Apple TV has released the full trailer for ‘Pluribus’, the genre-bending new drama from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan, starring Rhea Seehorn (Better Call Saul). The nine-episode series arrives this November, and if the new footage proves anything, it’s that Gilligan hasn’t lost his knack for turning ordinary absurdity into something deeply unsettling.
Picked up for a two-season order, ‘Pluribus’ follows the most miserable person on Earth, Carol, played by Seehorn, who must somehow save the world from happiness. That premise sounds like classic Gilligan mischief: familiar yet faintly radioactive. The new trailer shows Carol grimacing her way through a relentlessly cheerful society where even breakfast arrives on a silver tray outside her door. She promptly dumps it in the bin.
A voice calmly reassures her, “Rest assured, Carol. We will figure out what makes you different.” Whatever is going on, Carol wants no part of it. “I want to learn how to reverse all this,” she says, as smiling strangers and chirpy public service announcements push back against her misery.
From the brief glimpses we get, including test swabs, hazmat suits and unsettlingly cheerful citizens, it feels like a sci-fi satire about enforced bliss. Could humanity have caught a “happiness virus”? And is Carol the only one immune? If everyone else has been infected with eternal joy, she might be the only person left capable of seeing how terrifying that really is.
Gilligan has teased that Seehorn’s character is “a bit of a damaged hero, but a hero nonetheless,” while Seehorn herself described the show as pushing tone and genre to new extremes: “It’s really rich characters, but also him playing with the idea of tropes and genres and tone, and switching… In this new show, he pushes that to a limit that was both very thought-provoking and upsetting sometimes, and other times, so, so funny. It really swings for the fences.”
Alongside Seehorn, the cast includes Karolina Wydra (Sneaky Pete), Carlos-Manuel Vesga (The Hijacking of Flight 601), with guest stars Miriam Shor (American Fiction) and Samba Schutte (Our Flag Means Death).
Produced by Sony Pictures Television, ‘Pluribus’ is executive produced by Gilligan, Gordon Smith, Alison Tatlock, Diane Mercer, Allyce Ozarski and Jeff Frost, with Jenn Carroll and Trina Siopy as co-executive producers.
‘Pluribus’ Season 1 premieres Friday, 7th November 2025 on Apple TV.
Login to Geektown