Pluribus, the latest “prestige” offering on Apple TV, is a bad show. I know that I am in the minority on this, but that’s alright. A show can be bad while also being popular with audiences and critics, as can books, movies, and any other bit of entertainment, and I am not one to begrudge people their pleasures. It is not a failing to enjoy something that isn’t good (everyone does), and no productive purpose is served in trying to convince someone to stop liking something. I don’t chase people around trying to get them to refrain from patronizing Applebee’s or Olive Garden, despite their being bad restaurants that serve bad food, and I’m not suggesting that anyone who enjoys Pluribus should cease doing so, which in any case would be futile.
So, Pluribus is a critically acclaimed, widely-admired show that is nonetheless bad. (Just how widely admired is unclear, as actual viewer numbers — as opposed to the entirely useless metric of “number of minutes watched” — are not made available to the public by streaming companies.) But, beyond my criticisms of Pluribus — and I have many — I’m also interested in the way in which it illustrates much of what is wrong with contemporary, prestige television. And as I think this variety of popular entertainment will ultimately prove unsustainable, it seems worth delving more deeply into its faults in anticipation of the post-mortems of the genre that are to come.
What do I mean by “prestige television”? This is one of those terms that can’t be given a formal definition, and I’m not even talking about all of the shows that commonly bear the moniker. Rather, I am focused on programs with the following qualities: high-minded and/or far-out ideas; viral social media hype; high production values; micro-seasons of 8-13 episodes; hyper-serialization that incentivizes binge-watching; and long stretches between seasons that may be several years in length. (The space between seasons four and five of Stranger Things was a whopping three and a half years). Pluribus, Severance, Maniac, Silo…, these are the kinds of shows I’m talking about, and if what I’ve described sounds to you like a manipulative product designed to be as addictive as possible and string users along in perpetuity, you wouldn’t be wrong.
At its heart, Pluribus has an intriguing premise: The earth is infected with an alien virus that connects all of humanity together in a collective consciousness. (The expression “hive mind” is ubiquitous throughout the public conversation about the show but is inapt, since insect hives have a Queen and are not decentralized but hierarchical. Star Trek made the mistake of adopting this model for the Borg in First Contact and Voyager and thereby ruined what had been a unique adversary, precisely because of its decentralized nature.) Thirteen people, spread around the globe, remain unaffected, but there is the potential for them to be “joined” later. The show’s protagonist is one of these unjoined people, Carol Sturka, a successful writer of hybrid romance-fantasy novels, and the first season focuses on her reaction to the joining and her interactions with the joined and unjoined.
Characterization is a mess throughout. At first, Carol and her reactions are depicted realistically, and given the way the science fiction premise of the show is conceived and presented, one might get the impression that the aim is to give a somewhat grounded treatment of the joining and its individual and societal effects. But, this is quickly subverted when we are introduced to the others who have not been joined. To a person, their reactions are unrealistic, bordering on the cartoonish. They range from being calm and unconcerned — some maintaining, beyond any reasonable credulity, that their joined loved ones remain the same people that they were before the joining — to positively gleeful, as in the case of a man who revels in his ability to live a hedonistic lifestyle, beyond the dreams of avarice, due to the passivity and compliant nature of the joined. In one particularly lampoonable sequence, this gentleman is depicted as having taken over Elvis Presley’s suite in Las Vegas, where he has an entire coterie of joined people playacting at a James Bond-inspired gambling scenario and a harem of joined women who are there to engage in group sex with him. (Clearly, the poor man has never seen “A Nice Place to Visit” from the original Twilight Zone.)
We also are introduced to an unjoined man in Paraguay whose reactions are of the opposite extreme and equally absurd. Unlike the other unjoined (as well as the audience), to whom it has become clear that the joined are unthreatening and pleasant to a fault, this person has locked himself in a storage-unit office, where he is consuming sugar packets and dog food, because he doesn’t dare risk interacting with the joined, who bring him fresh food every day and leave it at the gate outside. This might just barely have worked, because there are unreasonable and paranoid people in the world, but it too is subverted, because the show writers couldn’t resist adding dramatic moments during which he exits the office to go out to the gate and dump the proffered food on the ground. If he is so worried that the joined are going to assault, capture or otherwise molest him that he is driven to locking himself in a room for days, peering through a peephole, and eating dog food, the last thing he would do is leave his fortified enclosure for nothing but a pointless, wholly performative gesture.
Later, when he almost dies during a trek from Paraguay to the United States that long outstays its welcome (more on this later), the joined appear in the nick of time and bring him to a hospital, where they save him from certain death. This would demonstrate to even the dullest or most deranged person that the joined pose no imminent threat, but immediately after regaining consciousness, this ridiculous man holds one of them at knifepoint and escapes in a stolen ambulance, despite the fact that the gaping, infected wounds on his back are still dripping blood and pus. Never mind that earlier in this turgid sequence of events, he is presented as so reflexively honest that he leaves money under the windshield wipers on the joined’s cars from which he has siphoned gas, despite the fact that it should be obvious to him that they have no use for currency. When the story requires him to be Rigid and Righteous, he is, and when it requires him to forget about it, he does. Carol even points this out to him when they finally meet at the end of the season, but if the Ridiculous Man From Paraguay is supposed to be some sort of crass hypocrite, he certainly hasn’t been characterized that way over the time we’ve spent with him.
Even the realism with which Carol is initially treated is undermined, subtly at first and later, in spectacular fashion. Despite being a successful author — and portrayed as highly intelligent, well-educated, and conversationally adept — she suddenly is catastrophically inarticulate when tasked with explaining to the other unjoined why the entire world’s population being forcibly merged into a collective consciousness (which we are told was accomplished at the cost of nearly a billion deaths) is a Bad Thing. Of course, this is necessary in order for the plot to happen, as the conflict between Carol and the unjoined is one of the central threads of the season and having them all get on the same page and start some sort of resistance right from the outset would spoil things. Later, building up to the first meeting between Carol and the Ridiculous Man from Paraguay, the plot requires Carol to undergo a change of heart regarding the joined in order to establish tension between the two of them. So, from one episode to the next, all of her hardnosed skepticism and bitter resistance that has been established over the entire course of the show thus far (and which was further reinforced by the discovery just an episode earlier that the joined are eating human corpses) are abruptly jettisoned, and she “falls in love” with one of the joined, setting her in opposition to the aims of the Ridiculous Man from Paraguay, who is determined either to change the joined back into individuals or else eradicate them entirely. Only thus could he utter the line that is meant to be the thematic slogan for the season (and which is the title of the last episode), “Save the world or get the girl?” which is a bit too reminiscent of the slogan that was the theme of the first season of Heroes (“Save the cheerleader, save the world“), which was far better television than Pluribus. Alas, Heroes went completely off the rails thereafter.
One of the few criticisms I’ve seen of Pluribus is for its somewhat glacial pacing, and itching to fast-forward through a season that is only nine episodes long is certainly a strange sensation. But, this paradoxical quality is actually something that plagues many of the prestige shows of the kind I’m discussing here. That they consist of micro-seasons means that one has spent so little time with the characters that radical changes in personality or behavior are jarring and come across as a function of either incompetence or contrivance, a problem that need not arise in cinema, where character development and pacing are handled entirely differently than in television. With regard to characterization, then, these shows feel rushed, something that is made worse by the fact that one is incentivized to binge them in a single session or two, which only magnifies the herky-jerky quality of the experience. But, because the high-minded and far-out ideas have to be drawn out over multiple seasons so as not to give away things too quickly, nothing much of interest happens for a good portion of each episode, which makes the shows feel plodding and slow despite being so short. Pluribus has this problem in spades, with the aforementioned interminable slog of the Ridiculous Man from Paraguay to the United States only being the worst example among many.
With regard to the high-minded and far-out ideas, the premise is always better than the product in this brand of television. Sometimes, as in the case of The Man in the High Castle or Foundation, it’s because the show is based on an already existing masterpiece with which it takes too many liberties and is a matter of simple hubris. How else to characterize TV writers who think they are going to do better than Philip K. Dick or Isaac Asimov, two of the greatest writers in the history of science fiction? (A film like Blade Runner is an entirely different matter, as it extracts just a single thread from Dick’s, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and creates something new out of it.) As for Silo, which is based on existing books that while serviceable are not great masterpieces, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
In the case of shows like Pluribus or Severance, there is a different problem, and it is one not just of prestige television taken in itself, but of its relationship to the social-media ecosystem. One starts with an absorbing, even brilliant premise, from which any number of interesting threads could be developed: In the case of Severance, it’s the idea of literally splitting one’s work-self from one’s personal-life self, so that there are two people inhabiting a single body, while in Pluribus, it’s the prospect of a handful of individuals suddenly confronted with a world in which everyone else is part of a collective. The first provides an opportunity to explore deep questions having to do with personal identity and the relationship between who one is and what one does and the myriad tensions between work and home, what a “solution” to those tensions might involve when stretched to the boundaries of imagination, and the ways in which it might be gamed or exploited, given the conflicting interests of employers and employees. The second raises perennial questions regarding the relative values of happiness and autonomy — pursued in great works of philosophy and literature, like Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Mill’s Utilitarianism, and Huxley’s Brave New World — and of individualist and collectivist political ideologies as explored in films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing, which are redolent of Cold War anxieties. Pluribus could even develop into a cautionary allegory for so-called “Artificial Intelligence,” which operates by aggregating human endeavors and achievements on a massive scale, raising the fear that it will continue doing so in the relentless pursuit of “progress,” until nothing individual or unique or substantive is left.
That these scenarios are so chock full of potential lines of development that are deep and profound is what makes them exciting and is responsible for these shows’ initial hype. But when it comes to actually realizing them, the troubles start. Unless one is producing a finite miniseries — which really is what all of these shows should be — whatever course of development one chooses for the high-minded or far-out idea must not only be dribbled out over years, perhaps even an entire decade, but has to be presented in as obscure and open-ended a manner as possible so as to feed the cottage industry of online commentators and theorists who are crucial to sustaining interest in the show during the vast periods of time between seasons. So-called “Easter Eggs” used to be cute little inserts into shows, movies, and video games, which offered an inside joke or a wink-wink reference to those with the patience to find them, but in this style of television, they are as numerous as shrubs in a suburban backyard and absolutely necessary to supply material for the gaggle of TV sleuths and their audiences who are inclined to analyze every element of every show for years on end. (In one unintentionally hilarious review of Pluribus that I watched recently, the reviewer maintains that the show’s soporific pacing is actually a virtue, because it gives the audience time to notice all of the Easter Eggs stuffed into every episode, and I might have thought this a parody had he not presented it with such gravity.) Otherwise, if your audience has only spent a measly eight or nine episodes with the characters, getting up to whatever opaque goings-on they’ve been getting up to, take two or three years off from them and no one will remember who they are or what’s going on or care for that matter.
It’s the rare program involving deep and complex ideas that is fully conceived and written before a single frame is shot and which thereby maintains continuity and consistency throughout its run — J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5 is the only one I can think of — and most of the time, production begins with just the basic concept in place and a vague notion of where things will go. In the case of the sort of television that I’m talking about here, when this fact intersects with the unfortunate structural and environmental elements we’ve been discussing, the result is a kind of ideas-and-details creep that renders an inchoate tangle out of what began as a clear-eyed and intriguing concept. The temptation to keep feeding the theorycrafting mill is too great, the lure of even more seasons with even bigger financial rewards too enticing to restrain oneself and maintain a tight and consistent narrative, which is crucial to a show’s potency. Severance fell into this trap, as its fascinating premise lurched from one strange conceit to another in the second season and diminished any interest I might have had in the third. Stranger Things retconned virtually everything it had done in its first three seasons, introducing an entirely new element in the form of “Vecna” that made nonsense of the fourth and which made me not even bother with the fifth, and Pluribus looks like it may very well follow a similar trajectory. There are too many things in the first season that already don’t make much sense, and I fear that an escalating bevy of exotica will be introduced to develop them. The incoherence of the joined’s desire to assimilate everyone is inadvertently made explicit, when Carol’s joined love-interest says that the collective can’t wait for her to write another chapter of her book, because it is the only novel thing in the world for them to look forward to, and it’s hard to imagine how a race of creatures so completely bereft of originality and creativity and so weirdly pacifistic that it will not even consume plants, could have made it even ten inches up the evolutionary ladder, let alone to the point of developing an advanced civilization with an interstellar reach capable of “seeding” distant planets. Combine this with the show’s numerous literary failings — the fact that it can’t decide whether it is a grounded dystopia or a hyper-stylized satire; its contrived and sometimes outright laughable characterization; and its godawful pacing — and I have serious reservations about what is to come.
A friend of mine for whom I have great respect and who is a fan of Pluribus told me that the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, is “the best writer working in the medium today” and that he is inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt and presume that the show will turn out to have been worth it by the end. But, while Gilligan certainly is good at his craft, as is evident from his ample resume (which includes the X-Files and Breaking Bad), artists orders of magnitude better than him, including the world’s greatest novelists and playwrights, have produced their share of duds. Sure, Gilligan might pull a proverbial rabbit out of the hat and make something worthwhile out of the convoluted mess that is Pluribus‘ first season, but so might Gravity’s Rainbow or Finnegan’s Wake, which don’t require a seven-, eight-, or ten-year investment, and neither of which I plan on reading. I’m giving the rest of Pluribus a pass, and as for “prestige” television generally, whatever its future, I’ll take it on a case-by-case basis.
