Television series

Pluribus

Name: Pluribus
Genre: Drama, Science Fiction, Thriller
Released: 2025
Cast: Rhea Seehorn, Karolina Wydra, Carlos Manuel Vesga

Vince Gilligan's first show since Breaking Bad swaps meth labs for a stranger poison: a signal that makes almost everyone on Earth serenely, permanently happy, folded into one benevolent hive mind. Rhea Seehorn plays the miserable holdout tasked with undoing it. It's slow, uncanny, darkly funny, and built for people who like their thrillers thoughtful rather than loud.

TVMaze rating

7.8

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Gilligan and Seehorn's actual pedigree together, if you haven't caught it yet — six seasons of watching her build a career of exacting, quietly devastating control that this new role only deepens.

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Breaking Bad2008

The template for everything Gilligan does: ordinary people pushed past their limits, dread mixed with pitch-black comedy, a camera that makes chemistry sets feel operatic.

But Pure crime drama with no sci-fi element, and its violence is relentless enough to exhaust even fans of dark television.

Severance2022

Apple's other great existential puzzle box: a corporation promises happiness through forgetting, and the uncanny, sterile dread it generates rhymes closely with Pluribus's own creeping unease.

But Answers arrive at a glacial pace, and the show is more interested in mood and mystery than resolution.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers1956

Pluribus runs on the exact same nightmare seventy years later: a contentment that spreads person to person, indistinguishable from happiness, that only one holdout can see as a threat worth fighting.

The original 'everyone around you is smiling and it's terrifying' story — pod people replace their human originals with calm, untroubled copies, and one man has to convince anyone that something's deeply wrong.

But Black-and-white, low on spectacle by modern standards, and its paranoia is Cold War-specific — some of the metaphor needs context.

The Leftovers2014

The best show about being the person left behind while everyone else changes — grief, faith, and dislocation handled with a seriousness that never blinks.

But Deliberately, almost punishingly bleak, offering few easy answers and rarely any relief along the way.

Station Eleven2021

A gorgeous, humane vision of what's left of civilization after almost everyone is gone — art and memory as survival, told with real tenderness.

But Fractured timeline and deliberate pacing make it feel closer to a tone poem than a thriller.

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A pulpy, vicious conspiracy thriller about a plot to remake humanity 'for its own good' — ruthless, stylish, and genuinely nasty in the best way.

But Low budget seams show, and its violence toward its own characters can feel gratuitous rather than earned.

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Wayward Pines2015no page yet

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But The mystery-box twists get sillier as they go, and later episodes strain under their own premise.

The Stand2020no page yet

A plague wipes out most of the world, and survivors must choose between two visions of what should rise from the wreckage.

But An uneven adaptation that flattens King's moral complexity into something simpler and considerably less unsettling.

The Century of the Self2002

Pluribus imagines engineered global happiness as science fiction; this documentary shows the real, decades-long project to do exactly that to entire populations, minus the alien signal.

A four-part BBC documentary tracing how the 20th century learned to engineer mass contentment — through psychoanalysis, PR, and politics — turning happiness itself into something manufactured and sold.

But It's dense, talky nonfiction with no plot and no thrills — a history lecture, not a drama.

Pleasantville1998

Same core question as Pluribus — is a world without conflict, want, or individuality actually worth wanting — just asked by a coming-of-age comedy instead of a science-fiction thriller.

A sweet, sly satire about two teenagers zapped into a black-and-white sitcom town where everyone is cheerful, safe, and utterly unchanging — until feeling anything real starts turning the world to colour.

But Gentle where Pluribus is unsettling, and its 90s sincerity about self-expression can feel a little quaint now.