Pluribus

The premise of Vince Gilligan’s latest series sounds like something ripped from The Twilight Zone: When, suddenly, everyone in the world is infected with an alien virus that turns them into a hive-mind who live and move as one, a romantasy author in Albuquerque (one of only thirteen people in the world unaffected) must grapple with what it means to have her alienating independence be literalized as she stands alone against an entire world that wants her to join them in their communal sense of bliss. Angry at her circumstances, grieving the loss of her girlfriend, and convinced of her own righteousness, Carol (Rhea Seehorn, turning grating exasperation into a thing of beauty) sets out to resist the “Others” even as their orderly new world order gets harder and harder to vilify. At its heart is a Rorschach test of a conceit that flirts with questions of agency, free will, AI, individualism, and the very American motto its title openly conjures. For dreaming up an equally prickly and slippery version of a dystopian horror invasion narrative that actively refuses any tidy answers about the ambitious metaphor at its center (is “we” better than “I”?), Pluribus wins a Peabody award.