Pluribus: Rhea Seehorn on the many conversations Vince Gilligan series has triggered

It’s always gutsy to give your TV show a Latin name. It immediately signals that it’s more cerebral than your average TV slop, that you’re not afraid to tell an audience that this is not a lean-back experience.

Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus is certainly not that. The slightly off-kilter sci-fi drama started its run in November and immediately sparked a conversation. Not one, but many.

Like the meaning behind its title, Pluribus has triggered a plurality of readings. Is this show about AI? Is it about grief? Is it about the pandemic? Is it about fame? Is it about isolation?

“Vince and I and the cast are loving all of these interpretations, because it’s about all of those things,” Rhea Seehorn told The Nightly.

Seehorn, who also worked with Gilligan on Better Call Saul, plays Carol Sturka, a best-selling romantasy author who finds herself in a strange – and lonely – position.

In the world of the series, which will drop its season finale this week, an alien virus has infected the entire world’s population so that everyone’s consciousness has been subsumed into a kind of hive mind.

Everything that was you is now everyone, and all human knowledge, from the important to the most mundane, is shared. Billions of people move and decide as one, and they are all, apparently, sublimely happy. No war, no conflict, no individuality.

Except for the dozen people who are immune, including Carol. She’s horrified at the pod people, and especially when the hive tells her it’s their imperative to have her and the other immune join them. They just have to work out the kinks of why it didn’t work for the exempt.

Throughout the first season, Carol rails against it, and declares her mission is to put everything back to how it was. She’s one woman against the world, and going through the throes of grief after the death of her wife Helen.

The show has been enthusiastically embraced by an audience hungry for another Gilligan production, but also for something that was a bit sticky and challenging, an original story brimming with challenging ideas.

Seehorn was relieved when the show became a critical and audience hit, “because you work so hard on it, and we love it”.

“What I’m find so gratifying is the amount of discourse it’s inspiring of really profound, philosophical questions, and finding out from fans on the street or friends and family members, people within the industry that I worked with eons ago, that they have to watch it when it comes out,” she said.

“They say, ‘I have to watch it with friends or I have a group chat and we all watch it at the same time because I have to talk about it afterwards.”

Those chats are not run-of-the-mill “can you believe that happened” but “what do you think is actually happening”. There’s an important distinction in that the latter is deep engagement.

Seehorn added, “We want (Pluribus) to be entertaining as well, and most (audiences) want to talk about the much larger philosophical questions that it’s bringing up for them – what does it mean to be human, what does it mean to be happy, what does it mean to be successful?”

Many of those questions are universal and eternal. Humans are forever chasing this ideal of happiness, what changes are the definitions, the things that pre-occupy us today.

Gilligan started writing Pluribus 10 years ago, when AI was still fanciful and a worldwide pandemic that would disrupt life everywhere was a warning that only a sliver of the medical establishment had heard.

It’s remarkable that the show has managed to hit on more recent pre-occupations. But of course, that reflects modern anxieties. Seehorn recalled a conversation she had the other day, when someone had drilled deep down into Pluribus’s thematic parallels with AI.

“I said at the time, ‘I’m not at all surprised because that’s top of mind to you because of the very specific threat it is to your livelihood’. I mean, to some degree, it is to many of us, but it’s an existential threat (to that person).

“So, watching this show, of course it’s going to bring that up.”

Seehorn said that while commentary about AI wasn’t Gilligan’s intention, he does now see the comparison.

“He lives in the world we live in, and I love that him writing a show that is investigating what it means to be human, and the individual versus the community, and what that means, just ripples out to touch so many topics.

“I think a lot of people wanted to have more nuanced, more philosophical and profound conversations about all of these questions we’re asking without it having to be black-and-white or binary thinking.

“That it’s possible to have a more complex conversation.”

Pluribus is streaming on Apple TV with the finale set to premiere on December 24