Move Over, Breaking Bad: Pluribus Just Became Vince Gilligan’s Biggest Hit

Vince Gilligan just swung big with Pluribus, his new sci-fi series on Apple TV+, and the early response is loud. It premiered November 7, 2025, and immediately lit up Rotten Tomatoes with a perfect 100% critics' score. For now, that puts it ahead of the very shows that made his name. Yes, including Breaking Bad. That alone is a shift in the Gilligan conversation.

What it is and why it feels different

Pluribus is Gilligan stepping out of the anti-hero sandbox and into a larger, stranger arena. The premise is bold: a solitary novelist trying to survive in a world overtaken by a hive-mind. Rhea Seehorn leads as Carol Sturka, and her reunion with Gilligan after Better Call Saul is one of the big reasons this thing has industry heat. The title itself turned heads early, and it makes sense once you see how the show plays with identity and collective thought.

"I know, 10 years ago, I couldn't have made this show. Because this show is bigger than anything I've ever made before."

That is Gilligan talking to GamesRadar+, and it tracks. The scale is up, the canvas is global, and the ideas are more philosophical: autonomy, choice, and what it means to stay human when the crowd literally thinks as one.

Why the industry is treating it like 2025's big genre play

• Premiered November 7, 2025 on Apple TV+ and launched with a 100% critics' rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
• Apple gave it a two-season order up front, which is not nothing.
• The show openly plants a flag with a credits card that reads "This show was made by humans" — a pointed, anti-AI statement baked into the rollout.
• Rhea Seehorn headlines as Carol Sturka, marking a high-profile reunion with Gilligan after Better Call Saul.
• The structure is a slow-burn mystery with character-first storytelling wrapped in big sci-fi stakes, which is still a weirdly rare combo in streaming right now.
• The title and themes sparked early speculation and buzz, which only intensified once people saw how directly the hive-mind concept ties into the name.

About that Breaking Bad yardstick

Breaking Bad set Gilligan's bar more than a decade ago, and it stayed the measuring stick through Better Call Saul. Pluribus is already nudging that narrative. On the numbers we can actually point to today, it has the higher critical score out of the gate. But the bigger deal is the gear shift: this is not another descent-of-one-man story. It is about how entire populations can flip overnight, what happens when individual choice gets absorbed, and how a single person pushes back when even thought feels communal.

Visually and tonally, don't expect desert-noir. The scope is wider, the world is more mysterious, and the sci-fi is front and center. Reviewers keep comparing certain ideas to a wild episode of Rick and Morty, which is a surprising touchpoint for a Gilligan project, but the comparison keeps coming up for a reason. Still, the pacing and tension are very much his — the storytelling engine that powered his earlier work is intact, just repurposed for a bigger machine.

The bottom line

Between the immediate critical wave, the two-season commitment, the very public 'made by humans' stance, and Seehorn commanding the center, Pluribus is not being treated as just the next Vince Gilligan show. It is being framed as the one that resets what his 'best' might mean. If nothing else, it proves he can build something new without losing the sharpness that made the previous era work.

Pluribus is streaming exclusively on Apple TV+. Breaking Bad is on Netflix. If you watched the premiere, I want to hear your take — does this feel like Gilligan's new number one to you?