The creator of Breaking Bad is creating another masterpiece

There are very few TV shows better than Breaking Bad.

No. Let me rephrase that. There’s NO TV show better than Breaking Bad.

I know that’s a bold claim in an era drowning in prestige television, but I stand by it. Breaking Bad is a masterclass in storytelling, character development, and moral complexity. Every episode feels like a chess move in a game you didn’t know you were playing.

The way Vince Gilligan transforms Walter White from a sympathetic high school chemistry teacher into something unrecognizable, all while keeping you invested in his journey, is nothing short of genius.

The cinematography, the symbolism, the pacing—it’s all so meticulously crafted that rewatches reveal layers you missed the first time.

I finished it a couple of months ago and I’ve been reluctant to watch anything else outside the Breaking Bad universe since. The bar was set so impossibly high that everything else just feels... lesser.

This is the same feeling I had when I finished Attack on Titan. Every other anime I watched afterwards felt below average, no matter how objectively good they were. AOT had set the bar too high. It had shown me what peak storytelling looks like, and now my standards were ruined. Everything else was just treading water.

And then, as if creating the greatest TV show of all time wasn’t enough, Vince Gilligan said “Let’s do it again” and gave us Better Call Saul… a prequel that somehow matches, and in some ways surpasses, the original.

I’m currently in season 5 (no spoilers, please) and it’s already peak cinema. The transformation of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman is every bit as compelling as Walter White’s descent, just in a completely different register—slower, sadder, more inevitable.

Now, with Pluribus, Gilligan might have just said “Let’s do it again” again.

The show stars Rhea Seehorn, who was phenomenal as Kim Wexler in Better Call Saul, and just three episodes in, I’m already hooked.

Rhea Seehorn as Carol Sturka in Pluribus

In Pluribus, she plays Carol Sturka, a curmudgeonly romance novelist who becomes, ironically, “the most miserable person on Earth” tasked with saving the world from happiness itself.

Yes, you read that right. From happiness.

Take a moment with that. What if happiness—real, genuine, collective happiness—was the enemy? What if happiness required giving up everything that makes you you? What if the price of collective joy was individual extinction?

This is a question that cuts to the heart of what it means to be human in an age where we’re constantly being sold solutions to our suffering, where optimization and happiness have become moral imperatives, where the promise of connection often means surrendering autonomy.

Pluribus doesn’t just ask this question. It forces you to sit with it, to feel the weight of it, and to realize that the answer isn’t as obvious as you’d like it to be.

Is happiness a paradox?

What makes Pluribus genuinely disturbing is that the hive mind isn’t evil. It’s not the Borg. The people who join it seem genuinely better off. They’re free from anxiety, loneliness, the crushing weight of being a separate consciousness trapped in your own skull. They’re happy. Provably, measurably happy. And they want you to join them because they love you.

That’s the knife twist. We spend our entire lives being told that happiness is the goal. Fix your trauma. Optimize your habits. The entire self-help industrial complex is built on the premise that suffering is a bug to be fixed. And now here comes a show asking: what if they’re right? What if there’s a patch available?

Would you install it?

Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning:

“What is to give light must endure burning”

He wasn’t saying suffering is good. He was saying meaning and suffering are so entangled that you can’t surgically remove one without losing the other. The thing which makes life worth living is significance, not happiness. And significance requires stakes.

But who am I to tell someone drowning in depression that their suffering is meaningful? Who am I to say the person with chronic pain should keep enduring because it builds character? I’m in no position to do that.

And yet something in me recoils at the idea of the hive. Something insists there’s a difference between healing and erasure.

Anything that can’t be lost can’t truly be had. The hive mind offers connection without vulnerability. Joy without the possibility of grief. And in doing so, it offers something that isn’t actually any of those things.

But maybe that’s just me romanticizing suffering because I’m not in enough pain to take the exit. It’s easy to wax poetic about the beauty of struggle when you’re not the one struggling. There’s something almost obscene about celebrating pain from a position of relative comfort.

So I’m genuinely torn. This is the tension Pluribus refuses to resolve, and I respect the hell out of it for that.

We live in an age that has declared war on negative emotions. Anxiety is pathologized. Sadness is a malfunction. Even boredom—that generative state where new thoughts emerge—is something we immediately medicate with our phones. We’ve built a civilization optimized for comfort and called it progress.

I’m not advocating for a masochistic embrace of suffering. I’m asking:

Have we become so addicted to comfort that we’ve lost our capacity to be uncomfortable? And if we have, what have we lost in that trade?

What Carol Knows

There’s a moment in Pluribus where Carol is presented with the choice directly. Join the hive or stay alone. And what breaks my heart isn’t her decision. It’s her hesitation. She’s tempted. Of course she’s tempted. She’s a lonely, difficult woman who writes romance novels because she’s never quite figured out how to have romance in real life. The hive is offering her everything she’s been missing.

And still, something in her resists.

Maybe that resistance is the most human thing we’re capable of. Not happiness. Not transcendence. But the ability to choose difficulty. To look at the easy path and say “No, I think I’ll take the hard one.” Free will includes the freedom to make terrible choices. To be wrong. To suffer unnecessarily.

The hive mind can only feel love because it can feel nothing else. But is love that can’t be withdrawn still love? Is joy that can’t be lost still joy? Or are these things only meaningful because their opposites exist?

In a nutshell

I think about Breaking Bad’s brutal honesty about consequences. About Better Call Saul’s examination of how we become who we become—one compromise at a time, one small surrender after another.

What draws me to these stories is that they don’t offer answers. They show us people making impossible choices and living with the aftermath. They remind us that being human means being uncertain, conflicted, capable of both wisdom and stupidity in the same breath.

Pluribus might be Gilligan doing it again—creating something that doesn’t just entertain but unsettles. Something that trusts you to wrestle with questions that don’t have solutions. Three episodes in, and I’m already thinking about it when I’m not watching it. That’s the mark of something real.

Maybe the point isn’t to answer the question. Maybe the point is to be the kind of person who still asks it, who resists the easy comfort of certainty, who insists on remaining complicated even when simplicity beckons. Maybe that’s what Carol represents—not the right answer, but the courage to keep questioning when everyone else has stopped.

And maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s everything.

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