What’s All the Fuss About Pluribus?
So I’ve been watching Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus on Apple TV and this review from Inkoo Kang resonated with me (emphasis mine):
Millions of offscreen casualties aside, it’s clear that Gilligan is aiming for a lighter — and stranger — outing than his two previous series. (For all that “Pluribus” delights in eerie atmospherics, the Southwestern sunniness keeps things from getting too dark.) The uncanny scenarios he conjures are a source of humor, intrigue, and genuine unease. But the show never adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Carol makes for a maddeningly tunnel-visioned protagonist — one with a shocking lack of curiosity about the entity that’s overtaken the Earth, or even about what the infected do all day when they’re not offering to cater to her whims. Her one-note sullenness means that Seehorn, who was heartbreaking as the repressed Kim on “Saul,” is squandered as the lead of her own show. The contentment and coöperativeness of the hive mind are similarly tough to dramatize.
It was somewhere around the middle of episode two when I started asking myself if I was supposed to care about Carol and what was going to happen to her, which is never a good sign. I like plenty of shows with unlikable protagonists (like Succession & Seinfeld) but I often can’t get past stubborn & incurious ones — it just seems fake to me and breaks my willing suspension of disbelief.
The show has a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Pluribus fans, what am I missing here? The premise is good and I want to like it. Presumably many of the critics have seen the whole season and so maybe it picks up as it goes on?
So I’ve been watching Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus on Apple TV and this review from Inkoo Kang resonated with me (emphasis mine):
Millions of offscreen casualties aside, it’s clear that Gilligan is aiming for a lighter — and stranger — outing than his two previous series. (For all that “Pluribus” delights in eerie atmospherics, the Southwestern sunniness keeps things from getting too dark.) The uncanny scenarios he conjures are a source of humor, intrigue, and genuine unease. But the show never adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Carol makes for a maddeningly tunnel-visioned protagonist — one with a shocking lack of curiosity about the entity that’s overtaken the Earth, or even about what the infected do all day when they’re not offering to cater to her whims. Her one-note sullenness means that Seehorn, who was heartbreaking as the repressed Kim on “Saul,” is squandered as the lead of her own show. The contentment and coöperativeness of the hive mind are similarly tough to dramatize.
It was somewhere around the middle of episode two when I started asking myself if I was supposed to care about Carol and what was going to happen to her, which is never a good sign. I like plenty of shows with unlikable protagonists (like Succession & Seinfeld) but I often can’t get past stubborn & incurious ones — it just seems fake to me and breaks my willing suspension of disbelief.
The show has a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Pluribus fans, what am I missing here? The premise is good and I want to like it. Presumably many of the critics have seen the whole season and so maybe it picks up as it goes on?
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