Like the hivemind it depicts, Pluribus lacks a soul... on self-satisfied vs. striving art

The difference between Pluribus and Industry is visceral.

Pluribus (Apple TV), above; Industry (HBO), below

I really expected—and wanted!—to like Pluribus. When I heard about the series, there was no way I was not watching a major sci-fi show, which was also kind of a one-woman show, with a queer, childless, middle-aged, woman novelist at its center. And, to be clear, Rhea Seehorn is fantastic. Unfortunately the material she’s given is not so much.

While I can understand the anticipatory buzz about a new Vince Gilligan show, especially one with as wild and timely premise as Pluribus, I genuinely cannot understand the praise having watched the series in full. I feel as if I’m amidst the alien collective consciousness at the heart of the series, everyone nodding pleasantly along, enthusiastically supporting what is very obviously a disaster.

I’ll acknowledge that it’s a great premise: some mysterious alien virus-type-thing invades the human race causing everyone to share a single consciousness except for the eleven people on the planet who are somehow immune. I can absolutely picture Vince Gilligan in a big-shot meeting or maybe just texting a big-shot executive with this bonkers logline, the AI symbolism bursting at the seams of each scene, a literally explosive ending to boot. I imagine he doesn’t have to finish his sentence before said executive is wiring him a gazillion dollars to get started.

Unfortunately, the intrigue more or less stops at the premise. Because…well…nothing actually happens. Each episode chugs along relying on classically compelling Gilligan desert-heavy shots, with bits that are meant to be quirky and clever but are so heavily relied on they end up being unbearably tedious (the repeated message every time Carol calls “them,” the back and forth of the translation app). The only thing that motivates me to keep watching is the approximately 45 seconds of unearned intrigue at the tail-end of each episode. A sign of cheap writing and one that feels almost cruel after enduring nearly an hour of self-satisfied, slow-moving repetition.

It would be one thing if the characters were actually layered and nuanced and we were on a believable emotional journey (even a slow one!) that set up these “twists” that (barely) carry the season along. But every character on the show is weirdly flat. In some sense, this is a by-product of the premise. Most people in the world Gilligan has created are void of all individualism. But even the surviving characters are more like one-note caricatures, including the lead, Carol Sturka (played as best could be by Rhea Seehorn). If this is an intentional philosophical prod for us to ponder what being “human” really means, it’s not working and it is also very boring.

But I don’t think it’s intentional. Carol is meant to be human, albeit someone who—very humanly—lets her emotional avoidance and stubbornness get in her way. She leads with her anger, and I’ll say up-top that there are few things I’d rather watch than a woman getting angry. Primarily because there are so very many things for women to be angry about. But in the case of Carol, in the case of Pluribus, we have unfettered, dogmatic rage in the face of an extremely complicated, mystifying scenario. Most of the time, there’s no clear reason for her one-note rage other than to knock the viewer over the head with the fact Carol is an “Angry Woman.” Her anger is so extreme that her utter lack of curiosity becomes a sort of punchline when she meets the other survivors who all know way more about the dilemma facing them because, well, they… asked.

At times I found myself wondering: is this really what the writer thinks a middle-aged child-free queer woman is like? Of course there’s no singular personality for any identity but in so many ways her character felt off, like a cartoon.

At one point, Carol is so angry [spoiler alert from here on in!] that the collective consciousness of humanity retreats and she is left alone for 40 days. A (very boring) period of time that we’re meant to believe changes her entirely because she proceeds to hook up with her very attractive, albeit robotic, brain-dead-in-a-sense, “chaperone,” Zosia. And while I’ve never experienced alien-takeover levels of loneliness, I was single in 2020, I’ve gone months without human touch, years without sex, a decade without a relationship—and so I’m here for her hooking up with her hot chaperone! Granted, there is no chemistry whatsoever and Carol up until this point has been nothing but hostile towards Zosia, but it’s the end of the world! Except this hookup somehow transitions into a full-on love affair, culminating in an actual montage? Carol has apparently abandoned her sole personality trait up to this point—a stubborn, angry resolve to save the world—for a connection that is so dull and nonexistent it’s almost comical (the height of conversation is a literal “fun fact!”).

Presumably, the show was trying to humanize Carol, but this attempt at an arc felt forced and misplaced. Until I read that the role was originally intended for a man. I could actually believe that a stubborn, angry man would stupidly, happily plunge into a relationship after a bout of loneliness with someone he didn’t connect with because she did whatever he wanted and was also very hot. But watching that would have been blatantly boring. With a woman this kind of empty, eye-roll tedium is at least slightly masked. Because it’s typically unnatural for a woman to deprioritize intimacy and indulge in her own superficial pleasure (and also incongruous with Carol’s character who was presumably deeply connected to her ex and set on saving individualism), and so there is at least a sliver of tension. But without a steadier line connecting the dots from “Angry Woman” to cheesy-love-affair montage, the tension is cheap, built on lazily plopping a woman into an arc that makes absolutely no sense for her character. It’s manufactured and unearned, and—I will die on this hill because “prestige” TV has been guilty of it since the dawn of West World—confusion does not equal intrigue. You cannot make inconsistent, unearned moves in a story and call it interesting.

I should have known not to trust the decision makers behind the show, because from the very first episode I could not get over one simple fact. The world crumbled around Carol Sturka. Only 11 people on the planet maintained their consciousness. And she is still continuously, constantly wearing pants with buttons. Excuse me, what? How am I, a forty-three year old woman novelist, supposed to buy into the fact that when this woman leaves her house in this new dystopian hellscape, she’s putting on khaki capris and a button down shirt?

I can’t help but contrast this with the other show I’m watching, which is the exact opposite of Pluribus in almost every sense. A kind of palate cleanser to remind me that I actually do really love television. And that is the once under-watched, now highly-anticipated HBO series Industry. Compared to Pluribus, Industry has one of the most boring loglines out there: new college grads enter the cutthroat world of investment banking. I’m not surprised people didn’t race to tune into the pilot; we’ve been watching some version of this since the 80s.

I had my own reasons for avoiding Industry until recently. When it piloted in 2020 I was too emotionally fragile to confront what I knew would hit a very particular and personal nerve. For the first five years of my career, I was dead-set on climbing the corporate ladder and making as much money as possible. In Middle School, when tasked to do a report on “what we wanted to be when we grew up,” I went to the library and studied investment banking, knowing only that, growing up poor, I wanted to be rich. Senior year of college, I had full-day interviews with the likes of Morgan Stanley and ended up in corporate consulting, donning a suit each day to my client offices and falling asleep each night calculating how many years it would take to reach Partner. But I abandoned my life-long dream of being rich once I had enough money to simply feel stable, once I learned that the game of capitalism, having always seemed like the most mysterious and difficult of challenges, was actually quite straightforward, depending mostly how much of yourself you were willing to give up.

And so, Industry. A very visceral part of me sees the drive, the unfettered, youthful ambition that sits at the heart of the show, each character fueled by their own specific flavor of trauma and I feel nostalgic for that part of myself, the striving child who imagined going to great lengths to sit in a glass-windowed corner office bossing people around. And not only nostalgia, but a sense of failure—though I wouldn’t want it any other way—that, at least in some sense, I gave up. In other words, for a long time Industry felt almost too close to home for me to turn it on.

But then I did. And thank god. As soon as I finished the pilot, all the addictive tendencies I’d learned to suppress, the same tendencies that once allowed me to excel in our extremist, exploitative system flaring up as I skipped the intro and clicked from one episode to the next. I’m now re-watching the series in full in preparation for the Season Four release. I fall asleep to it each night, strangely comforted by the sociopathy embedded in the plot-lines, the way the tidy, transactional nature of the trading desk thrills, until, when applied to human relationships, it slices.

The lead, Harper Stern, played incredibly by Myha’la is a juicy, rich character, the same kind of character, in fact, that Vince Gilligan himself helped pioneer in Breaking Bad! The classic anti-hero. Someone who is “bad,” pathologically so, but who you still, somehow, can’t help but root for. Importantly, she’s not just a shadow of the typical male anti-hero that we’ve all seen enough of by now, she is very much her own version of it—uniquely unpredictable, but fully cohesive; all the wild specific parts of her fit thoughtfully together. And while Harper sits at the center, the complexity of her relationships, especially with her publishing heiress frenemy, Yasmin Kara-Hanani (played impeccably by Marisa Abela) and her I-Banking veteran boss, Eric Tao (chef’s kiss, Ken Leung), charge the show. Every single character is dense with their own layers of trauma and desire, malice and longing, flailing—fabulously, tragically—to fill their own uniquely shaped wound.

Like any piece of art I glom onto, the lore, the process of creation, plays as big of a role as the artifact itself. I’m fascinated by the creators of Industry, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, who themselves started in investment banking upon graduating from Oxford. It’s my favorite kind of writing, when the heart of the work is glaringly, viscerally personal. Both Down and Kay admit to mining the details of their own lives to achieve the depth of characters we get on screen. They both have their own history with ambition and success, as this fantastic New Yorker profile explains. But in the world of television, they were underdogs. They wrote scripts while living with their parents and had never made a show of their own. When Industry first came out, it was one of the least watched series to ever air on HBO.

When you watch Industry, you know that whoever is heading up the writer’s room has felt a version, however distorted, of the emotions you see onscreen. Not only did Kay and Down create the show, they wrote most of the episodes and played a heavy role in directing. The two men are mining their souls for this series and it shows.

One could argue that the relentless backstabbing in Industry is sometimes just as one-note as the monotony of Pluribus. But at least it’s trying—to make its characters feel alive, to make its viewers care. I loathe Harper Stern and I also somehow want her to run all banks everywhere. Am I rooting for Carol Sturka? I have no idea, because I don’t actually know her. (Speaking of, why is she a romantasy writer?? Maris Kreizman very generously tried to make sense of this and there’s certainly a lot the screenwriters could do with that, but other than a few minutes of scribbling end-of-world storylines on a whiteboard, it’s almost entirely peripheral).

Pluribus prompts a lot of fascinating philosophical questions, and I’ll keep watching to see if they lead anywhere interesting in the actual storyline. Unfortunately, so far the answer is no. The culminating realization of the series, that we may have to destroy the world as we know it in order to save it, is not exactly revelatory in the genre. I’m waiting for it to go deeper, to actually get personal.

Industry is not perfect. A handful of plot-lines don’t land, some scenes are excessive. But it’s a hell of an interesting ride. The dialogue, by and large, is great. And, most importantly, it is trying. It is not produced to entertain itself, to mock from a distance, but to cut people open and look at all their gnarly parts—head on, uncomfortably close. Pluribus is clever, it asks big questions. But it’s afraid to step into them. At best it elicits a cocked head and a half laugh. It’s standing on the sidelines of itself, patting itself on the back. Industry is brutal and unapologetically messy. It leaves you wincing in discomfort, mouth hanging agape.

A recent essay on here made me realize what I think the ultimate difference between these two shows—why one hits at my core and the other feels like a waste of time beyond reading the undeniably catchy plot summary. Increasingly, we are funding people who have already become famous in some way, who think of a TV show as a side project, or at least not the thing that will make-or-break them, because they’ve already made it into the proverbial room.

I can’t help but think this is the case of Vince Gilligan. He had a real stake in the game when he created Breaking Bad, and he birthed something visceral and unique with Walter White. I’ll leave my personal opinion aside here, but a generation of men connected with White’s journey of the overlooked everyman morphing into the all-powerful super villain. They were invested, not just in the concept but the character.

What we see with Industry, and what we need more of—what prestige television once relied on—are people whose soul rests on the creation of their art. Who are obsessively trying to capture something very personal and very real and do it just right. People who don’t care about having the coolest logline, but are simply determined to capture a certain sliver of life.

My hope, especially as we enter the AI era where any dude with deep pockets can feed a clever idea into machine and get a script vomited out, is that we channel money towards people whose souls depend on their art. Whose material is coming from their life blood, who are invested in the premise not because it’s cool but because it’s everything to them. Let’s get obsessed, let’s get personal, let’s not mock the world around us, laugh along ironically at the end of it all, but cut ourselves open and pour our fucking hearts out.

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My Favorite Shows of 2025

So many shows last year were entertaining. Producers have found a real precise recipe for a profitable streaming series—sociological thrillers with “complex” female leads—and they’re churning them out en masse. To be clear, I watch them all! Think: The Beast In Me, The Girlfriend, All Her Fault, Sirens, the list goes on. They were a blast. But they were mostly shadows of the same mold. Like store-bought chocolate chip cookie dough. Yes, please! Won’t say no to a reliably yummy cookie. But it’s not homemade.

Here are my favorite shows of 2025 in no particular order, unique creations that tumbled me over:

• The Pitt (HBO)

• The Rehearsal (HBO)

• Adolescence (Netflix)

• Dying for Sex (Hulu)