When your last two shows are Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, you can bet that everyone will be turning into your next one. Apple, grabber of the best sci-fi shows on TV, landed Vince Gilligan’s next outing, and man, is it something to behold, and has a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The show is Pluribus, a series with a weird name and a weirder concept. A woman, played by Better Call Saul’s Rhea Seahorn, is the one miserable person on Earth when everyone else has suddenly become uniformly happy. There’s more to it than that, but anything else gets into spoilers, even if it explains why that’s maybe a little less weird than it sounds. But…still weird.
Before release, Pluribus landed a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics. Now, the weekend after it aired with more reviews in, it has maintained that 100% score. Audience scores are a bit lower at an 85%, but given how wild the concept is, I’m not surprised that at least some percent of the audience may not have gotten on board. But others are saying that Pluribus has one of the best pilot episodes they’ve ever seen, and after watching it (48 hours late, dodging spoilers), I can certainly see where they’re coming from.
Pluribus now only has one other 100% scored, high-profile series on its level, The Chair Company on HBO. Both are comedies of sorts, but in an extremely non-traditional format in different ways. The Chair Company has 40 reviews in compared to Pluribus’ 66, so Pluribus has the edge there. It also has a slightly higher audience score with 5x the reviews in.
There will be nine episodes in season 1 of Pluribus, and Apple has already greenlit a second season. Gilligan has talked about the future of the show, saying he can envision it running for maybe four seasons (Breaking Bad ran for five seasons, albeit with 13-16 episode seasons). Gilligan also says that he made this show specifically for Seahorn, the Better Call Saul actress he loves, who was often snubbed for her amazing work on that show.
There have already been some comparisons to HBO’s The Leftovers, another series about a world-spanning change to its population, but also, there’s an idea that Apple may have found its next Severance, even as Severance continues to air. It’s a high-concept sci-fi show suddenly impressing everyone out of nowhere, creating buzz almost instantly. Award-level buzz? We’ll have to see, as Gilligan’s Better Call Saul was almost entirely ignored in terms of Emmy wins for reasons that remain a complete mystery, given its quality.
In any case, who cares about awards, the series is great, and critics are right about it. I highly suggest you watch the first two episodes immediately before anything gets spoiled for you, and then follow along week-to-week on Fridays.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.