The Emmy Awards will be held September 14 and broadcast on NBC and Peacock. AmNews readers may remember that last year, in an effort to be your friendly neighborhood guide to television achievement (or in some cases, underachievement), I slogged through and ranked the nominees, from my least favorite to my most favorite, in four marquee categories — outstanding television movie, limited series, comedy series, and drama series.
This year, rather than weigh in on 26 entries, I reviewed what was the most satisfying viewing experience during my scan of the nominees. That distinction belongs to “Pluribus.” Created and written by “Breaking Bad” creator Vince Gilligan, and featuring a tour de force performance by Rhea Seehorn as Carol, “Pluribus” has all the DNA tracings of an Apple TV original production: a creepy dystopian cocktail (à la “Severance,” “Silo”) chased with a gaggle of odd, shiny, happy people (à la “Ted Lasso,” “Shrinking”). “Pluribus” may have dropped last year, but it remains among the freshest and most original streaming productions on screen today.
The most compelling feature of “Pluribus” is the conceit at the heart of its plot: An extraterrestrial virus infects almost every human on the planet, transforming each person from a unique-minded individual to an extension of a hive mind. However, you will find no garden-variety humanoid drones or snarling zombies around these parts. The unified consciousness is anthropomorphized by a legion of pathologically pacifist vegetarians (well, sort of vegetarians. It’s complicated) whose directive is to deliver absolute harmony to earth.
Carol is among a dozen or so people on the entire planet who are inexplicably immune to the virus. Prior to the alien takeover, she was a successful magical-romance novelist — in her own eyes, a hack — whose career and social regulatory system are managed by her wife, Helen (Miriam Shor). Helen, who doesn’t survive the takeover, just might have been the only person who loved Carol and vice versa. The poetic irony of “Pluribus” is that Carol, an irascible misanthrope, becomes the unwilling champion for a humankind she once actively disdained.
This premise alone is a pleasure that can launch a thousand study groups. However, the most satisfying triumph of “Pluribus” is what Gilligan does once he has gifted us this storyline. Instead of jump-scares from the living dead playbook, we get a darkly funny meditation on the mechanics of being a social animal and what makes us specifically human. And like “The Matrix,” that other philosophical cinematic journey down the thematic rabbit hole of free will and choice, “Pluribus” divides the survivors into red pill and blue pill takers.
Gilliigan’s world can’t help but surface the implications of socialist utopia. What would happen, for instance, if we followed to its inevitable conclusion the “Imagine” world that John Lennon pines for? Who would we be without greed, meanness, or conflict to animate and inspire us? What would happen to language and art if everyone agreed on everything and wanted the same things? What would happen to culture and technological advancement if we didn’t follow separate identities and had no need for money because everyone saw themselves as equal parts of a whole, and thus shared equally with one another? Would the absence of good and evil result in a rapturous heaven on earth? Or would it just be a white-breaded, monochromatic hell?
As we’ve seen through “Breaking Bad,” which sometimes played like a how-to video on crystal meth production, Gilligan is a process guy. In “Pluribus,” Gilligan doesn’t just focus exclusively on the uninfected; he occasionally follows hive-mind community members through their daily paces and answers questions you might not have cared about or thought to ask. We learn how one might nourish oneself if one were constitutionally incapable of taking life in any form, including picking fruit from a tree. We discover what a carbon-neutral and zero-waste existence could lead to. And when the hive mind is in the presence of Carol, we understand what it’s like to fulfill someone’s every wish in a world stripped of purpose.
Carol is nobody’s hero or action figure, but she is indeed everywoman. She fights the hive mind so viscerally and loudly that she becomes a walking primal scream. When robbed of human contact in any form, her sense of isolation is not just a sad expression of loneliness, but a bottomless depressive terror that prompts her to undermine her own humanity.
The near-absolute apocalyptic premise of the series makes for a limited amount of speaking roles. Karolina Wydra plays Zosia — Carol’s foil, hive mind escort, and sole source of intimacy — with just the right combination of vapidness and body-snatcher charm. Carlos Manuel Vesga is the monomaniacal and joylessly quirky Manousos who takes antipathy towards the hive mind to a new level. And Samba Schutte is irresistible as Koumba, the survivor who treats the hive mind’s accommodations as the mother of all winning lottery tickets.
Like “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” before it, “Pluribus” catches its vibe from its Albuquerque setting. In the case of “Pluribus,” the expanse of the desert reinforces the existential bleakness of the colonizing invasion. Out of many, we can be one people. But when we are many and only one, we are nobody.
