#pluribus

#pluribus

If you weren't clear on just what a miserable person Carol (Rhea Seehorn) is, episode 3 of Pluribus sure makes it obvious. It opens with a flashback, as Carol and her partner Helen (Miriam Shor) are on a dream vacation at an ice hotel in Norway, and all she can do is complain about how cold it is. When Carol sees a stunning aurora borealis, her only thought is "it looks like a screensaver."

In many regards, Vince Gilligan's is a one-woman show. Cheekily referred to as "the most miserable person on Earth" in the vague description that Apple TV initially provided, Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) is the grumpy hero at the show's center, a cynical fantasy-romance writer who suddenly finds herself one of 13 fully conscious and in-control humans left on Earth - the other seven-odd billion having been subsumed into a peaceful hive mind.

A global catastrophe takes place in the first episode (much like in The Leftovers but with the tone of Severance); it's another quirky, head-scratcher from Apple that feels very on-brand for the post-Covid-19 TV environment. Not because you're watching actors on Zoom screens or shell-shocked ER doctors like in The Pitt, but because Pluribus kicks off with a montage of brain-washed factory workers spreading their germs onto petri dishes and distributing them into our water supply at mass scale.

but in the case of Pluribus, it boils down to a sentence: What if the body snatchers were right? To be sure, it could have been any one of a handful of sentences, including "Vince Gilligan has a new idea" and "Rhea Seehorn is playing the lead." But the show, whose first two episodes drop on Apple TV+ this Friday, has more to offer than the tantalizing prospect of reuniting the creator

In the 1988 John Carpenter classic They Live, aliens have invaded the country without anyone knowing it - or, at least, without anyone of actual power and importance knowing. Then one day, a drifter in Los Angeles, played by the wrestler Roddy Piper, picks up a stray pair of sunglasses, puts them on, and sees the world as it truly is.