New Apple TV series ‘Pluribus’ is ‘as big as modern TV gets’ – NYT

“Pluribus” premieres Friday, November 7th on Apple TV.
“Pluribus” is the highly anticipated drama hailing from writer and director Vince Gilligan, the creator of “Breaking Bad” and co-creator of “Better Call Saul.” Starring Rhea Seehorn, who earned two Emmy nominations for her acclaimed performance in “Better Call Saul,” the nine-episode drama series will make its global debut on Apple TV with its first two episodes on Friday, November 7, 2025, followed by new episodes every Friday through December 26th.
Already picked up by Apple in a two-season order, “Pluribus” is a genre-bending original in which the most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness.

Austin Considine for The New York Times:
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The new show, Gilligan’s first to debut in a decade, is in many ways as big as modern TV gets: high-budget, high-concept, a deep character study that combines science fiction, philosophy and sociopolitical allegory…
[T]he lead character, Carol, [is] a successful author and chronic malcontent played by Rhea Seehorn. One day, Carol finds, for reasons hard to describe because of Apple’s extensive spoiler list, that almost everyone on Earth but her is happy. All conflict has vanished, self-loathing too. A mysterious signal from outer space has created a kind of utopia, fulfilling the wishes of countless dreamers since the dawn of humanity. This makes Carol, suddenly and literally, the unhappiest person on Earth.
And yet she prefers that to the alternative.
“I think about ‘Brave New World,’” Seehorn said later at a soundstage in downtown Albuquerque. “I think about even ‘Fahrenheit 451’ and Neil Postman’s essays in his book ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death,’ when he talks about the real threat is that we would come to love our oppressors instead of revolting — that everybody was just happy.”
“The twist on this one is that there is no twist,” as Gilligan put it. The question soon becomes not whether the protagonist will fulfill some great desire — she can have anything she wants — but whether her misery, as an expression of her free will, is worth defending.

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MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote last week of Pluribus, it has “big potential” to quickly become Apple TV’s next Severance-like mega hit!

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[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
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