Vince Gilligan knows better than to try to explain where his stories come from. Like the extraterrestrial transmission that kicks off his new Apple TV series, Pluribus, their origin is a mystery. But the writer, producer, and director best known for creating the era-defining crime drama Breaking Bad can approximate where and when he started mulling the idea for the sci-fi epic that would become his first major project since leaving the Walter White universe.
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It was probably 2016, in Burbank, where Gilligan had convened the writers’ room for Season 3 of Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad spinoff he created with Peter Gould. “We would take lunch breaks that seemed to stretch longer and longer,” he recalls. “I’d walk around the neighborhood, and my mind would wander.” Eventually, his thoughts coalesced around the concept of wish fulfillment. “I thought: What if everyone in the world got along? And, specifically, what if everyone in the world was suddenly really, really nice to me personally?” When he took himself out of the scenario, the question became: “Why would one guy be that interesting to people?”
The answer forms the wild premise of Pluribus, whose particulars are being kept under wraps until Apple unveils its first two episodes on Nov. 7. But as for that irresistibly interesting guy, well, he turned out not to be a guy at all. Gilligan recruited Rhea Seehorn, who earned two Emmy nominations for playing the beloved Saul character Kim Wexler, to anchor the show as his first female protagonist, Carol Sturka. Despite press materials that introduce Carol as “the most miserable person on Earth,” she is also his first bona fide hero.
For a creator synonymous with the rise of antihero television, who made his name telling what he famously called “a story about a man who transforms himself from Mr. Chips into Scarface,” this is a seismic shift. Yet it’s also a reflection of the keen moral sensibility that has always permeated Gilligan’s work, as well as the kindness for which he has long been known throughout his industry. Though he remains proud of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, both of which aired on AMC, the once avowedly apolitical storyteller has become convinced that pop culture’s recent supersaturation with antiheroes has been unhealthy for society. His most ambitious series to date, Pluribus can be seen as a corrective of sorts—a grand, artful, mind-bendingly philosophical, darkly funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but consistently humane vindication of our fractious species.
When Gilligan reflects on his trajectory, from a kid making Super 8 movies in the Richmond, Va., area to, at 58, one of the small screen’s most acclaimed creators, the word that comes up most is luck. “I really feel like I’m the Kramer of the TV-writing world,” he says when we meet in October at a boutique hotel in New York City. “I fell ass-backward into good luck time and time again.” This self-assessment egregiously undersells the talent of a man who has made two of the medium’s greatest dramas. But rather than false modesty, it comes across as the genuine humility of a guy who, throughout our conversation, reflexively credits his collaborators.
It’s about a month before Pluribus is slated to debut, and Gilligan, who lives in New Mexico—his new show, like the Breaking Bad universe, is set in Albuquerque—is in town for a round of press and a preview screening during New York Comic Con. Dressed in a bright blue T-shirt that happens to match the hotel room’s azure-and-white decor, in an accidental echo of the meticulous production design for which his series are known, he speaks largely in anecdotes, with a soft Southern twang. As if to mark a new phase of his career, he has shaved the goatee that was his signature throughout the AMC years.
He’s been through several eras already. Gilligan was studying film at NYU when, in 1989, he won the Virginia Governor’s Screenwriting Award for the screenplay that would become the movie Home Fries. He spent the next few years writing feature scripts. But by 1994 screenwriting work was drying up; he was broke and had lost his Writers Guild insurance. When his agent got him a meeting with The X-Files creator Chris Carter, Gilligan only intended to compliment him. But Carter asked for ideas, Gilligan pitched an episode about a character whose shadow came to life, and the man who’d soon become his boss hired him on the spot to write it.
Gilligan’s three-decade tenure in television has paralleled the rapid evolution of the medium. In the mid-’90s, broadcast networks dominated prime time with megahits like Seinfeld, ER, and The X-Files, whose viewership on Fox peaked at a now-inconceivable 20 million. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul emerged into what has been called the Third Golden Age of Television, a renaissance in audacious, cinematic cable programming for adult audiences, spurred by the success of The Sopranos and sustained by Netflix’s need to build a streaming library. Now he’s making Pluribus for Apple, one of the few companies still reliably funding expensive streaming series—especially science-fiction titles like Foundation and Severance—at a time of consolidation and austerity in Hollywood.
And yet Gilligan initially doubted he could make it as a TV writer. “The thing I was most trepidatious about is, I am so lazy,” he says. Surely, he figured, a guy whose process involved frequent video-game breaks wouldn’t last past his 13-week X-Files probation. “I thought, I don’t really need to clean out my fridge in Virginia. The ketchup will keep 13 weeks.” But to his surprise, he took to the hard work. “The two things about TV that are so great,” he discovered, are that “your writing actually gets produced”—unlike film scripts, which can take years to reach the screen, if they do at all—and “working with smart, talented people you can stand to be in a room with for 12 hours a day, five or six days a week.”
Another aimless period followed The X-Files’ 2002 finale. But Gilligan counts himself, yes, lucky to have been pitching Breaking Bad amid a boom in cable networks making bespoke scripted series, an escape hatch from broadcast’s grueling 22-plus-episode seasons. The 2008 premiere of the show, which follows a terminally ill teacher (Bryan Cranston) who cooks meth to stockpile money for his family, failed to generate the same buzz as AMC’s flagship original, Mad Men. A 2011 New York Times Magazine profile ventured, in an observation that has aged awkwardly, that Gilligan might be “TV’s first true red-state auteur.” Just when it looked as if that crowd might not be enough to sustain it, Netflix licensed the show during its fourth season, driving millions of new viewers to AMC for new episodes.
Breaking Bad not only ended its five-season run with a record-breaking 10.3 million viewers tuning in for Walter White’s Shakespearean sendoff, but also yielded a more ruminative companion show in Saul, about Walt’s crooked lawyer (Bob Odenkirk), and a feature-length Netflix sequel, El Camino, that followed Walt’s puppyish partner in crime, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul). Gilligan isn’t wrong that he benefited from serendipitous timing. Yet it’s equally true that none of Breaking Bad’s rivals maintained both the huge audiences (Mad Men never averaged more than 2.6 million) and the consistent quality (see: Game of Thrones) of what became basic cable’s crown jewel of the 2010s.
Pluribus, which arrives three years after the final episode of Saul, opens by having a bit of fun with the clichés of prestige apocalypse dramas, from The Walking Dead to The Last of Us to 3 Body Problem. The premiere hints at many types of extinction events before pivoting to a cataclysm so surprising, it’s useless to guess. All you really need to know is that, within the first half-hour, the world we know is transformed beyond recognition. I wouldn’t want to reveal more even if I hadn’t been asked not to, because the show works best when you’re just as clueless as poor Carol.
What is clear from the outset is Pluribus’ global scale, which required a much larger canvas than Gilligan had ever been given. Portions of the nine-episode season were shot in the Canary Islands and northern Spain. There are scenes set at a Norwegian ice hotel and in the hills of Tangier, Morocco. The production built Carol’s entire neighborhood in the desert outside Albuquerque: “We picked a spot with this beautiful view of the Sandia Mountains,” Gilligan says. “And we said, ‘OK, in however many months we’re gonna have a whole cul-de-sac here.’” It wasn’t just a flex. “We knew we couldn’t shoot in a real neighborhood,” he explains, “because the neighbors would kick us out after the second episode.” Suffice to say, a lot of weird stuff happens at Carol’s house.
This cul-de-sac at the end of civilization feels like a physical manifestation of the loneliness Carol radiates even before the cataclysmic incident. A best-selling romantasy author with a perma-grimace, she dismisses her own books as “mindless crap” and hates her fans in what Gilligan says is a projection of self-loathing. Her manager and romantic partner, Helen (Miriam Shor), serves as a buffer between Carol and everyone else. When your hero has so many flaws that they initially obscure positive traits like independence and grit, it doesn’t hurt to cast an actor your loyal audience already adores. For Gilligan, who wrote the character specifically for Seehorn, the reunion also meant getting to spend more time with a performer who was “as sweet and kind and pleasant to be around as anyone I’ve ever worked with.”
He didn’t take the challenge of crafting his first female protagonist lightly. (While Kim, a chronically underestimated lawyer torn between law and morality, was so popular that viewers lived in fear she’d be killed off, Walt’s long-suffering wife, Skyler, played by Anna Gunn, was widely despised for her perceived shrillness.) “I always worry about writing female characters,” he says. “A lesbian character as well, because that’s not my experience.” But women are well represented among the series’ writers and directors. Besides, what makes Carol, like Kim, a great character is that she isn’t defined by gender or sexuality; she’s a person first. “It doesn’t feel like [Gilligan] had an agenda of, ‘I’m going to write a female-empowerment story,’” Seehorn says. “He wrote a fascinating, complex, incredibly reluctant hero with a lot of flaws but a lot of strengths, some of which she didn’t know she had.” “I wasn’t thinking in terms of masculine versus feminine,” Gilligan confirms. “I was just writing this character who’s got a lot of issues and is struggling to find happiness” but somehow feels even worse once society reorients itself around her whims. Only in hindsight did he realize that her anxious, misanthropic tendencies—“standard writer problems”—mirrored his own.
Still, for all that Pluribus constitutes a departure from male-antihero crime capers, it’s also unmistakably a Vince Gilligan creation: mournful undertones cut by dark humor; visual grandeur and distinctive characters. Gilligan’s trademark cold opens, which can transport us halfway around the world or introduce new characters, remain a masterly way of calibrating suspense. Exiting the New York screening, I heard one giddy attendee regale her companion with a list of Breaking Bad Easter eggs I hadn’t even noticed. In many ways, returning to speculative storytelling has felt like a homecoming to Gilligan, even as swerving away from crime presents a chance to expand his legacy. “I’m lucky as hell to be known for Breaking Bad. That’ll be the first thing on my tombstone,” he reflects. “But I don’t want to be a one-trick pony. If I have any life left in me, I want to do a few other things before I’m done.”
Between the second and third seasons of Better Call Saul, in 2016, the news broke that Gilligan was developing a drama about the Jonestown massacre. But the project never got off the ground, in what he looks back on as “a real failure on my part.” Gilligan found himself paralyzed by the task of doing justice to the victims and their families without elevating the perspective of their “scumbag” leader. “So I realized I better stay in my lane,” he says. “I’m better at making up stories. Then I don’t have to feel responsible” for dramatizing real people’s pain.
As adaptations and franchises crowd out the original storytelling of a bygone Golden Age, Gilligan is notable for what he doesn’t do as well as what he does. You’re not likely to find him helming the next Andor or The Penguin or any other prestige-branded series based on monolithic IP. “We’ve got modern mythologies now, with Star Wars and Star Trek and Marvel and DC—and all that stuff’s great,” he says. “But that stuff was created for people who are now in their 60s and 70s. In terms of DC Comics, it was created for people who are now long deceased. It’s good that they continue. It shows that they have a fundamental worth in terms of myth.” He just thinks it’s vital for pop culture to keep producing stories organic to the times we’re living in: “Every generation deserves its own mythology.”
Another lucrative option that would surely be open to Gilligan is the megaproducer route, in which a big-name creator like Ryan Murphy or Shonda Rhimes develops a stable of series, each with their valuable imprimatur but its own showrunner. “I probably should figure out how to do that, because there’s a lot more money,” he muses. But the idea of parachuting into a writers’ room, dispensing high-level feedback, then moving on to the next? “That sounds like hell on Earth,” he says.
Though often described as an auteur—a term he has rejected—Gilligan continues to thrive on the collaborative spirit of the writers’ room as well as the production process. “There are writers who write every episode of a TV show, and my hat is off to them,” he says. (Think Mike White’s The White Lotus.) Not only does he appreciate camaraderie; he also believes that, were he to script every episode solo, he’d have “a poorer show creatively.” Seehorn describes him as “the composer in the middle of the orchestra,” working to realize “this beautiful story in his mind” but also leaving room for each musician to contribute. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gilligan alums were represented in almost every department of the Pluribus crew.
In his 2013 book Difficult Men, which profiled the mostly prickly personalities behind contemporaries like The Sopranos and Mad Men, Brett Martin observed that Gilligan “was known as a good man to work for—someone who managed to balance the vision and microscopic control of the most autocratic showrunner with the open and supportive spirit of the most relaxed.” This reputation has persisted; as Shor noted at the preview screening, he’s been called the nicest guy in Hollywood. (Even the mildest criticisms are difficult, though not impossible, to find.) This fosters creativity. When Seehorn joined Saul, she found herself surrounded by “people that are all working at the very top of their game.” What was even more remarkable, she says, is that it was “all in service to the story, not ego. And you come on and they cannot wait for your contribution.”
Standing before a crowd of peers in February to accept a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild, Gilligan argued that pop culture needed to move on from bad guys like Walter White. “We are living in an era where bad guys, the real-life kind, are running amok,” he said. “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.” It was time, he believed, for heroes to make a comeback.
Gilligan has been expressing similar sentiments since at least 2018. What changed to make a creator who spent the better part of the Obama years cultivating his own Scarface nostalgic for Mr. Chips? Gilligan doesn’t mention names. But Donald Trump took office in 2017, so guess. “I’ve been studiously apolitical my whole career,” he says, because he found that polemic “instantly turned off half the potential audience.” Breaking Bad and Saul were concerned with larger moral truths: “At their heart, both say: actions have consequences.” Simple though it is, Gilligan points out that this message eluded TV for years, as characters in the episodic fare that predominated before DVR and streaming enabled serialized storytelling could commit murder in one episode and never speak of it again.
Now, Gilligan feels compelled to reexamine the kinds of characters he’s creating because “what’s going on does not seem like it’s about left or right anymore. It feels like it’s about maintaining a democracy, maintaining a civil republic and the rule of law and the right to free speech versus giving it all away.” Though it seems, to him, like the U.S. is “right on the edge of civil war,” he’s convinced that no one actually desires that outcome.
“We’ve got to find a way to talk to each other,” he says. Gilligan wants to see people from across the partisan spectrum interact face to face, instead of taunting each other online. He’s as stumped as anyone about how to make that happen. But he does hope Pluribus, a show too removed from our reality to explicitly address current political debates that is nonetheless “about people struggling to do the right thing,” can play a small part in facilitating those conversations.
Despite its speculative premise, the series captures the loneliness that has pervaded society since the COVID pandemic and the dread of a future in which artificial intelligence might render human interaction obsolete. (Gilligan didn’t have LLMs in mind when he conceived Pluribus but says he’s “happy if this show, in any way, shape, or form, could turn people off to AI.”) And in the imperfect hero who is Carol Sturka, viewers get a role model who doesn’t let her own anger or grief stop her from trying to save the world.
Gilligan is probably incapable of saccharine. Pluribus is as dry, ironic, brutal, and alert to the horrors festering in no small number of human souls as anything he’s made. Yet, as the season goes on, Carol’s quest becomes kind of inspiring. This reflects not just Seehorn’s charm and Gilligan’s frustrations with antiheroes, but also his anxiety about the prevalence of postapocalyptic sci-fi stories. “It started to worry me that we were writing so many of them,” he says. “It was like it was priming people for the apocalypse, instead of priming them to avoid the apocalypse at all cost.” Distilled to its essence, the message of Pluribus might be: Humanity is worth fighting for.
By the time Pluribus premieres, Gilligan will be back in the writers’ room, at work on a second season that was greenlighted along with the first. He’s relieved to have gone into the project knowing he’d have time to tell his story, as viewers who get invested in its expansive world-building surely will be, too. Does it bother him that he won’t get to hear audience feedback first? No, he says, because “I don’t think that’s the job.” Ever since The X-Files became one of the first shows to engage the online commentariat, he’s avoided fan chatter. “Fellow writers would say: ‘You need to check out this chat room. They’re talking about your episode,’” he recalls. “I instinctively knew to never do that.” Now he jokes to friends that they should euthanize him if he ever makes a social media account.
Not that he’s closed off to all input. “He never, ever shuts me down,” Seehorn says. And as meticulous as he is in constructing his richly detailed stories, Gilligan also values dynamism and spontaneity. As a showrunner, “you have to be ready to jettison ideas at the drop of a hat,” he says. Breaking Bad lore is littered with major plot changes made on the fly, alternate endings tossed around the writers’ room, characters as major as Jesse that Gilligan kept around much longer than he’d intended because he liked the actors’ performances so much. He has a clearer sense of how he wants to wrap up Pluribus than he did for previous shows at this point in their runs but makes no guarantees that he’ll stick to it.
“I want to stay open to the possibilities of going a different way,” Gilligan explains. “It’s like if you get in your car and you say, ‘I’m in Virginia, I want to head out to California. So I know, basically, the direction I need to head.’ But there’s all these little side trips and backroads you can take along the way—and that makes the trip more exciting.” Luck is part of that ride. You may get a flat tire, or you may run into a long-lost friend at a rest stop. But if the destination is appealing and the driver adept, the journey is bound to be worth taking.