The show follows author Carol Sturka, played by Seehorn, as the rest of humanity is suddenly joined into a hive mind that seeks to amicably assimilate Carol and other immune individuals into the mind. The title of the series refers to e pluribus unum, a Latin phrase meaning 'out of many, one'.[5]
Apple has ordered two seasons of the series for Apple TV, with the series premiering two episodes on November 7, 2025, for a nine-episode first season. Pluribus has received acclaim from critics, who praised Gilligan's writing and direction, Seehorn's performance, and the series's originality, tone, and stylistic influences.
Premise
Set in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the series centers on author Carol Sturka, who is one of only 13 people in the world immune to the effects of "the Joining". This event, caused by an extraterrestrial virus, has transformed the rest of humanity into a peaceful and content hive mind known as "the Others", who consistently accommodate the wishes of those who remain unaffected.[2][6][7][8]
Cast and characters
Main
Rhea Seehorn as Carol Sturka, an American fantasy romance author who survives the outbreak of an alien virus that renders nearly all of humanity into a relentlessly optimistic hive mind[2]
Karolina Wydra as Zosia, a member of the Others who acts as Carol's companion and guide
Carlos-Manuel Vesga[es] as Manousos Oviedo, a self-storage facility manager in Paraguay, one of the 13 people in the world not infected by the virus. He refuses to interact with the Others.[9]
Guest
Miriam Shor as Helen L. Umstead, Carol's manager in public and romantic partner in private[10][11]
Samba Schutte as Koumba Diabaté, one of the immune individuals from Mauritania, who decides to live a hedonistic playboy life in the aftermath of the virus outbreak[10]
Peter Bergman as Davis Taffler, a member of the U.S. government (Under Secretary of Agriculture for Farm Production and Conservation) who speaks to Carol about her situation[10]
Jeff Hiller as Lawrence J. Kless, a member of the Others[13]
Tim Keller as Mayor Tim, a member of the Others. In real life, Keller has been the mayor of Albuquerque since 2017.[14]
Patrick Fabian as the voice of the Others' prerecorded messages to Carol.[15]
Episodes
Episodes were promoted as being released on Fridays globally from November 7, but were released in Eastern Time Zones on the preceding Thursday evenings.[16] The fifth episode was released two days early due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States.[17]
Astronomers detect a radio signal from space that spells out a viral RNA sequence. Over a year, researchers reproduce the viral sequence in a lab, but an outbreak occurs one night, causing those infected to act collectively, spreading the virus through saliva. Romance novelist Carol Sturka returns to Albuquerque after her latest book tour with her manager and partner Helen. During a night out, Carol notices everyone around her begin to suddenly convulse, including Helen, who collapses. Carol rushes Helen to a hospital, finding the city overrun with chaos and destruction along the way. Carol is alarmed to find everyone at the hospital is infected and knows her name; Helen soon dies from her injuries. Carol flees to her house, where she discovers a TV broadcast showing a man in the White House press room with a lower third showing Carol's name and a phone number on-screen. When she calls, the man explains that the virus has transformed humanity into a permanently happy hive mind. He tells Carol that she and eleven others appear immune, but shares that the hive mind seeks to assimilate them.
While burying Helen, Carol is approached by Zosia, a member of the hive mind (the "Others"), who explains that all infected humans share one consciousness, containing each other's memories—including Helen's. When Carol lashes out at her, Zosia convulses. After recovering, Zosia reveals that Carol's anger overwhelmed the hive mind, and that her outburst killed many. Carol demands to meet the five other immune English speakers, and the Others arrange a meetup in Bilbao. One survivor, the hedonistic Koumba Diabaté, arrives aboard Air Force One, where the group assembles. Carol discovers the other survivors have accepted the new collective existence, despite her pleas to search for a cure. Zosia explains that the Others are nonviolent, but admits that over 886 million people died during the initial "joining". Enraged, Carol triggers a second deadly global seizure, prompting the other survivors to abandon her. Koumba tells Carol he plans to travel to Las Vegas with Zosia as a sexual companion, but he requires Carol's permission. Carol protests but allows it before getting on her own commercial jet to return home. When she sees Zosia leaving with Koumba, she has a change of heart and rushes to stop their departing plane.
Over seven years before the Joining, Carol and Helen visit an ice hotel, where they witness the aurora borealis. Carol and Zosia fly back to Albuquerque, during which Carol calls Manousos, one of the immune, but he curses at her. Zosia provides Carol with a gift that Helen had ordered before the Joining; Carol demands the hive mind completely forget about Helen. Carol refuses a meal prepared by the Others and instead goes grocery shopping, finding her local store empty because of the Others' allocation of resources. At Carol's request, the store is immediately restocked. Angered by a forced power outage, Carol sarcastically asks for a hand grenade. Later, Zosia brings a grenade to Carol's home. Over drinks, Carol vents her frustrations and primes the hand grenade, thinking it is fake, but is shocked to learn it is real. Zosia quickly throws it away but is injured in the explosion and taken to a hospital. While waiting for Zosia to recover, Carol speaks to a representative of the hive mind, asking if they would give her anything, even a nuclear weapon. When the hive mind confirms that they would, Carol dismisses the representative as she contemplates.
In a flashback, Manousos, living in a storage facility office in Paraguay, refuses help from the Others. He ransacks the lockers for food when he receives Carol's call. In the present, Carol returns home from the hospital and starts to compile a list of facts she has learned about the Others, determining they cannot lie. Carol goes to Zosia at the hospital to ask if the Joining is reversible, but the hive mind refuses to answer. Carol secretly takes vials of sodium thiopental and tests its effectiveness as a truth serum at home, revealing to herself that she is sexually attracted to Zosia. Back at the hospital, Carol takes Zosia for a walk outside the hospital, stealthily injecting the serum into her IV bag. When Zosia starts to lose clarity, Carol tries to probe the answer from her about reversing the Joining. Zosia struggles to speak, while several Others arrive to surround them, repeatedly chanting "Please, Carol". Zosia collapses from cardiac arrest, with members of the hive mind coming in to try to revive her.
After Zosia is returned to the hospital, Laxmi, one of the immune, calls Carol and berates her for disrupting the Others. Carol naps, during which the entire Albuquerque population departs, leaving a recorded message telling Carol they need space from her. She records a video message to the other twelve immune, explaining what she's learned and asking for their help. In trying to prevent wolves from digging in her garbage, she takes her trash to town and discovers a large number of empty milk cartons from a local dairy. She investigates and finds that, instead of milk, the dairy was producing a strange fluid created from a bagged crystalline substance. Carol performs tests on the bagged substance, recording her observations in a video to the immune. She postulates the Others drink it to maintain the hive mind. The wolves return for more food and attempt to dig up Helen's body. Carol scares them away with her police car and lays heavy tiles over the grave to protect it. After finding a barcode on the bag, she traces its origin to a local food packaging plant and discovers something shocking hidden under a tarp.
Vince Gilligan conceived the series's premise after becoming "weary of writing bad guys"[21] after a decade of working on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.[22] During production of Better Call Saul, he came up with the premise of a man that, after some cataclysmic event, everyone on Earth adored. He expanded on the idea, turning the lead to a female character that was written with Better Call Saul star Rhea Seehorn in mind,[11] and coming up with the idea of a hive mind. As he wanted the story as grounded as possible, Gilligan came up with the idea of the hive mind coming from a signal sent from space containing code for RNA that would transform humanity.[23][24]
Gilligan told Seehorn that he was working on something aimed for her, and she immediately wanted to be part of the work even before seeing the initial drafts.[24] After Better Call Saul ended in August 2022, he pitched a new series that he would develop with Sony Pictures Television.[25] His pitch brought the first bidding war for one of his works,[24] with Apple TV winning the rights to the show in September 2022, giving it a two-season order. Gilligan was named to serve as showrunner and executive producer. Seehorn was cast as Carol Sturka, a successful but discontented romance novel author.[4] Gilligan crafted the character to be a "flawed good guy" who tries to save the world.[26]
In March 2024, Karolina Wydra was cast in the series in the lead role of Zosia, one of the "Others" that serves as Carol's liaison.[27]
The series title was chosen from a list of over 100 names, as "a tip of the hat to the unofficial motto of America, 'E pluribus unum', the Latin phrase. It means 'Out of many, one'."[5]
Production
Promotional poster for season 1
In October 2023, after writing for the first season was interrupted by the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike, Gilligan and his writers' room regrouped to finish the last two episodes. The strike also pushed back the plans to begin shooting, possibly into the early part of 2024, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.[6] The strike also affected some cast and crew decisions that were made before the strike; Gordon Smith, an executive producer and screenwriter for Pluribus, had to step in to direct at least one episode due to scheduling conflicts with their original planned director.[28] Filming began on the series in February 2024,[29] finishing in September 2024 after 7 months of production in Albuquerque under the working title of Wycaro339.[30] Each episode had a reported $15 million budget.[31]
The official series title of Pluribus, along with its planned release in November 2025, was announced in July 2025.[20]
Dave Porter, who composed music for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, is the composer for the series.[32] Denise Pizzini served as production designer.[33]
Once Gilligan had selected Seehorn for the starring role, he was reluctant to use Albuquerque again for filming, fearing that viewers would conflate Seehorn's role as Carol with her Kim Wexler role from Better Call Saul. However, it proved more effective to use Albuquerque as the setting, given his previous work in the city for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul along with pre-existing soundstages that were used for those shows; to avoid confusion, Gilligan avoided filming at locations that had already been used on those previous shows.[33] For exterior shots, Carol's cul-de-sac was temporarily constructed in West Mesa outside of Albuquerque, including Carol's home exteriors and interiors, six surrounding homes, a park, and roadways.[34][33] Gilligan and his crew constructed fake residences for Pluribus to avoid drawing tourists to a real Albuquerque residence, as had occurred with the home used as Walter White's residence in Breaking Bad.[35] Smith said this was also to minimize the impact to the people of Albuquerque, as some of the shots they planned around Carol's home would normally require shutting down roads and businesses if they had used existing residences.[28]
Release
After Pluribus was announced, very few details of the show were released publicly, even with the series's full trailer released in late October 2025.[36][37]
An advance invitation-only screening of the series's first two episodes was held in New York City on October 10, 2025.[38] The series held its official premiere event at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles on November 4.[39]Entertainment Weekly released an exclusive preview of the series's first four minutes one day before the Apple TV premiere.[40]
Pluribus premiered its first two episodes on November 7, 2025, exclusively on Apple TV. A new episode is set to air every Friday through December 26.[20]
Marketing
Various teaser trailers for the series have included the phone number "(202) 808-3981", which when dialed plays the following message:[41][42]
Hi, Carol. We're so glad you called. We can't wait for you to join us. Dial "zero" and we'll get back to you via text message.
Subsequent text messages included alerts for teaser trailers and an invitation to the October 2025 advance screening event in New York City. The messages, which continued through the series premiere, referred to all recipients as "Carol."
On November 14, 2025, Apple Books released an 11-page "excerpt" from Bloodsong of Wycaro, the fourth book in Carol's Winds of Wycaro book series, which was featured in the series's first episode.[43] The excerpt contained a "Letter from the Author", Chapter 16 of the fictional book, and an "About the Author" biography page.[44]
Reception
Critical reception
Rhea Seehorn has received critical acclaim for her performance.
Pluribus has received widespread critical acclaim, with reviewers praising Seehorn's performance, Gilligan's writing and direction, and the series' originality, tone, and stylistic influences. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the series holds a 98% approval rating based on 114 critic reviews. The website's critics consensus reads, "Genuinely original science-fiction fare from television veteran Vince Gilligan, Pluribus leads Rhea Seehorn through a brave new world with plentiful returns."[45]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, gave the series a score of 86 out of 100 based on 37 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[46]
Nicholas Quah of Vulture called the series "an entrancing piece of television", praising Seehorn's "remarkable" performance, writing, "she makes it easy to comply with Pluribus's insistence on total presence as it meditates on something essential about humankind." He compared Gilligan's direction to his work on the Breaking Bad franchise for emphasizing sequences that "luxuriate in depicting process and atmosphere", describing the series' pace as "deliberate and meandering, both thrilling and confounding in its refusal to yield payoff, immediate or otherwise" and praising its "gorgeous" cinematography and production design.[47] Kaiya Shunyata of RogerEbert.com called Pluribus "one of this year's most complicated and thrilling television series", describing the show as a "bewildering mix of science fiction and noir". She praised Seehorn's performance for "commanding" the screen, while describing the "push-and-pull" between her and co-star Wydra as "fascinating to watch".[48]
Linda Holmes of NPR felt Gilligan's "genius" to be in "the deft way he marbles brutality, humanity and humor into a single creation in which each element retains its punch, but the whole still makes sense". She praised the collaboration between Gilligan and the "extraordinary" Seehorn for tapping into the actress's comedic sensibilities, while also praising the series's "crushingly sad" depiction of existential loneliness, as well as its "philosophical frankness", which she found "more refreshing than didactic".[49] Ben Travers of IndieWire gave the show a B+, writing that the series "rewards acute attention and an engaged mind, which would be more than enough reason to recommend it even if it wasn't also a sharply observed celebration of the human condition". He praised the "steady and stunning" cinematography and the "colorful and clarifying" production design, but in contrast to Quah, felt that Gilligan's "devotion to process" as a director "throws off the pacing, which is already unsteady thanks to the general shapelessness of our protagonist's overall journey".[50]
James Poniewozik of The New York Times likened the series to several others, while considering Pluribus to be "its own mystifying thing" and "a wildly fanciful series that feels unsettlingly real at its core". He praised Gilligan as "a master of disorientation" and called Seehorn's performance "enormous, in quality and quantity".[51]
Viewership
According to Apple TV, the first two episodes of Pluribus broke its viewership record for a series launch, surpassing the premiere of the second season of Severance.[52] For the week ending with November 16, 2025, Pluribus ranked #1 as the most-watched streaming original series in the United States.[53]
Several critics noted the series' stylistic influences and philosophical commentary. Sean T. Collins of Decider noted influences from several science fiction works in the series premiere, including Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Night of the Living Dead and 28 Days Later. He also described the series as "a big-budget reimagining" of the 1960s TV series The Prisoner.[54]James Poniewozik compared the series to The Leftovers, The Twilight Zone and The Last Man on Earth. He noted that Gilligan, who was a writer on The X-Files and one of the showrunners of its spin-off The Lone Gunmen, returned to many of the themes from that universe. Pluribus was also compared to another Apple TV show, Severance, as they both deal with "transforming human consciousness."[51]
Some critics considered the story relevant in connection with the topical subject of artificial intelligence. Poniewozik found parallels between the series' premise and "the modern lure of A.I., which promises to deliver progress and plenty for the low, low price of smooshing all human intelligence into one obsequious collective mind".[51] Josh Rosenberg of Esquire also interpreted Pluribus as an allegory for humanity's "bizarre acceptance" of artificial intelligence, writing, "for once, we're watching a meaningful story about our connection to AI that isn't solely about choosing whether to fall in love with it or kill it."[55] Gilligan himself noted his disdain of A.I. and included a disclaimer in the end credits of Pluribus that the production did not rely on the technology, while also pointing out that he was not thinking of A.I. while writing the show since the story was conceived more than eight years prior.[56]
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