‘Pluribus’: Rhea Seehorn & Vince Gilligan Explain Utopia of New Sci-Fi Drama (VIDEO)

Kate Hahn October 28, 2025, 12:27 pm

What To Know

Vince Gilligan’s new sci-fi drama Pluribus, starring Rhea Seehorn as grumpy romance writer Carol Sturka, explores a global event that transforms humanity in an unexpected way.
Gilligan explains why he wanted to turn the concept of a dystopia upside down with a supposed utopia where individuality is lost but peace and happiness prevail.
Seehorn shares why Carol is very different from her Better Call Saul character, Kim Wexler.

In executive producer Vince Gilligan‘s long-awaited, eerie sci-fi drama, Pluribus, inspired by Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Twilight Zone, a shocking global event suddenly transforms everyone on our planet in a way that even the biggest fans of freaky futurism won’t see coming. Pod people? Nah, too predictable. For his lead actor, Gilligan reunited with Rhea Seehorn who played poker-faced lawyer Kim Wexler on his hit Better Call Saul. She is now grumpy romance writer Carol Sturka, who reluctantly faces the fact she must save humanity from what many feel is a utopian age.

“One of the many super fun things about doing this role is Carol’s the polar opposite of Kim: reactionary, impulsive, has anger issues,” Seehorn told TV Insider in an interview alongside Gilligan. (Watch the video above for the full interview and a new clip from the show.) She revealed that one thing she did to prepare for the role was going to readings at an L.A.-area romance bookstore called The Ripped Bodice.

Gilligan wanted to turn the concept of a dystopia upside down. “The apocalypse is always presented as awful, hence the name,” Gilligan told us with a chuckle. “But there’s all these great shows like The Walking Dead and The Last Of Us. I really like those, but you do not want to turn into a mushroom person. You don’t want to turn into a zombie. With this show, the fun for me is the argument that the audience can have about, ‘Is this a terrible thing, the loss of individuality?’ There’s great arguments to be made for it not being so good, but on the other hand, everybody’s happy, everybody’s peaceful, everybody’s getting along. Nobody is under dictatorship or in prison. To me, that’s what interests me about the show, is that people get to discuss it and argue amongst themselves.”

And for Carol, she discovers that expressing her negative side can have bigger repercussions than it once did. “There are huge consequences for her anger and her emotions now that are not just about hurting people’s feelings,” Seehorn hints.