Vince Gilligan remembers the indescribable feeling he had when he first watched The X-Files. It was September 1993, and he was flipping through the TV channels looking for something new to watch. On came the pilot episode of The X-Files, which followed Mulder and Scully as they investigated a purported alien abduction in a small Oregon town. It’s a creepy, moody hour of television that would launch one of the biggest sci-fi TV shows ever, which Gilligan himself would cut his teeth on before creating future crime show classics Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. But 32 years ago, Gilligan was just another viewer blown away by this great, enigmatic episode of TV.
“Within five minutes, I was hooked,” Gilligan recalls to Inverse. “I thought, ‘Man, I love this. This show was made for me.’ But I love that I didn’t know anything about it. That made the experience richer and more memorable for me.”
“I want people going into it knowing as little as possible.”
That’s the experience that Gilligan wants to recreate with his new Apple TV series, Pluribus. Gilligan’s first sci-fi series since his time on The X-Files and its spinoff The Lone Gunman, Pluribus stars Better Call Saul star Rhea Seehorn as the “most miserable person on Earth” who “must save the world from happiness.” And that’s it; that’s all we know. Even the trailers for the show reveal as little as possible, making the entire marketing campaign around Pluribus seem couched in mystery. And according to Gilligan, that’s intentional.
“I want people going into it knowing as little as possible,” Gilligan says. “Some people don’t roll that way. Some people want to know the ending before the beginning. Different strokes for different folks, but that’s not my jam. I like knowing as little as possible. So I'm trying to extend that to the audience.”
One person who was not excluded from the mystery of Pluribus was its own star, Seehorn — at least at first. She remembers the day that Gilligan sent her the script for the first episode with no pitch or prompting beforehand, except that it had a “psychological sci-fi element.” So she read the script and fell in love with it immediately.
“He just sent me the script, and I was like, ‘This is bonkers,’” Seehorn tells Inverse. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, he’s going to let me do everything.’ It’s funny, it’s terrifying, it’s dark, it’s psychological. It raises these questions that my crew and I would even stay up late at night questioning ourselves.”
But Gilligan insists that he didn’t keep Pluribus’ plot a secret from Seehorn intentionally. “When it came to Rhea, I wasn’t trying to be secretive so much as I wanted to put my best foot forward, because you only get one first impression. And I write better than I talk.”
Gilligan wrote Pluribus specifically for Seehorn, after coming up with the idea for the show 10 years ago, while he was working on Better Call Saul. He recalls the premise coming to him during one long lunch break, when he started to ponder a character, who was originally male when he conceived it, “who everyone inexplicably loves.”
“He hadn’t done anything to deserve it, but everybody’s really, really nice to him suddenly, and they’ll do anything for him. They’ll bend over backwards to make him happy, and they love them. And that was kind of intriguing. And I thought, ‘Is there a story in there?’” Gilligan recalls.
Only One Woman In The World
There was indeed a story there, but it took nearly a decade of finessing before Gilligan could make it a reality. Pluribus brings Gilligan back to his sci-fi roots, more than 20 years after he concluded his work with The X-Files. But he didn’t intend to make this his big return to the genre; it just happened that sci-fi was the best vehicle for a story like Pluribus. “I was intrigued by this character. I was intrigued by the world, and the world presented itself as science fiction. You can’t really explain what happens in Pluribus without the aid of science fiction. So that’s where we wound up. I never made an active choice to get back to science fiction,” Gilligan says. “Having said that, I love being back in the science fiction realm.
“I think the world needs to see her starring in her own story.”
But first, he had to finish his time in the crime world of New Mexico. Back in 2015, Gilligan was in the process of premiering the Breaking Bad spinoff, which would go on to air for six critically acclaimed seasons. Better Call Saul would earn dozens of accolades and nominations (also setting the record for the most-nominated show to never win an Emmy), with Seehorn in particular becoming a breakout star. Audiences fell in love with Seehorn’s Kim Wexler, and Gilligan did too — it was then, as he developed his idea further, that he decided to change the main character of this new show from a man to a woman and write it with Seehorn in mind. “God knows she deserves it!” Gilligan says.
And could this be the role that earns Seehorn the Emmy she long deserved for Better Call Saul? When I ask Gilligan this, he says he “would love to see that,” but almost thinks that having a legion of fans rooting for you is better than any award.
“Hardware aside, I think the world needs to see her starring in her own story,” Gilligan says. “And I think it's long past time for that to happen, and I'm so happy to be able to do that with her.”
A New Kind of Anti-Hero
As for Seehorn, she’s ecstatic to be working with Gilligan again, and to be playing a character as different from Kim Wexler as can be.
“I absolutely love the Kim Wexler character and always will,” Seehorn says. “But not only is it fun to play a character as an actor that’s polar opposites as to the one you just played, it actually probably would’ve felt a little daunting to play one that was in the shadow of her. So I was really excited to create one from whole cloth with Vince.”
Seehorn’s new character, Carol Sturka, a romance author and the so-called most miserable person on Earth, is angry and brash, whereas Kim is cool and controlled, and mean and occasionally cruel, where Kim had a strong moral compass.
“I made a joke the other day. I was like, Kim would definitely win at poker and Carol would lose, every time,” Seehorn says.
Gilligan is no stranger to writing anti-heroes, but the premise around Pluribus is predicated on his new protagonist’s unlikability. But that’s something that he’s excited to see audiences deal and grapple with.
“Likability is a funny thing. We do best when we ignore it, I think, and probably that’s a good analogy for real life too,” Gilligan says. “A lot of us spend our days worrying about being likable. And what has set us free in the writers room at first with Walter White, played by Bryan Cranston, and now with Rhea Seehorn playing Carol Sturka, we don’t worry about it. We just go where the story takes us.”
“Likability is a funny thing.”
But among the pantheon of his unlikable characters — which include the all-time great TV characters like Walter White and Saul Goodman — Gilligan has a real soft spot for Carol Sturka. “[There’s] the old Groucho Marx saying: She wouldn’t want to be in a club that would have her as a member. She’s got all that kind of stuff. She drinks too much. She does not want to save the world, but she feels that it has to be saved. So, ill-equipped as she may be to save the world, she’s going to do her best to save it. And I love that about her. I love the fact that she’s tenacious. She doesn’t give up. I find her far more lovable than unlikable. And I hope audiences do too.”
