AppleTV has done it again. It is a platform that we could consider minority, which refuses to follow the currents that unify the rest…and gives us one of the best series 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 an original project to Sony Pictures Television 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.” Trust translated into figures: each episode of ‘Pluribus’ has a $15 million budgetquintupling what ‘Breaking Bad’ cost.
What is it about? “The most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness,” reads the official synopsis from Apple TV+. Carol Sturka, author of romanticasydiscovers he 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 “science fiction nerd my entire life,” wanted to “touch every trope of the sci-fi world“. For example, Carol baptizes the hive as “Pod People”, a direct tribute to ‘The invasion of the ultrabodies‘, which Gillighan obviously cites along with ‘The Twilight Zone’ as a fundamental inspiration. There are also something from the Borg of ‘Star Trek‘ when designing the hive mind, but in general the entire series breathes an air of classic sci-fi, like a Richard Matheson story, absolutely delicious.
Everyone loves ‘Pluribus’. The series has been unanimously acclaimed on aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes (99%) or Metacritic (86). Her it has been said which is “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 her as “one of the most intelligent and 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. Now his proposal, of original science fiction with a super-production budget in an audiovisual era kneeling before the franchises It 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 overtly symbolic approach, but the satire works perfectly (in the first instance, towards the AI artifacts; secondly, to the post-internet human species that we have left, where our only objective is to express 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 4,500 and 5,000 million dollars annually in contentpursuing a radically different strategy than 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 can afford it. The figures are overwhelming: 271 original titles compared to 13,000 from 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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