — Pluribus (or, as it’s unhelpfully stylised, PLUR1BUS, because the future clearly still doesn’t have spellcheck) is coming to Apple TV+ this November, and if the trailer is anything to go by, the apocalypse has never looked so smugly cheerful.
The setup is deliciously simple — and deeply Gilligan. A mysterious virus sweeps through the USA, infecting the populace with permanent, blissed-out contentment. No anger. No sadness. No anxiety. No passive-aggressive emails about missing Tupperware. Just serenity, forever. There’s only one problem: one woman, Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn, reuniting with Gilligan after Better Call Saul), can’t catch the happy bug. She’s immune — and in a world where everyone else is skipping through the ruins, that makes her public enemy number one.
The trailer opens like a wellness advert gone to hell. We see pastel-washed suburbs filled with smiling people mowing perfectly symmetrical lawns, office workers giggling through disaster, and a mayor who looks one serotonin booster away from spontaneous combustion. Then there’s Carol — standing in the middle of it all, expression flat, clutching a notebook, the only frown left in America. As the voiceover chirps, “Welcome to the new world… where happiness is mandatory,” you can practically feel the existential dread seeping through your broadband connection.
Gilligan’s decision to centre the story on an author is a particularly cruel joke. Writers, after all, draw inspiration from misery — and Carol, staring down a civilisation high on enforced joy, suddenly has nothing left to write about. Her prose dries up, her publisher’s smiling too hard to care, and her therapist keeps saying things like, “Isn’t it wonderful you feel nothing but fine?” You can sense the black comedy right there under the surface — equal parts The Stepford Wives, Black Mirror, and that one TED Talk your coworker wouldn’t stop quoting.
Apple TV+ is billing this as “a grounded sci-fi about humanity’s relationship with emotion,” but this being Gilligan, we’re fully expecting it to devolve into paranoia, government cover-ups, and at least one scene where someone uses a coffee mug as a deadly weapon. And let’s not forget that unnerving phone number featured in the teasers — a cheery automated voice inviting you to “join us” if you dial in. (Naturally, here at SFcrowsnest we did, and are now waiting for our complimentary enlightenment package to arrive in the post.)
Rhea Seehorn, one of television’s finest purveyors of subtle moral collapse, looks tailor-made for this. Her Carol isn’t fighting zombies or dictators; she’s fighting enforced peace — a woman desperately trying to keep her humanity in a world that’s smiling itself into extinction. Karolina Wydra joins as Zosia, a serene but suspicious acquaintance who might know more about the virus than her placid grin suggests. Expect passive-aggressive gaslighting with immaculate posture.
The Albuquerque setting is another sly nod to Gilligan’s past sins. The wide desert skies that once framed meth labs now shimmer with eerily calm drone convoys dispensing anti-anxiety mist. Instead of crime montages, we get community yoga in the ruins. Somewhere, Walter White’s ghost is surely screaming, “This is not chemistry!”
Visually, Pluribus looks halfway between Better Call Saul and Her — all golden light, precise symmetry, and quietly malignant design. The trailer lingers on faces just a second too long, until their smiles curdle. It’s all terribly polite dystopia — like 1984, if Big Brother were your life coach.
Apple clearly believes they’ve got something special here, ordering two seasons before a single episode aired. That’s either confidence or hubris, but if there’s anyone we trust to turn existential crisis into appointment television, it’s Vince Gilligan. The man could make a queue at the post office feel like a moral reckoning. Here at SFcrowsnest magazine, we love a science-fiction story that weaponises the mundane, and Pluribus looks to do exactly that. Forget alien invasions or killer robots — the real horror, it seems, is a world where no one ever argues again. It’s the apocalypse in soft focus, the end of history via mindfulness app.
So, when Pluribus premieres on 7th November 2025, remember to smile. Not too much, though. Someone might think you’ve caught it.
