The fury of happiness
After leaving us Breaking Bad (a pinnacle of television) and its prequel Better Call SaulVince Gilligan returns to the arid, borderlands of Albuquerque with PluribusA dystopia about uniform happiness.
The protagonist, Carol Sturka (Rhea Sheehorn), is a cynical and angry romance novelist who wakes up in a conflict-free world after a mysterious virus has transformed almost all of humanity into an interconnected colony of absolute optimism. Immune to the phenomenon, wounded and filled with sarcasm and distrust of this artificial harmony, she struggles to reverse such emotional simplification. From there, it would be unfair to reveal more aspects of the plot to potential viewers.
Carol is not a heroine in the traditional sense, but rather human and visceral; a 50-year-old woman filled with anger at so many plastic smiles and a uniformity that emerges as an allegory for social media and algorithms. The idea of a colony as a single mind that Gilligan explores can be interpreted as the constant pressure to be happy and to remain connected, aligned with an optimistic consensus.
The problem of Pluribus It could be, on the one hand, that it's on a niche platform like Apple TV, which specializes in dark and visually stunning series; and, on the other hand, that it comes after other equally excellent dystopian series, such as The Leftovers (more existential and indelible) and Severance, more focused on workplace alienation.
The critique of Pluribus not only against technology or artificial intelligence, but against the contemporary tendency to forget that sadness, contradiction, and fury are also part of the human experience, and that a world that applauds unfiltered happiness, where anyone can have whatever they want, is, in reality, a monstrous place. This is where Vince Gilligan finds his strength, his strange beauty (what shots, what direction!), and his place in a television landscape struggling not to end up like the world of... Pluribus.
As long as proposals like these exist The Leftovers, Severance either PluribusWe're saved. All that's missing is for Gilligan to create a time warp to resurrect Walter White and Jesse Pinkman in this new Albuquerque. And if not, he can always keep watching. The Golden Girls on the sofa, which isn't a bad plan for a sinking world either.
