Vince Gilligan and Rhea Seehorn’s Apple Series Has a Title and a Premiere Date
Nearly three years after it was first announced, and following a few vague teasers from the principals over that time, some concrete details about the Apple TV+ series created by Vince Gilligan and starring Rhea Seehorn are finally available.
Well, a couple, at least.
For starters, the series — marking a reunion between the Better Call Saul co-creator and star — has a title, Pluribus (the “many” part of the unofficial U.S. motto “E pluribus unum,” or “From many, one”) and a premiere date, Nov. 7. Apple TV+ also released the first photo of Seehorn from the series, which is at the top of this story.
As for what Pluribus is about? That’s murkier. The show’s logline describes it as “a genre-bending original in which the most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness.” Cryptic social media posts from Apple earlier in the week read, “Happiness is contagious,” while a brief teaser released with the premiere date (watch it below) offers a deeply unsettling vibe but no insight.
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What is known: Pluribus comes from Sony PIctures TV, Gilligan’s long-time studio home and the producer of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Apple TV+ won a bidding war for the series in 2022 with a two-season order. Gilligan has said he wrote the show for Seehorn, who in turn has described it as “a wild ride.”
“He’s vacillating between tones and between genres like he and Peter Gould did on Better Call Saul, but it’s even more pronounced now,” she told The Hollywood Reporter last year. “… It is a very challenging role and a very challenging show in the best way. It’s everything that an actor would want.”
Gilligan has also said that, unlike the antiheroic centers of Breaking Bad and Saul, Seehorn’s character in Pluribus is more of a hero (albeit a flawed one). Accepting an award from the Writers Guild of America in February, he called on his fellow scribes to leave villain stories behind: “As a writer, speaking to a room full of writers, I have a proposal; it certainly won’t fix everything, but I think it’s a start. I say we write more good guys. For decades we made the villains too sexy [and] viewers everywhere, all around the world, pay attention. They say, ‘Here’s this badass, I want to be that cool.’ When that happens, fictional bad guys stop being the precautionary tales they were intended to be. God help us, they’ve become aspirational.”
Along with Seehorn, the cast includes Karolina Wydra and Carlos-Manuel Vesga. Miriam Shor and Samba Schutte are guest stars.
As for the rest, we’ll find out in November.
Gilligan executive produces Pluribus with Gordon Smith, Alison Tatlock, Diane Mercer, Allyce Ozarski and Jeff Frost. Jenn Carroll and Trina Siopy are co-EPs. Smith, Tatlock, Mercer, Carroll and Siopy all worked with Gilligan on Breaking Bad and/or Better Call Saul.
