Pluribus creator Vince Gilligan: 'I want to prove I'm not a one-trick pony after Breaking Bad'

You'd be forgiven for thinking TV titan Vince Gilligan, creator of two of the best series of the 21st century, has nothing left to prove. But you'd also be wrong.

Before creating the global phenomena that were Breaking Bad (which ran from 2008 to 2013) and spin-off Better Call Saul (2015 to 2022), Gilligan wrote for and produced on another smash hit – The X-Files.

Now, he's returning to his sci-fi roots with a gripping mystery on Apple TV, and audiences are desperate to see what he's been cooking up.

"I'm very much feeling the pressure," Gilligan admits during an exclusive chat with RadioTimes.com ahead of the premiere of the highly-anticipated series, titled Pluribus.

"It would have been safer doing something else in the Breaking Bad universe. And I was tempted, because I love that world so much. I loved writing for Walter White [Bryan Cranston].

“I loved getting to write for Bob Odenkirk and Saul Goodman, Jimmy McGill. I love all those actors, I love those characters, I love all the people we were working with.

"But I just wanted to prove to myself that I wasn't necessarily a one-trick pony, and I wanted to write a good guy after about 20 years. I used to write for The X Files, which was a wonderful job, and for seven wonderful years on that show, I wrote for two heroes. I wrote for Mulder [David Duchovny] and Scully [Gillian Anderson], and I enjoyed every minute of that.”

He added: "But when it ended, I thought, 'Maybe we'll do an anti-hero or a villain,' because they're more fun sometimes. Sometimes they're a little easier to write because they don't have boundaries.

“But now, after almost 20 years of that, I'm thinking, 'How do I break free of things I've been doing?' And I figured it was time for a change."

And what a change it is. Even months before its release, Pluribus had already gripped audiences thanks to the mystery surrounding it. With Apple TV dropping a seven-second teaser here and there, no one really knows what it's about. We even have to be careful describing it.

It's [checks notes] a genre-bending nine-parter which sees the world change in a significant way, resulting in reluctant hero, jaded author Carol (played by Better Call Saul's Rhea Seehorn), having to effectively save the world from happiness.

Star Seehorn gave some insight into why the marketing has been so secretive, telling us of Gilligan: "All of his favourite experiences and memories of finding a show or a movie that he loved, were when he virtually knew nothing about it.

"And I do think that we have a unique thing on our side, that Vince has already built this following, and I hope we have new followers, especially him going back to his sci-fi roots, but you almost have a pre-knowledge going in that he's going to push genre.

"He's going to push tone-switching, take wild swings, and you have to sit forward and pay attention...just get in the car and go for the ride."

Pluribus has also been a long time in the works – about a decade, in fact. Gilligan came up with the idea while working on Better Call Saul and, while he originally envisioned the lead as male, meeting Seehorn quickly put that plan to bed, with the writer building the entire show around her.

"Rhea made me change my mind," he recalls. "I am pretty unimaginative, sometimes, certainly in terms of [how] I was going to write yet another male protagonist. When I started to come up with the inklings, the first threads of this story, I thought, 'Oh, it'll be another guy, because that's what I know. I'm a guy, so I'll write about guys.'

"About the same time, I was getting to know Rhea Seehorn, because she had only been on Better Call Saul for maybe a year or so. Maybe it was even before that. And I just thought, 'This actor is wonderful. She is so talented, and she is so sweet and kind.' The crew on Better Call Saul, a lot of whom are the same people on Pluribus, would crawl across broken glass for Rhea. They love her so much.

"She can make you cry. She can make you laugh. She can do it all. She has all the skills, and she's wonderful to work with. So I said to myself, 'This new show, let me make it about a woman instead of a guy. I've done enough of that, and I'm going to build it for Rhea.' Indeed, I created this show expressly for Rhea, because she's so much fun to work with, and she has not disappointed."

Understandably, Apple TV have shown a lot of trust in Gilligan, commissioning two seasons from the off and, by the sounds of it, securing a big old budget for the production.

"This show is markedly bigger, certainly in terms of scope and scale and budget, than the previous two shows were," he explains.

"And it was kind of daunting thinking, we got to go to Spain to shoot this thing, and we got to go to the Canary Islands, not to mention other cities in the United States. We got to go to Las Vegas, Nevada. We ranged around our home state of New Mexico, much farther and wider than we ever got to do on Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul. It was great to be able to do that."

That show of faith for a new and completely original series is rare. In recent years, there have been fewer and fewer success stories for TV and film built on original stories, with audiences instead being hit with a sea of prequels, sequels, and reboots. That's something that worries Gilligan.

"There is a lot of pressure in the business – not from the folks I work for, but in general. There's pressure, at least in the United States, to stick with the known, to stick with the familiar," he admits.

"We use that phrase IP here a lot – Intellectual Property, pre-existing stories, pre-existing movies, TV shows, even board games, video games.

"I do feel like there's a lot of pressure people feel that they have put upon them to reboot pre-existing things. That's all well and good, but it's a big world with a lot of different viewpoints and a lot of different audiences, and I think every new generation deserves their own mythology, deserves their own stories. That's what I want to see.

"I feel bad for young folks, watching the stories of their grandparents over and over again. I think they deserve their own new stories and, yes, the stories of their grandparents, by all means, keep them going too. Let's keep stories alive – that's part of what makes us human, is that we can share stories, we can share touchstones.

"But new generations need their own thing too. I think there's room. It's a big world. There's room for all of it."

Pluribus will begin streaming on Apple TV on 7th November.

Check out more of our Sci-Fi coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.