e pluribus unum — out of many, one
“The most consequential question in prestige television as of 2025: what does the creator of Breaking Bad do next?”The question the industry has been asking since Better Call Saul ended
Pluribus is Vince Gilligan’s 2025 science fiction series for Apple TV+ — his first major project entirely outside the Breaking Bad universe and his first sustained engagement with science fiction since his years as a staff writer on The X-Files in the 1990s. The title derives from the Latin phrase e pluribus unum (out of many, one), the motto on the Great Seal of the United States, which suggests thematic concerns with identity, multiplicity, and what it means to be a unified whole constituted from distinct, irreconcilable parts.
Gilligan spent over two decades in the American Southwest — Albuquerque, New Mexico as a moral and geographical landscape, Walter White and Jimmy McGill as the twin poles of his creative universe, the crime drama as his native form. Pluribus represents a conscious break from all of it: a different genre, a different platform, a different set of questions. The show is not a sequel, not a spinoff, not a return to familiar territory. It is the first entirely new world Gilligan has built for television since Breaking Bad premiered in 2008.
The thematic resonance of the title is unmistakable for anyone who has watched Gilligan’s career carefully. His work has always been preoccupied with fragmentation and transformation — Walter White’s identity splitting into Heisenberg, Jimmy McGill becoming Saul Goodman, Jesse Pinkman surviving what Walter could not. The question of what constitutes a self, and whether transformation destroys or reveals it, runs through everything Gilligan has made. E pluribus unum names that question directly: out of many, one. How many selves can one person contain before they are no longer recognisably themselves?
The move to Apple TV+ is as significant as the genre shift. Apple has established itself as the premium streaming platform for prestige drama from major showrunner talent — Severance, Slow Horses, For All Mankind, Presumed Innocent, Bad Monkey, Silo. It is the platform that takes genre television most seriously as a vehicle for adult dramatic ambition, and it has demonstrated a willingness to give its showrunners creative latitude that network television cannot offer and that most streaming services no longer do.
For Gilligan specifically, Apple represents freedom from the expectations that would have followed him anywhere in the Breaking Bad universe. AMC is his creative home for crime drama; Apple is a clean slate. The platform’s science fiction library — For All Mankind in particular — has shown that Apple is serious about the genre as a long-form narrative form rather than a vehicle for spectacle. That is the right environment for a writer whose gifts are character, moral complexity, and the slow accumulation of consequence.
Gilligan’s science fiction credentials predate Breaking Bad by over a decade. He joined The X-Files as a staff writer in 1994 and stayed through the show’s run, writing or co-writing more than thirty episodes over nine years. Some of the most celebrated X-Files standalone episodes are his: “Bad Blood,” “Pusher,” “Folie à Deux,” “Hungry.” He developed his voice on that show — the dark comedy, the moral complexity, the sympathy for characters operating under systems they cannot control — and then carried it directly into Breaking Bad.
Pluribus is not a return to the X-Files mode. It is something new. But the comfort with genre conventions, the understanding of how science fiction creates distance that allows a writer to ask questions that realism forecloses — that came from those nine years on The X-Files. Gilligan has always known how to work in speculative space. Pluribus is the first time since 1994 that he has done so as the person in charge.
Better Call Saul ended in August 2022 to near-universal critical acclaim — widely regarded as one of the finest series finales in television history, a confirmation that the Breaking Bad universe had been entirely worth the fifteen years Gilligan invested in it. The question that followed immediately was the hardest one a showrunner can face: what do you do after you’ve made two of the best television shows ever produced?
The answer, for Gilligan, is Pluribus. Science fiction on Apple TV+. A new world entirely. It is a bet on himself as a writer rather than as the custodian of an established universe — a bet that the qualities that made Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul extraordinary were not specific to those characters or that genre, but are portable, transferable, available to any story he chooses to tell.
Whether Pluribus confirms that bet is the most interesting question in prestige television in 2025. The early answer matters not just for Gilligan but for the broader argument about what television authorship means — whether a showrunner’s vision is a voice that can speak in any room, or whether it is inseparable from the specific rooms it was built in.
The title’s promise: E pluribus unum — out of many, one. In a career defined by characters who fragment under pressure, Pluribus announces itself as a show about what survives the fragmentation. That is new territory for Gilligan, and new territory is exactly what the next chapter of his career requires.