I recently spoke with Richard Hanania to review the first 3 episodes of Pluribus, a new series by Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.
The show follows Carol Sturka (played by Rhea Seehorn, the same actress who portrayed Kim Wexler in Saul), a depressed romance novelist who seems to be the only miserable person left on Earth after an alien virus infects almost every human and makes them happy and docile.
Some highlights:
Vince Gilligan has expressed concerns about the popularity of antiheroes like Walter White, and wants more “good guys” in stories. But Carol, the protagonist of Pluribus, is not exactly a conventional hero. The show gives us something stranger and more interesting
Gilligan has described himself as “more conservative” than most people in Hollywood. We talk about how this is reflected in his shows
Carol is an unhappy individualist; the pod-people are happy collectivists. Viewers are implicitly asked which life they would prefer
Why people love watching pure competence — even when the skill is cooking meth or decoding alien RNA. The show taps into a deep psychological pleasure: watching mastery in action
Viewers don’t know where the story is going — and that uncertainty is rare now. In an age of formula, unpredictability feels thrilling
Whether the show is a metaphor for the COVID pandemic and the rise of artificial intelligence
Richard frames the alien hive mind as a dark reflection of capitalism: a system that cheerfully gives you whatever you want, including the moral equivalent of heroin, and can quietly destroy you by being too good at serving your desires
Most of the surviving resisters are women. We discuss how many men, given the chance, might simply behave like Koumba, the Mauritanian character: pleasure-seeking opportunists in a world of obedient drones
I predict that later in the show, the real villains may not be the aliens/pod people, but ordinary humans who like having pod-people as servants and will fight to keep this new system in place
This leads into Robert Nozick’s “experience machine” thought experiment: if merging with the aliens guarantees happiness, is it rational to resist?
Thoughts on the new media landscape. Richard and I speak about how fragmented TV is now: even a Vince Gilligan show on Apple, pushed through Amazon promos, can exist without most Breaking Bad fans knowing about it
We speculate about why Gilligan has created another show set in Albuquerque, toggling between “he genuinely loves the place” and the more practical explanation of New Mexico tax credits and production costs
Carol’s sexual orientation and why, in prestige TV, there are usually more gay male characters than female ones
How the show’s characters (disagreeable white American lesbian, compliant Asians, lecherous African/French/Arab Mauritanian man) subtly align with racial and cultural stereotypes
The actress who plays the character Zosia, Karolina Wydra, is 44 but looks far younger; we discuss how attractive women are stretching the window of youth
I’m planning to watch new episodes weekly as they drop. It’s a good show, check it out.
