This new sci-fi from the Breaking Bad creator is ‘one of the smartest shows of 2025’

This intriguing series from Vince Gilligan stars Better Call Saul’s Rhea Seehorn, who plays a sarcastic woman living in a world where people suddenly feel happy all the time. The result is George Orwell meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

If a mysterious man is speaking to you directly by name through your television set, and you are not dreaming or hallucinating, it is safe to assume that the world has changed. How and why is the question in creator Vince Gilligan’s exhilarating new Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul series. Pluribus plays like George Orwell meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it still has Gilligan’s distinctive voice, mixing the real with the bizarre. After all, how preposterous would it have been for a high school science teacher to become a drug dealer, like Walter White did in Breaking Bad, or for a lawyer like Sol Goodman to become the hero we root for? Here Gilligan wraps timely social commentary in sci-fi tropes—and centers the story around a prickly yet humble heroine—to create one of the smartest and most entertaining shows of the year.

That heroine, Carol Sturka, played by Rhea Seehorn — Better Call Saul’s Kim, minus the characteristically inelegant ponytail — is perfectly attuned to Gilligan’s mix of real emotion and wild plot twists. A catastrophic event occurs that leaves Carol surrounded by happy people all the time. She was truly one of the least cheerful people on the planet, and seemed immune to everything happening around her. A best-selling romance novelist, she privately says her readers are a “pack of dummies” because they devour her books with titles like Bloodsong of Wycaro. She’s sarcastic and acerbic, and her funny skepticism is a wonderful, refreshing quality in this world of people who might otherwise walk and talk with smiling faces. “No sane person is that happy,” she insists. The series puts us in Carroll’s shoes, and Seehorn’s sympathetic performance is both dramatic and intelligent, grounding the sci-fi plot in her visceral, chilling, and determined reactions.

Although the show’s premise plants her in The Twilight Zone, one of many genre classics that the show conjures alongside Body Snatchers (both of which Gilligan has said are inspirations), Carol falls into quite a subtle place. She lives in a large house on an upscale cul-de-sac in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the city where Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul take place. These shows don’t overlap with Pluribus, but the site does allow Gilligan to hide some Easter eggs. The science fiction aspect takes him back to his early days as a writer on The X-Files. But here he uses genre metaphors in a cognitive way. “We’ve all seen this movie and we know it’s not going to end well,” Carol says. And the science fiction never overshadows her human story. Her sarcastic wit and Seehorn’s sharp delivery make the show so funny. Sometimes it brings to mind the comedy “The Good Place.” Other times, he recalls the strangeness of the HBO drama The Leftovers, but all the while shifting effortlessly from one tone to the next.

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