TV & Streaming

Vince Gilligan is likely best known at this point as the guy behind the “Breaking Bad” universe, including the lauded prequel “Better Call Saul” and spinoff movie “El Camino” — along with various Emmy Award-nominated and -winning web series.

But he wasn’t always the crime guy… Gilligan actually started his career as the sci-fi guy, particularly with his big break writing and directing for “The X-Files.” Now, after a 20-plus-year hiatus, Gilligan is back in the genre that made him with Apple TV’s “Pluribus,” which re-teams him with “Better Call Saul” star Rhea Seehorn, and has a neat, simple sci-fi premise that… Apple wants to keep secret until it premieres.

All Apple will say about the show, which debuts with two episodes on Friday, November 7 and has already been picked up for a second season, is that it is “a genre-bending original in which the most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness.”

That’s not very descriptive, but we can tell you that Seehorn stars as Carol Sturka, a romantasy writer who finds herself somehow immune to a viral plague that makes everyone else in the world happy and optimistic. It’s the sort of plot that certainly would be right at home in “The Twilight Zone,” an oft-mentioned inspiration for the series. But it also clearly has its roots in the sort of bizarre freak-of-the-week episodes that populated “X-Files,” between the heavier mythology hours.

For Gilligan, though, his love of sci-fi goes back even further than his stumble into TV writing on “X-Files” — which we’ll get back to in a moment.

“I just always loved it,” Gilligan told IndieWire on his enduring love for science fiction. “I always loved creating little worlds in my bedroom. I loved drawing robots and spaceships and then sculpting them out of model parts from various model kits. God, that was my favorite thing in the world to do, was just create spaceships and robots and stuff down in the basement of our house in Kimberly Hills, in Farmville, Virginia. That was the name of the subdivision, Kimberly Hills. I go back from time to time to time and just drive through the neighborhood and reminisce. That was about the happiest time of my life, actually.”

Born in 1967 in Richmond, Virginia, the precocious George Vincent Gilligan Jr. was reading and writing at an early age, leading to the gift of a Super 8 camera and early experiments in film. One of the earliest? “Space Wreck,” a feature Gilligan made starring his brother, Patrick.

“‘Space Wreck’ is a little film I made in 1979 with my brother Patrick, [who] starred in it,” Gilligan said. “He was an astronaut who lands on an asteroid, and he’s investigating the wreck of a spaceship, and then this weird space mold gets on the bottom of his spaceship. I should reboot that. Maybe that’ll be my next project. Do a big-budget Apple TV version of ‘Space Wreck.’ That’d be fun.”

While it wasn’t a non-stop ride to Hollywood from age 12, Gilligan didn’t have to wait too long to make it. Right after graduating from NYU, he won the Virginia Governor’s Screenwriting Competition for “Home Fries,” which he wrote in film school and would later be adapted into a 1989 feature with Luke Wilson and Drew Barrymore. That movie was straight romantic drama, but around the same time, Gilligan sold his script for “Wilder Napalm,” about two brothers with pyrokinesis (the ability to create fires with their minds). That was released in 1993, starring Debra Winger and Dennis Quaid.

But it wasn’t until a year later when Gilligan “fell ass-backward” into a job at “The X-Files” that he came into his own.

“I didn’t even intend to get that job,” Gilligan said. “I was a fan of ‘The X-Files.’ I was a huge fan of it. But I wasn’t trying to get a job on that show… I was out in California on movie business. I was pitching movies, and I happened to get a meeting with Chris Carter. ‘The X-Files’ had been on for about a season, at that point. 1994, I met him for the first time, and I said, ‘I just want to shake your hand. I love your work, and I love “The X-Files.”’ I didn’t realize they were desperate for episodes, for scripts. He said, ‘Do you have anything to pitch?’ One thing led to another. I wound up being on the show for seven wonderful years.”

With a laugh, Gilligan noted that when he tells this story, people “get mad, and I don’t blame them. I’m like Kramer of television… The nonfiction version. I keep falling ass backward [into] good luck.”

After writing the episode “Soft Light” in the second season of the Fox series, Gilligan went on to write, produce, direct, and even help craft the short-lived spinoff “The Lone Gunman,” making himself an essential part of the storied series. And he stayed with science fiction for years after, co-writing the Will Smith dark superhero movie “Hancock,” writing on a “Night Stalker” reboot for “X-Files” alum Frank Spotnitz, and working with Spotnitz on a pilot titled “A.M.P.E.D.” about, curiously, the mirror-image of “Pluribus.”

While the series was never picked up, it involved “a group of police detectives and officers as they deal with a small but growing percentage of the population that is falling prey to strange genetic mutations, causing them to do destructive things to the city and those around them.”

So how did Gilligan, who spent most of his life up to that point on science fiction, end up in the “Breaking Bad” universe?

“I go where the stories and the characters take me,” Gilligan said. “That sounds maybe kind of highfalutin, but it’s the cleanest answer I have for it. I was intrigued… If you told me 25 years ago I’d be most known for writing a crime show about a drug kingpin, I would have said, ‘You’re crazy. I’m going to be either a comedy guy or a sci-fi guy.’ But I was fascinated by this character who became Walter White. I was fascinated by the idea of a straight arrow guy who wouldn’t even rip the tags off his mattress, who would never break the law, suddenly doing about the most reprehensible thing he could do in order to make money. So then I asked myself, ‘Why would he need to do that?’ Well, he’s dying, dying of cancer. He’s got to leave money to his family.”

That germ of a character led to one of the most critically acclaimed franchises in TV history, and certainly a feather in the cap of the channel AMC. It also led to Gilligan and his company of directors, writers, and technicians creating a style of storytelling that is unique to Gilligan’s work — and carries through to “Pluribus” as well.

Unlike the propulsive pace of a network procedural, even one with off-kilter aspects such as a Cigarette Smoking Man and alien conspiracies like “The X-Files,” Gilligan’s work on AMC has been measured and careful, often painfully so. While “Breaking Bad” started with a procedural, science experiment of the week focus, it quickly switched to the long, slow shots of Albuquerque and steady, tense scenes followed by spurts of violence that “Breaking Bad” became known for.

That feeling expanded considerably with “Better Call Saul,” which lengthened those stretches, leading to multiple black and white montages of the main character making cinnamon buns. And yet, those sequences remain high-water marks in the history of the medium because they have intention behind them. They’re not there merely to kill time between commercials, or move from plot point to plot point. The unwavering focus reveals more about the characters, the settings, the overall arc of the season by — get this — showing, instead of telling.

“The more of these episodes we direct, the more confidence we get from the wonderful reactions we get from fans,” Gilligan explained of his signature style. “One of the best gifts the fans have given us is patience. We live in a world where everybody says, ‘Oh, nobody has an any attention spans anymore. Everybody’s into TikTok. Everybody’s into six-second, 10-second videos. Nobody now wants to watch anything longer.’ ‘Man, you’re crazy to not make your show hyper-caffeinated.’ ‘You gotta keep turning over cards.’ … Whatever the metaphor, you gotta keep them watching. They’re gonna turn the channel, man, they’re gonna turn the channel. And it’s really true for some viewers, but they’re not ‘Breaking Bad’ or ‘Better Call Saul’ or ‘Pluribus’ viewers.”

As Gilligan noted, that aesthetic has continued with “Pluribus,” and Apple has laudably been leaning into it. In lieu of revealing the actual premise of the show, instead they’ve released footage showing everything from a woman licking donuts, to a hilariously careful drone picking up trash scene which Gilligan revealed cost $15,000 per drone, and — mild spoilers here — ends with the drone wrapped around a lamppost. “A nail-biting day on the set by all accounts,” Gilligan said. “Every time you wrap that damn thing around, you’ve just spent another 15 grand on a drone.”

While the pace of a Gilligan show may not be for everyone, it doesn’t phase the creator — and clearly, he’s dove into it more and more as he’s continued in the industry. “The sad thing about TV over the last 30 years is that every show, even the hit shows, now have so many fewer viewers,” Gilligan said. “Back in the day, you could have the final episode of ‘M.A.S.H.,’ have nearly 100 million people watching it, that’s never going to come back, that’s gone forever. The good news is that you can keep a show on the air with fewer viewers than you could have in the past, and that’s a wonderful, freeing thing. When I finally got my brain around that, it made me very happy… The final episode of ‘Breaking Bad’ only had like 11 million viewers, and back in the day on ‘X-Files,’ we would have been canceled for 11 million viewers. But then you say to yourself, ‘Yeah, but man, [which] viewers?’”

Those “really smart fans,” as Gilligan calls them, are clearly what has not only kept him going in the industry, but also shown that he and his team are taking the right approach. “They give us the gift of time,” Gilligan said. “They will stick with us so that we can slow down the editing, slow down the pacing… Not just to be slow, but because it’s great to be able to take your time with everything, with a meal, with a good book, sitting by the fire. There’s so many things in life that benefit from taking your time and enjoying them and savoring them. And our fans allow us, the directors and the writers and the actors, to do that with our show, and it makes all the difference. The more things we do, the more confident we get that we don’t have to speed things along unnecessarily or artificially.”

So how does that all lead to “Pluribus”? As Gilligan explained, it was less about getting back to science fiction than the same sort of process that led him to “Breaking Bad”: he couldn’t get the idea out of his head. Noting that instinct has “held me in good stead all these years,” Gilligan feels that if you call yourself “the sci-fi guy, or you’re the comedy guy, you’re potentially robbing yourself of a lot of opportunities.”

The guy he was tired of, though, was “bad guys.” While working on “Better Call Saul,” Gilligan started to mull on the idea of a world where everyone was nice. “I wanted to write a good guy, and Carol Sturka fits the bill,” Gilligan said. “She’s a flawed good guy, but she endeavors to save the world. Nonetheless, she endeavors to be a hero. And that is refreshing. That is more refreshing to me than rejoining the sci-fi world… The world needs more good guys. Our world, our real-life world, needs more good guys. So I want to spend some more time writing good guys before I’m done.”

Calling it “harder” to write good guys because “they’re not necessarily as much fun,” Gilligan did note that you need to find flaws in them — and don’t worry, Carol has plenty. She’s also, in a flip for Gilligan after working on Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk), among others, for the past two decades, a female protagonist. “I’m intrigued by her, and lo and behold, her story lends itself to science fiction” Gilligan said. “So that’s where I go next. But there’s never any advanced thought to, there’s never an overarching goal of, OK, it’s time for science fiction again. I gotta do some sci-fi again. Nothing like that. It’s never that calculated. It’s never calculated at all. I just go where my passions take me, for lack of a better word.”

Even with the protestations, from a viewer’s perspective, it’s hard not to think that Gilligan is, in a certain way, coming home with “Pluribus” — or at least to his new home base in Albuquerque, where the “Breaking Bad” shows were filmed, and now the Apple TV show as well.

And Gilligan does admit that “Pluribus” wouldn’t have been possible without what came before… In fact, post-”X-Files,” he wouldn’t have been able to write the new show at all; it was what came in between that brought it all together.

“I don’t think I could have written ‘Pluribus’ 20 years ago,” Gilligan said, adding humbly that it’s a group effort of the writer, directors, and actors he’s gathered around him for the past two decades. “Twenty years ago, I would have over-explained everything. I would have not trusted the audience as much. That’s one of the best things that’s come with age and experience… I’ve never been a confident person, particularly, but I have more confidence. I do have more confidence in myself and my writing, but more than anything, I have more confidence in the audience. I don’t ever go wrong assuming they’re smarter than I am, and I realize what that means in practice is… We, the writers don’t have to explain everything to them.”

Adding that on the new series, they use “all the tools in the toolbox,” Gilligan concluded that, “I guess they’re all culminations of who we were leading up to that point. I couldn’t have done ‘Breaking Bad’ without seven years on ‘The X-Files’… Peter Gould and I couldn’t have done ‘Better Call Saul’ without ‘Breaking Bad.’ And then ‘Pluribus,’ I couldn’t have done it without all those other shows under my belt.”

“Pluribus” debuts on Apple TV on Friday, November 7, with new episodes dropping weekly through December 26 after that.