Copyright Polygon
About a decade ago, Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, had an idea. That idea can best be summed up by the logline for his mysterious new science fiction show, Pluribus: "The most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness." But getting from that simple, strange sentence to an actual TV show took a lot of patience and a bit of luck. Thankfully, Gilligan had plenty of both. “Sometimes, I back into these things,” the showrunner tells Polygon. “I started off almost 10 years ago with this vague idea about a male protagonist who everybody suddenly, inexplicably was very, very nice to. He didn't do anything particularly much to deserve everybody's love and affection, but everybody suddenly loves this guy. They will do anything for him. No matter how mean he is to them, he can never hurt their feelings. He can never shake their enthusiasm for him as a person.” The concept that eventually became Pluribus popped into Gilligan’s mind around the time Breaking Bad ended and its spinoff, Better Call Saul, began. With a huge success behind him and a new series already confirmed, the showrunner had the space he needed to let his thoughts marinate. “I started kicking this idea around on my lunch breaks from Better Call Saul," Gilligan continues. “I didn't know what it was about this idea that stuck with me — and I couldn't figure out what would be the plot mechanism by which this would happen — but I kept messing around with it, and I realized, well, it has to be a science fiction story. You can't explain a situation like that in the real world.” You’ll have to wait a few more days to find out exactly how Gilligan cracked Pluribus, though the show’s title may hold some clues, and the showrunner has dropped a few more. However, one other major breakthrough needed to happen before his original thought experiment could become a reality. It came down to Better Call Saul’s breakout star, Rhea Seehorn, who plays ambitious, independent lawyer Kim Wexler opposite Bob Odenkirk’s Jimmy McGill. “At about the same time, in the early seasons of Better Call Saul, I realized how much I love Rhea Seehorn,” Gilligan says. “So I decided: Let's make it a female protagonist. I want to write this thing for Rhea. She deserves to be the star of her own show.” The lesson from all this, if there is any, is that Pluribus happened, not because Gilligan felt some intense desire or pressure to create a sci-fi show, but because he had the freedom to let a weird little idea expand slowly into something worth pursuing. “I kind of backed into the science fiction of it,” Gilligan says. “I wasn't setting out to make a sci-fi show.” Pluribus premieres Nov. 7 on Apple TV.
