BREAKING GOOD

Vince Gilligan leaves bad guys behind in a sci-fi epic with an unlikely hero

- BY JUDY BERMAN

VINCE GILLIGAN KNOWS BETTER THAN TO TRY to explain where his stories come from.

Like the extraterrestrial transmission that kicks off his new Apple TV series, Pluribus, their origin is a mystery. But the writer, producer, and director best known for creating the era-defining crime drama Breaking Bad can approximate where and when he started mulling the idea for the sci-fi epic that would become his first major project since leaving the Walter White universe.

It was probably 2016, in Burbank, Calif., where Gilligan had convened the writers' room for Season 3 of Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad spin-off he created with Peter Gould. “We would take lunch breaks that seemed to stretch longer and longer,” he recalls. “I’d walk around the neighborhood, and my mind would wander.” His thoughts coalesced around the concept of wish fulfillment. “I thought ... what if everyone in the world was suddenly really, really nice to me?” When he took himself out of the scenario, the question became: “Why would one guy be that interesting to people?”

The answer forms the wild premise of Pluribus, which premiered on Nov. 7 and whose particulars are best discovered as the show unfolds. But as for that irresistibly interesting guy, well, he turned out not to be a guy at all. Gilligan recruited Rhea Seehorn, who earned two Emmy nominations for playing Saul’s beloved Kim Wexler, to anchor the show as his first female protagonist, Carol Sturka. Despite press materials that introduce Carol as “the most miserable person on Earth,” she is also his first bona fide hero.

For a creator synonymous with the rise of antihero television, who made his name telling what he famously called “a story about a man who transforms himself from Mr. Chips into Scarface,” this is a seismic shift. Yet it’s also a reflection of the keen moral sensibility that has always permeated Gilligan’s work. Though he remains proud of