It is a brave thing, in our polarised, warring and fearful world, to create a TV series whose message seems to be: no, actually, everything would not be better if we could all just get along. Yet that is what the Breaking Bad writer-creator Vince Gilligan has done with his new show, Pluribus.
Carol (Rhea Seehorn, with whom Gilligan previously worked on the Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul) is a middle-aged, successful romantasy novelist who – like Gilligan’s earlier creation, Walter White – lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her rictus grin while interacting with her rabid fans does not quite manage to conceal the fact that she hates her work and, perhaps, herself for doing it. Her books are, in her own words, “mindless crap” and “like a bad episode of Star Trek”. This is Carol through and through: sardonic, spiky, cynical, a little misanthropic.
Carol and her partner/manager Helen’s journey home from a book-tour signing is interrupted when Earth’s entire population freezes and begins to shake convulsively. Everyone except Carol, that is. When they rise from their collective seizure (and not all of them do – some, including Helen, die in the process), everyone is impossibly, psychotically contented. It turns out that the human species has been reprogrammed with alien RNA, so that it shares one consciousness, speaking of “we” and “us” instead of “I” and “me”. They each have access to the knowledge and memories of all others, with gently comic effect: a girl in a TGI Friday’s uniform flies a passenger jet; a small boy discusses the best approach to a gynaecological exam. “You are on the verge of heat exhaustion,” Carol is told by Zosia (Karolina Wydra), who seems to have been appointed her minder, “and that is the opinion of every medical doctor on Earth.” This transformed humanity has uncanny physical effects, too: their movements are synchronised, as if they are taking part in a choreographed dance; as communication can now be done mentally, they are eerily silent. They are, in effect, zombies, only the zombies are pliant, polite, passive; they drift around as though partially sedated, bearing faint smiles and middle-distance stares.
Carol, predictably and fairly, finds all of this insane and infuriating. But to Zosia and the rest of the hivemind, the world’s transformation was “the greatest day in the history of humanity”. This is no apocalypse, but a utopia.
Humanity’s single goal now is to try to make Carol, and the dozen or so others like her, happy – first by cheerily and compliantly caring for them, and eventually by finding a way to (consensually) infect them too. When Carol is flown out to Spain to gather with five others like her, she is horrified to learn they are not bubbling with rage and exasperation as she is. Instead, they are content to be waited on hand and foot by the whole of humanity, or desperate to join their families in blissful interconnectedness. The whole world is living in peace and harmony, just as John Lennon dreamed.
Thus, Pluribus (the title recalls the United States motto E Pluribus Unum, “one out of many”, a call to unity) raises some interesting philosophical questions: what would be lost if all of Earth lived in harmonious agreement? If the price of peace is the subordination of the individual, is it worth it? Can you still be human without every distinction and difference that makes you you? There is much in the show’s set-up – the lab leak leading to infected zombified hordes – that feels familiar from virus-apocalypse films such as Contagion and 28 Days Later, but conceptually Pluribus shares more with series like Black Mirror or Severance, concerned with ethics, human consciousness and the nature of reality.
Their situations might be very different, but Walter White and Carol are not completely dissimilar characters: both are powered by a self-centred sense of injustice, and both are engaged in a battle of them against the world. But Pluribus is, in a way, a riskier proposition than Breaking Bad, because Carol is the only character with whom you can identify and empathise; the only person speaking any sense in a world of inanely grinning, endlessly upbeat automatons. You might not always like her, but you will laugh at her jokes, and admire her courage to say the quiet part out loud. And you will join her in shouting: what the fuck is going on?
[Further reading: It ain’t easy being George Clooney]
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Meet the bond vigilantes