The AppleTV series Pluribusstars Rhea Seahorn as Carol Sturka, a romantasy writer who doesn’t care for her genre. As the show opens, she’s released a new book, Bloodsong of Wycaro, and now you can read a little slice of it.
“I’m going to do something that is antithetical to capitalism: give my work away for free. A bit of it, anyway,” writes Carol in the letter for Bloodsong, which now has a free 11-page excerpt you can read on Apple Books. Like on the show, she’s fed up with her audience fretting about the lack of Raban on the cover, so the excerpt—Chapter 16, “The Isle of Sanantes”—confirms Captain Lucasia’s longtime lover Raban is alive and well after he was made to walk the plank in the previous book, Stormshadow. You may recall in the Pluribus pilot that Carol hinted as much to a fan.
As for the full Bloodsong book, Lucasia is tasked with saving her crew after they’ve been afflicted with a curse that’s left them bedridden. With few able-bodied workers left, they brave a nasty storm to reach the isle and find Madam Asclepius, a banished healer who may be able to help.
Along with the chapter and letter, the excerpt includes Carol’s author bio—her books have won “multiple honors,” including the Mars & Eros Reader’s Choice Award—and an end page hyping up the show. This whole thing may remind some folks of what Apple did for Severance, whose self-help book The You You Arefrom Ricken Hale got a downloadable version back in January.
New episodes of Pluribus premiere Fridays on Apple TV. For those who read the Bloodsong of Wycaro excerpt and have a romantasy background, let us know in the comments below how it’d fare as a real book in the genre.
The new Apple TV series Pluribus stars Rhea Seahorn as one of a handful of people not overwhelmingly happy. Now that the first two episodes are out and people know what it’s about, some have wondered if this is all a metaphor for artificial intelligence.
Creator Vince Gilligan recently told Variety he thought up and wrote the show before AI and large language models like ChatGPT really gained prominence in recent years. That said, he won’t fight anyone who’s made those connections, just as he isn’t planning to explain things to the degree he did with Breaking Bad. “One thing I did wrong [there] was telling people, ‘This is what that meant!’ I look back and it was so tiresome,” he recalled. Going forward, he’s following advice once given to him by Michael Mann in 2002: “Just tell a good story, let the audience figure out the theme. That’s their job.”
Lest you think he’s secretly an AI booster, that’s not the case at all: after previously telling Polygon he’d never use it, Gilligan used Variety to further affirm his stance. “I hate AI. It’s the world’s most expensive and energy-intensive plagiarism machine. I think there’s a very high possibility that this is all a bunch of horseshit. It’s basically a bunch of centibillionaires whose greatest life goal is to become the world’s first trillionaires. I think they’re selling a bag of vapor.”
Gilligan’s beef with the technology primarily concerns “Silicon Valley assholes” who’ve put all their eggs in the AI basket. Because should it develop “a true singularity that has its own soul, and therefore its own identity,” does that mean companies like Meta and OpenAI have created digital slaves to monetize? He certainly seems to think so, and warns audiences to not get impressed by Silicon Valley’s latest shiny toy.
Like Heretic, the Pluribus credits declares it as a show “made by humans.” Whatever else you take away from it in the coming weeks, know that it was all done with a personal touch.
If you watched all the way to the end of the new Apple TV show “Pluribus,” you may have noticed an unusual disclaimer in the credits: “This show was made by humans.”
That terse message — placed right below a note that “animal wranglers were on set to ensure animal safety” — could potentially provide a model for other filmmakers seeking to highlight that their work was made without the use of generative AI.
And just in case the disclaimer wasn’t clear enough, creator Vince Gilligan (best known for “Better Call Saul”) was even more emphatic in a Variety feature story about the show, declaring flatly, “I hate AI.”
He went on to describe the technology as “the world’s most expensive and energy-intensive plagiarism machine” and compared AI-generated content to “a cow chewing its cud — an endlessly regurgitated loop of nonsense.”
“Thank you, Silicon Valley!” he added while laughing. “Yet again, you’ve f—ed up the world.”
“Pluribus” is the former “X-Files” writer’s return to science fiction, and it reunites him with his “Better Call Saul” co-star Rhea Seehorn, who plays a romantasy author confronting an alien invasion.
The Pluribus creator, whose new show premiered the first two episodes Friday on Apple TV+, made sure to note in the credits of the post-apocalyptic sci-fi series that the production did not rely on AI.
“This show was made by humans,” reads the credits, following a list of acknowledgments from the producers.
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In Pluribus, Rhea Seehorn plays Albuquerque author Carol Sturka, one of 12 people on Earth who is immune to an extraterrestrial virus that transforms everyone in the world into a relentlessly optimistic hive mind.
Gilligan previously slammed AI as he discussed the series. “I have not used ChatGPT, because as of yet, no one has held a shotgun to my head and made me do it,” he told Polygon.
“I will never use it. No offense to anyone who does,” added Gilligan. “I really wasn’t thinking about AI [when I wrote Pluribus], because this was about eight or 10 years ago.”
Meanwhile, Coca-Cola has faced backlash this week for another AI-generated holiday campaign, and the entertainment industry has expressed concern over AI creations like Tilly Norwood replacing human actors and other crew members.
What if the biggest problems plaguing humanity vanished overnight—and there was no more violence, crime, discrimination, or conflict? But what if the tradeoff for all that positivity and bland happiness was outrageously intrusive and creepy? That’s the launchpad that Pluribus, Apple TV’s newest sci-fi series, blasts off from, with a wonderfully complex main character at its core.
Pluribus is the latest series from Vince Gilligan, who got his start writing on The X-Files and went on to become a producer and director on that show, then created two award-winning series of his own: Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. The inaugural season of Pluribus runs nine episodes (io9 watched the first seven for the purposes of this review), with the first two streaming today and a weekly rollout thereafter.
Pluribus takes cues from each of those well-loved Gilligan titles. The setup is propelled by science fiction in that thought-provoking, surprisingly emotional X-Files way, but there’s also Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul’s anarchic, subvert-the-system energy, with Gillian’s signature sense of humor (wry, dry, clever, and observational) underpinning everything.
A fantastic Rhea Seehorn (Better Call Saul) stars as Carol Sturka, a successful author of “speculative historical romance literature” (think Outlander, but with pirates) who secretly loathes her books and is embarrassed by her fans. Carol’s able to stomach writing “mindless crap,” as she calls it, mostly because it funds the comfortable lifestyle she shares with Helen (Miriam Shor), her partner in life and business.
As we’re learning about Carol, Pluribus is also alerting us to another group of characters: scientists who’ve discovered something very unusual. The show periodically uses an on-screen timer to let you know exactly where we are in relation to the event that changes the world.
If you want to go in completely blind, here’s a warning (however, note that we don’t discuss any spoilers beyond the inciting event, hinted at in the show’s existing marketing, that propels everything that follows).
That world-changing event: a mysterious-in-origin phenomenon that links almost the entire population of the world into a single hive mind.
Think Unity from Rick and Morty, except in live-action, and Pluribus takes an astonishingly believable approach to what such a scenario might look like to an outsider—namely Carol, who’s unaffected by the outbreak. As humanity’s overhaul takes hold, it’s not unlike the opening scenes of a zombie movie, and Carol is left confused, terrified, and heartbroken.
There’s widespread death and destruction at first, but the chaos soon dies down and a placid new normal emerges. The affected, or “Others,” as Carol comes to call them, awaken with serene, irritatingly upbeat attitudes. They refer to themselves as “we” (the first episode is titled “We Is Us”), and since they share a single consciousness, everyone knows everything about everything. Any person, even a little kid, can perform open-heart surgery or pilot an airplane. And they know absolutely every little thing about Carol, thanks to their access to Helen’s mind and memories, as well as the surveillance drone they launch to keep tabs on her at all times.
The Others assure Carol they mean her no harm, though they are actively trying to figure out how to convert her. Dripping with benevolence, they place themselves at her beck and call. Carol, who was already a salty soul before being hit with this nightmare—and who has, she’ll have the Others know, seen many sci-fi movies that follow this exact plot, and it never ends well—responds with sarcasm and fury.
While Pluribus’ first two episodes necessarily front-load a lot of exposition, once we move past the initial shock of what’s happened, the show finds its true groove. We meet Carol’s “chaperone,” the elegant and accommodating Zosia (Karolina Wydra), who’s been hand-picked for hilarious reasons we won’t reveal here. Carol’s quest for allies doesn’t help much, including the flamboyant Diabaté (Our Flag Means Death’s Samba Schutte). He’s actually pleased as punch with the new status quo, especially the part about suddenly having beautiful women attending to his every need.
There’s also the remote Manousos (Carlos-Manuel Vesga), who’s even more unwilling to engage with the Others than Carol is. Carol, at least, will pick up the phone when she needs groceries restocked or help flipping on the power in her hometown of Albuquerque—a favorite Gilligan setting and an ideal backdrop for Carol’s personal post-apocalypse, where surreal horrors and deep loneliness play out against stunning natural beauty.
As Carol vacillates between boozy despair, bursts of anger, inconveniences galore, and an investigative quest to dig up information on the Others—the latter a coping mechanism more than anything—we dig deeper into Pluribus’ exquisitely balanced existential crisis. Carol’s life is messy. She is miserable. Things weren’t awesome before, but they’ve definitely taken an extreme downturn in the aftermath. It would be so easy to just give in and join the Others’ collective crusade; it’s an option that Carol has, unlike the billions of others across Earth who became part of this without any choice or warning.
But she also knows that giving up everything that makes her an individual, even her many unpleasant qualities, means she’ll no longer be human. And that’s something she’s prepared to keep a death grip on—even if sometimes being a human really, really sucks.
Pluribus already has a second season in the works, so there’s no telling what kind of resolve we’ll get when this batch of episodes is over. But no matter what happens, it’s clear Carol is a new hero for our times: stubborn, impulsive, cranky, and short-tempered, yet also intelligent, funny, resourceful, and easy to root for. Not to mention, she’s determined to save a world that might seem superficially improved—but she knows is steadily spiraling into a dystopia even more disastrous than the one it left behind.
Fight for your right to feel crappy. Photo: Apple TV/YouTube
Have you ever been depressed at karaoke? Unable to feel the love at a wedding? Ever been to a party and thought, Oh, my vibes are so off — and everyone knows? Inthe new show from Vince Gilligan, starring Better Call Saul’s Rhea Seehorn, one lady is tanking the energy of the entire world. Here, everything you need to know about Pluribus, the new show breaking the S curse for Apple TV.
You can’t get this guy out of New Mexico. He loves it! Like Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul before it, Pluribus is set in Albuquerque. Entertainment Weeklysays Seehorn plays Carol, a historical-romance author who wants to “save humanity from happiness.” Some time before the series’ start, a virus swept the globe and made everyone content and placid. And based on the trailer, it seems the world isn’t cool with Carol being left out.
No one likes a spoilsport, apparently. In the trailer for Pluribus, we see everyone from a shipping-company worker to the president trying to turn Carol’s frown upside down. The guy from the shipping company would give her a hand grenade if it would make her happy. But why is Carol’s local Sprouts abandoned? Do the happy no longer need to eat? We’ll find out more in November.
Seehorn will be joined/opposed by Karolina Wydra (True Blood)and telenovela star Carlos Manuel Vesga. Miriam Shor, Samba Schutte, and Peter Bergman guest-star.
Besides the location and the star? It’s possible. Gilligan told EW that there are little nods to his past work in the show. “There might be a couple if you keep your eyes and ears peeled,” he said. “Fans of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, if they pay close attention, they might come upon an Easter egg or two.”
Catch the fever when the first two episodes of Pluribus come to Apple TV (without the +) on November 7. New episodes will drop every Friday until December 26. And there’s already an order for a second season.
Everything we’ve seen from the new show from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul mastermind Vince Gilligan has been a mystery—from cryptic teasers to an ominous conversation with the President himself, all we’ve really gotten a flavor of so far is that something has gone very, very wrong with the world, save for one woman (Carol, played by longtime Gilligan collaborator Rhea Seehorn). Now, we know a little more, and it’s only getting creepier.
Ahead of its launch in a few weeks, Apple TV has launched the first full trailer for Pluribus, giving us a slightly better picture of its strange world where everyone in the world is blissfully happy, save for seemingly just author Carol Sturka. Carol is rightfully freaked out, and not just because of the rest of humanity’s sudden positivity, but because humanity is seemingly ardent in figuring out how she can join the rest of them at any cost.
It’s not just the blindingly optimistic, almost zombified happy people that are giving the creep factor, though. This new trailer gives us a better look at the wider world around Carol, and it seems like whatever’s happened in the world to turn the rest of humanity this way, there was a major disaster beforehand—ambulances everywhere, cities and vehicles on fire, dead bodies; they’re all slowly but surely being cleaned up by cheerily marching hordes of people. People who then still stop at nothing but to acknowledge Carol and her difference the second she’s in public.
It’s a great vibe, and even with showing us much more of the show than we’ve seen already, it still barely gives anything away—and has us dying to see more of what Gilligan has cooking.
Pluribus hits Apple TV from November 7, kicking off with a two-episode premiere.
