It’s over. And now we gotta wait two years to get more.

First came the great buildup. The guy who did ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘Better Call Saul’ is harkening back to his ‘X-Files’ sci-fi roots to bring us ‘Plur1bus’. Something mysterious, set in the land of enchantment, it should give us plenty to talk about. Now the reviews and reactions are coming in. It’s somewhere between the greatest show now on TV or a great disappointment because nothing much happened. 

The word “pluribus” means “from many,” and the phrase “e pluribus unum” translates to “out of many, one.” If you look at the hive mind of the internet for reviews and reactions, you’ll find that Plur1bus can be everything for everyone. It’s like a zombie apocalypse show, or an alien invasion movie, or a viral contagion drama, and then again it’s not really any of those. It’s got a Soylent Green moment, but it’s no big deal. It’s about how a writer who is the most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness. It’s a commentary on the state of the society and how internet or AI psychosis is isolating us from one another. It’s a work by a genius — just let him work his magic. Or it’s a work by a former genius who cashed in big with Apple TV, and you can’t really blame him. Or perhaps it’s like being shipwrecked on a desert isle with a fellow named Gilligan. Whatever it is, it’s classic television.

There’s an old saying that ‘content is king’. Bill Gates stole the idea and applied it to the internet, but it actually goes back to television programming talk in the 1970s. Back then, there were 26 episodes a ‘season’ for a network television show — enough to cover every week of the year if you repeated each one once. Now that’s dropped to 22 for network TV, but cable and streaming shows do far fewer. It was 16 for a while, enough to repeat it three times a year, but now the number of episodes is plummeting. Many streamers are now down to 10 or even 8, often with a two-year hiatus between seasons — which means Plur1bus either shorted us one episode or gave us a bonus episode. So maybe content isn’t king anymore.

Or maybe it’s a different kind of content that’s important. There’s hundreds if not thousands of hours of Plur1bus content on YouTube: podcasts, breakdowns, endings explained. There’s also countless blog posts on the internet (including this one). If you add up the running times of the Official Pluribus Podcast and the ‘bonus content’ on the Apple TV+ app, it’s greater than the total running time of the entire first season. 

Is this the future of television?  The shows move forward at an excruciatingly slow pace, then we wait two years to get more, meanwhile careers are built on less creative content than ever before. TV shows now seem to be more of an invite to an engage in a conversation than a creative endeavor to entertain us. Is this okay?

What is Plur1bus really about? Perhaps Vince Gilligan is showing us how he feels about ‘the audience’ by presenting us with a writer who is sick of writing ‘trite’ romance novels. He’s saying that internet fandom feels like some monolithic hive mind that just wants to consume content. 

Or is Plur1bus really a study in the personal grief of one person? Carol lost the person who connected her to the outside world and helped to give her life purpose. The whole world changing is secondary to that. When you lose that one person — your significant other — the outside world can feel so alien, like a distant hive mind that could never understand your loss — a hive mind that want you to move on from the loss and join them. How does Carol go on?

So now the wait comes. We’re beyond the first season of Plur1bus and looking forward to season two, in two years. Where will we be as a world then? Where will Plur1bus take us? Are we ready for the future? 

The audience screams, we want content! Get back to writing already!