Apple TV has done it again. It is a platform that we could consider minority, that refuses to follow the currents that unify the rest… and gives us one of the best series that we can see right now. Vince Gillighan’s seal of quality, a plot that will be familiar to science fiction regulars and a tremendous humanist message that reflects on the here and now. It’s ‘Pluribus’ and these are some of the keys to its success.
How it started. After closing the ‘Breaking Bad’ universe with the end of ‘Better Call Saul’ in 2022, Vince Gilligan presented Sony Pictures Television with an original project completely unrelated to Walter White. A bidding war between platforms then broke out in which Apple TV+ won, offering what Gilligan valued most: “trust and time.” The trust was translated into numbers: each episode of ‘Pluribus’ has a budget of $15 million, five times what ‘Breaking Bad’ cost.
What is it about? “The most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness,” reads the official Apple TV+ synopsis. Carol Sturka, author of romantasy, discovers she is one of just 13 people immune to the “Union”: an extraterrestrial virus that merges human minds into a perpetually optimistic collective consciousness. The film’s title inverts the American motto “E pluribus unum” (out of many, one) to question what happens when individualism dies out.
Gilligan, a self-declared “sci-fi nerd my whole life,” wanted to “touch every trope of the sci-fi world.” For example, Carol baptizes the hive as “Pod People”, a direct tribute to ‘Invasion of the Ultrabodies’, which Gillighan obviously cites along with ‘The Twilight Zone’ as a fundamental inspiration. There is also something of the Borg from ‘Star Trek’ when designing the hive mind, but in general the whole series breathes an air of classic sci-fi, like a Richard Matheson story, absolutely delicious.
All worship the ‘Many’. The series has been unanimously acclaimed on aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes (99%) or Metacritic (86). It has been called “an exceptional and distinctive vehicle for its star” (incidentally, Gilligan conceived the project as a vehicle for Rhea Seehorn, who agreed to come on board before reading a single draft of the script). BBC crowned it “one of the smartest and most entertaining series of 2025” and Variety as a “captivating piece of television.”
Is it that good? It’s all a matter of opinion, but… yeah. His proposal, of original science fiction with a super-production budget in an era of audiovisuals kneeling before franchises, is worthy of admiration. But also, the balance between satire, forceful drama and exquisite staging is just what we can expect from the creator of ‘Breaking Bad’, with that narrative that unfolds very little by little, without artificial secrets or cheap twists, but keeping the viewer absolutely fascinated with what happens.
There will be those who may object to its openly symbolic approach, but the satire works perfectly (in the first instance, towards AI artifacts; secondly, to the post-internet human species that we have left behind, where our only objective is to manifest an eternal complacency towards strangers). There is infinite space in its approach to show us characters that move in an infinite scale of gray, as in fact it has already done in just three chapters, and that force us to ask ourselves in each episode the million-dollar question: what would I do?
Apple TV, the great winner of all this. ‘Pluribus’ represents one of its most ambitious bets to date for the platform (not bad for someone who has built a mastodon like ‘Foundation’). The platform invests between 4.5 and 5 billion dollars annually in content, pursuing a radically different strategy from that of Netflix or Disney+: prestige over massive volume. Apple TV controls only 8-9% of the business streaming in the US after Netflix, Prime Video, HBO Max and Disney+. But its objective is different.
Apple TV+ has become the prestige area of the streamingthat corner in which HBO once sat comfortably. Now there are more viewers than in the days of ‘The Sopranos’ and Apple TV loses about a billion dollars a year, but it can afford it. The numbers are overwhelming: 271 original titles compared to 13,000 for Prime Video, but yes, 271 titles of unquestionable technical and artistic quality. Apple TV, and ‘Pluribus’ is the best proof, it does not seek to conquer the numbers, but the conversation.
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