Vince Gilligan On The Premiere of ‘Pluribus’

Chris and Andy talk about the two-episode premiere of ‘Pluribus,’ Vince Gilligan’s new sci-fi drama on Apple TV, and how despite its unique concept, it still contains the hallmark style that the ‘Breaking Bad’ creator is known for (1:02). Later, Chris is joined by Gilligan to discuss what inspired the series, going back to Albuquerque, Rhea Seehorn’s unparalleled talent, why he wanted to write a hero protagonist, and much more (26:04). Subscribe to the Ringer TV YouTube channel here for full episodes of ‘The Watch’ and so much more! Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Guest: Vince Gilligan Producers: Kaya McMullen and Kai Grady Video Producer: Jon Jones Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Ryan?

  This episode is brought to you by NASS Energy. Every ounce of dirt, sweat and gears, every checkered flag and trophy raised, every lap, every race, every hard fought place. They're all jammed inside every can of NASS Energy. High-performance energy for burning the midnight oil in the garage and pedal to the metal human horsepower for the streets. Go ahead, crack open a can of NASS Energy and get after it.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Observe the North American dad. 50s, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana. An offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, dang, that's a good offer. The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle, no one called him boss. He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  I need support staff to clear the room. Stand up and walk now.

• 0:59Chris Ryan?

  Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at theringer.com and joining me in the studio in London, it's Andy Greenwald. We're cooking with gas today. Here we go. Okay, Andy, it's Friday. If you're listening to this in the United States of America, Andy and I are here in London recording. Today is a special episode. We are going over the first two episodes of Pluribus, which aired on Apple. You can watch those episodes and I highly, highly, highly recommend, check those episodes out and then you listen to this episode of the podcast because what we've got is a chat with Vince Gilligan. After you and I talk for about 15 minutes, I'll get into my conversation with Vince about the origins of this show. Yeah, how was that? Awesome. He's a white whale for us. We've never, I've never met him, never talked to him.

• 1:44Chris Ryan?

  I said that to him, actually. I was just like, never got you, man. And he was like, who are you? I interviewed him in our New York offices and he was enamored with the view from World Trade Center. That's nice. Yeah. So this is the first series from Vince Gilligan, solely created by him since Breaking Bad. Obviously Gilligan had a role, a heavy hand. He co-created Better Call Saul. He directed El Camino, which was the breaking. Bad spinoff in 2019, I believe it was.

• 2:13Chris Ryan?

  But for the most part, you know, it's been a, it's been a few years and Vince Gilligan is part of a loose generation of writers who I think defined prestige television and, and like of that Dame Lindelof, Matthew Weiner, David Chase, not necessarily the same age bracket, but maybe the same level of authorial.

• 2:36Chris Ryan?

  Power and authorial reputation. And Pluribus is at once a left turn from him. And it, on the other hand, makes perfect sense as, as a Vince Gilligan product. I will do, let's do the most broadest of broad conversations for about a minute or two here before we get into spoilers. It is almost impossible to talk about this show without giving away what it's about and they have done.

• 3:00Andy Greenwald?

  A great job.

• 3:00Chris Ryan?

  A great job suggesting things, but not saying what it's about.

• 3:04Andy Greenwald?

  Can I just straight up say this? I was so delighted to know nothing.

• 3:10Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 3:11Andy Greenwald?

  Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate it, but I do think you should stop and watch Pluribus before we talk more about it because part of the absolute exhilarating joy of the first two episodes of the show is an almost childlike sense of, holy shit.

• 3:29Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:30Andy Greenwald?

  Where are we going?

• 3:31Chris Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:31Andy Greenwald?

  And then quickly followed by, we can go anywhere.

• 3:34Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 3:35Andy Greenwald?

  And I feel, I feel like I'm floating because of it.

• 3:39Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. I thought this was one of the best first episodes of a TV show I've seen in years. I, I, in my mind, I need to make a Bill Simmons-esque top eight pilots of the last nine years kind of thing.

• 3:51Andy Greenwald?

  No, you need to do tiers. You need to do a pyramid.

• 3:54Chris Ryan?

  This is pretty high up there.

• 3:57Chris Ryan?

  And let's just say what people can probably deduce from all the promotional materials, which is that Ray Sehorn, who was the breakout star of Better Call Saul, is the star of this show and it is essentially a platform for her.

• 4:13Chris Ryan?

  Her performing greatness, I think. She is capable of doing so many different things and Vince Gilligan really, she puts, he puts his players in a position to succeed and it's really wonderful to watch that. This show has elements of drama, comedy, sci-fi, horror, so many different things. So why don't we draw a line there? Take a beat. If you guys have not listened or have not watched the episodes, I just, please go watch them now and then come back.

• 4:42Andy Greenwald?

  Can I, can I say one thing in this, one other thing in this part of the conversation?

• 4:44Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, in the general conversation.

• 4:45Andy Greenwald?

  Before we get into specifics?

• 4:46Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:47Andy Greenwald?

  Last week, we were having fun talking about Taylor Sheridan's big, big move.

• 4:52Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:52Andy Greenwald?

  And because I have a finger on the pulse, I'm, I'm the I love LA demographic. I made an Albert Pujols reference. I went straight to Major League Baseball, which is having a moment.

• 5:06Andy Greenwald?

  Vince Gilligan, at least through two episodes of this show, has done something that no one else in his entire cohort of the great masters of the prestige television era have done. Making him, I suppose, the Mookie Betts of this in that he is a World Series champion in the first part of his career. And then shows up and keeps fucking winning.

• 5:26Chris Ryan?

  Right.

• 5:27Andy Greenwald?

  I cannot tell you how exciting it was to see.

• 5:32Chris Ryan?

  Hasn't Verlander done that like four times?

• 5:34Andy Greenwald?

  Okay, yeah, Verlander. Let's talk Justin Verlander. His whip is still remarkably high. His ERA plus.

• 5:46Andy Greenwald?

  It is so exciting to see Vince Gilligan, who is just an absolute master of the form.

• 5:52Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:53Andy Greenwald?

  In terms of writing, in terms of efficiency of character dialogue, his ability to mix the stressiest, high stakes dramatic moments with absolutely goofy comedy, which he's done throughout his career brilliantly from X-Files through Breaking Bad and that the whole Albuquerque universe that he created. Just like crack his knuckles, take a few years and be like, now I'm gonna do this.

• 6:16Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 6:17Andy Greenwald?

  And this is beautifully directed. He's got more in his bag than I realized as a director. There's some framing that's almost Wes Andersonian in the beginning of this show. And there is a. Freedom to what he's doing here and a confidence in his ability to do it that I don't think we often see. I think filmmakers we see evolve and grow in different decades of their career.

• 6:40Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 6:41Andy Greenwald?

  We could talk, I mean, you talk about all the time on Big Picture or Rewatchables, or like, we were just talking about P T Anderson and how he's changed over his career. But the, the big few, the big, the Mount Rushmore, like David Simon made The Wire and everything that he's done since, and some of it has really, really reached incredible highs.

• 6:59Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 7:01Andy Greenwald?

  It is of a similar flavor to The Wire because he is, like many of the novelists we like, he does a certain thing, and that is his hobby horse to ride, right?

• 7:13Andy Greenwald?

  Matt Weiner and David Chase, in various ways, have struggled to reach the apex that they did, but also they didn't need to because they made masterpieces.

• 7:20Chris Ryan?

  Chase is coming back, though, right?

• 7:21Andy Greenwald?

  Chase is coming back with an, with MKUltra show. Okay, so jury's still out.

• 7:26Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 7:26Andy Greenwald?

  Right? But I would say that like, the Romanoffs, which was an ambitious swing, was not successful and was not successful when they were going to relitigate it. But the ways that Pluribus is successful suggests an absolute, he's just, he's playing loose.

• 7:44Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 7:44Andy Greenwald?

  It's someone who is confident and like, has been an MVP and has maybe found a new team.

• 7:49Chris Ryan?

  Look, I mean, just on a very basic level, like, that guy could probably have made Breaking Bad universe shows for the rest of his professional life.

• 7:57Andy Greenwald?

  And seemed happy doing it. And it wasn't cynical, right? Like, whether it was El Camino, or whether it was Better Call Saul, like, he and-

• 8:04Chris Ryan?

  I'm sure Sony would have been like, please do this again.

• 8:06Andy Greenwald?

  And he made those things with his whole heart. Like, there was nothing about Better Call Saul that was like cynical.

• 8:11Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Andy Greenwald?

  And that's okay. Like, I, I feel like we've been on this podcast or just been in bars talking about artists we like, being like, James Crumley only wrote one book, he just wrote it eight times, and that's awesome, because writing a book is hard. That, I, I don't know, I feel like I'm getting in front of my skis just saying how exciting I found this.

• 8:29Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 8:29Andy Greenwald?

  Um, we can get into the specifics of it, but wow, you don't often see it.

• 8:33Chris Ryan?

  Okay, so going forward, we'll have a spoiler conversation for the first two episodes, which Apple is very smartly airing as a pair, rather than making people wait for the second episode, I think, because it gives a really good picture of both sides of this show. Um, so this is the new series from Vince Gilligan. It follows a romanticy author named Carol, who's played, as I mentioned, by Ray Sehorn, who, uh-

• 8:56Chris Ryan?

  After a viral outbreak, I think is the best way to put it, which is spread at least somewhat by kissing, turns almost everyone in the world into a member of a great collective consciousness. Now, the details of it are a little bit confusing because we are learning things alongside Carol. Like, there's not a lot of audience privilege in this first episode. Everything that happens.

• 9:22Andy Greenwald?

  We see a little bit.

• 9:22Chris Ryan?

  A little bit in the beginning about like the origins of the virus.

• 9:25Andy Greenwald?

  We see some something from space, we see some labs, and then we eventually learn that everyone's consciousness has now been glued together.

• 9:31Chris Ryan?

  Yes, and while that, um, that has been a pretty violent transformation. A lot of people die in the process. But at the end, and one of the people who dies is Carol's partner. Ellen, like another woman who helps her with her romantic see author.

• 9:49Andy Greenwald?

  And with her anger and drinking issues.

• 9:51Chris Ryan?

  Yes. Once we get past that moment, which is a harrowing, harrowing sequence, we'll talk a little bit more about in detail. Carol finds out that the world is essentially now been taken over by a great collective consciousness. Everybody is everybody. Everybody knows how to do everything everyone else knows how to do.

• 10:10Andy Greenwald?

  And everybody's moving like ants in a colony.

• 10:12Chris Ryan?

  Yes, and strangely, life seems both at once terrifyingly lonely and scary, but also society, or at least the functions of society, seem to be working a lot better because there is a collective sort of, uh, for like a collective participation happening. So this first episode is essentially one half, kind of a dramedy that wouldn't be out of place in Better Call Saul. It takes place somewhat in Albuquerque, which is where Carol and Helen live, and does some of the things that Better Call Saul did so well with framing characters against

• 10:56Chris Ryan?

  modern, late-stage, capitalistic backdrops to create a sense of alienation or dislocation.

• 11:03Andy Greenwald?

  And a deep fixation on process.

• 11:05Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 11:06Andy Greenwald?

  How things are done.

• 11:07Chris Ryan?

  This is the Gilligan signature is, and that comes in in the second episode as well. About halfway through this show turns into a Hitchcockian horror film.

• 11:18Andy Greenwald?

  Is it Hitchcock or is it Romero? Like there's some, I mean, you know.

• 11:21Chris Ryan?

  I mean, it's a Night of the Living Dead moment, but it's also a Night of the Living Nice Dead. It's a Night of the Living Kissing Dead.

• 11:27Andy Greenwald?

  Happy Zombies.

• 11:28Chris Ryan?

  And, you know, I think that this is one of the most striking

• 11:35Chris Ryan?

  internalizations of the last five years of what's happened in this world, rather than an explicit commentary on it. By making it sci-fi to some extent, and by just changing things a little bit. So it's not COVID, it's not this, it's not that. He can tweak it, he can talk about it in different ways. And what emerges is a protagonist who is miserable, but also wants to hold on to her misery and wants to hold on to her grief and wants to hold on to her individuality, even if going along with what everybody else is doing would be a much more painless way of existing.

• 12:16Chris Ryan?

  So that first episode, this first episode is just incredible and features several moments that I think I'll, I'll hold with me for a really long time. Number one is obviously Carol's stealing, you know, she takes this guy's truck and is trying to drive her partner to the hospital. And society is collapsing. Uh, what did you think of the sort of more stat set piece particularly?

• 12:39Andy Greenwald?

  I mean, it, it, it feels so uniquely fresh to be experiencing a happy apocalypse. It's, it's, everything is familiar, uh, in terms of the beats of something ending. We've seen plenty of dystopian apocalyptic fiction over the last few years. But in addition to Night of the Living Dead being, or Contagion being a reference point, I think the Lego movie is a reference point. In the goofiness of it as well, um, you know, there's the moment in the second episode where she tries to help. And there's someone hanging from a crane. He's like, it's okay, Carol, I'm fine. And that is pure, hey Emmet, from the beginning of the Lego movie.

• 13:22Chris Ryan?

  There's a little bit of good place in it.

• 13:23Andy Greenwald?

  Yes, there is as well. And it. You know, I guess my feeling is it's just this continuation of just exhilaration that I felt watching the show where it's like you listen, when you talk to people who've written great songs and they're like, well, there really are only three chords. It's just how you deploy them. I know there are more than three chords, but like traditionally in certain types of melodic pop music, it's just how you, how you play them. And I was like, oh, he found a new way to play them. Yeah. He's mixing and matching this. And to your point about like, it is about isolation and COVID. It is also about ludism in the face of like what tribalism exists because of technology and, and community. But it also casts our main character as so negative.

• 14:06Andy Greenwald?

  And at least in the first two episodes, as a negative, potentially negative, murderous, unintentionally so force in the world, that it makes you wonder, because I think one of the things that is so complicated about our current moment is we are all yearning for a real return to a sense of community. Mm hmm. And yet we see the communities that are forming and it's like fucking grippers. It's like, wait, what? Don't, don't do our work. Wait, how is this working? Sure. People are finding each other, but maybe we didn't want them to find each other that way. And it's all deeply, deeply out of control. We shouldn't be this connected. Maybe we should be less connected. Yeah. And also, you know what? The good place thing is such a smart point, too, because as well as helping me understand

• 14:51Andy Greenwald?

  why, I know there was a bidding war for this, why Apple won out. I assume one of the reasons Apple won out is because Vince Gilligan knew, and maybe you talked to him about this because I haven't listened to your interview yet, that to do a show like this and really fucking do it, you need to say yes and all the time. This is what I wanted to ask you about. So as it moves from episode one, which is granular Carol's nightmare experience, into episode two, a generation of TV watching and a relatively recent indoctrination into how production works and how much things cost, did not lead me to believe that we would get Air Force One in the empty Bilbao airport.

• 15:32Andy Greenwald?

  Before the midpoint of episode two.

• 15:33Chris Ryan?

  Now, you've been to New Mexico. Is that actually the New Mexico airport with a Bilbao sign?

• 15:37Andy Greenwald?

  I don't know if you talked to Vin. Like, it does seem, production is based in Albuquerque. He loves to give people work in Albuquerque, but, but regardless, even if he dressed New Mexico to be otherworldly destinations, like Tangier, which is where the second episode begins.

• 15:51Chris Ryan?

  Right.

• 15:52Andy Greenwald?

  I've never seen a coastline like that in New Mexico, so there may be, there may be something going on here. My point is, he has the juice to ask for this. He has the technical know-how and the, the production team to get it done, and he has the creative hunger to say, yes, yes, yes. Let's go, let's go, let's go.

• 16:11Chris Ryan?

  The opening of episode two is a really good place, really good example of what I wanted to ask you about. So like in TV writing, there's story, which is what this thing is about. There's plot, which is what happens. But Gilligan kind of takes it a step further in his writing, which is, it's actually the plot that dictates the story or brings the story out. In so much as, for instance, the second episode begins with this painstaking.

• 16:40Andy Greenwald?

  Crazy.

• 16:40Chris Ryan?

  Essentially like journey from northern Africa to New Mexico for this woman who resembles the woman on the cover of Carol's romanacy novels.

• 16:52Andy Greenwald?

  Resembles the man.

• 16:53Chris Ryan?

  Who is supposed to kind of resemble Helen, basically, I think, in a way.

• 16:57Andy Greenwald?

  But also it's supposed to be like a, you know, it was like a, when, when Carol was feeling more bold, it was going to be a coming out story.

• 17:04Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 17:04Andy Greenwald?

  But she blinked.

• 17:06Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 17:06Andy Greenwald?

  And made the, the sexy pirate a man.

• 17:09Chris Ryan?

  Yes. So this woman basically comes across the world to.

• 17:14Andy Greenwald?

  This is Carolina Ouijra.

• 17:15Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, and to talk to Carol and to basically be her guide through this process. Because they think this is a person that Carol is going to respond to physically, because she resembles some part of her id and some part of her imagination. But the actual process of getting her from Africa to New Mexico is not, she doesn't just show up. We actually see her take a scooter and avoid a truck that's piling dead bodies into it and then get on a plane and fly that plane and then arrive at a first-class lounge and shower and change into an outfit in New Mexico and throw out like a bottle of water that she had and then go and meet Carol. But all these little steps gives you this idea of a world

• 17:59Chris Ryan?

  that's 20-dimensional, like that you're thinking about how are these people like hydrating? How are these people transporting themselves? Like, who's filling up this plane with gasoline? Like, how is she getting from this part of the coastline to an airport, you know? And you start to see, without any words spoken, the collective spirit, what would happen if everybody was selfless and just helped each other and was like, yep, you take my scooter. Yep, you take my car. Yep, this is your plane now.

• 18:26Andy Greenwald?

  We all have a place, we all have a role to play.

• 18:28Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 18:28Andy Greenwald?

  And it also leads to, you know, in that episode, there's a summit, quickly. I think in the first episode, when she's speaking to the designated representative of the United States government.

• 18:38Chris Ryan?

  Who's like the undersecretary of the Department of Labor or something?

• 18:40Andy Greenwald?

  It's really funny. Says like, there are probably 11 people like you on the planet, who have not, who are immune to being joined up, glued up. And so I'm like, okay, well, that's the arc of the first season. Nope, she meets with six of them in a summit on Air Force One.

• 18:57Chris Ryan?

  In Bilbao.

• 18:57Andy Greenwald?

  In Bilbao, in the second episode.

• 18:59Chris Ryan?

  And they're all having a great time.

• 19:00Andy Greenwald?

  And they're having a great time. And it is not a dystopian thriller. It is not The Walking Dead, where the ragtag group of survivors learns to make a new society. One of the dudes is just having lots of sex and is just like super into how fun this is.

• 19:14Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 19:16Andy Greenwald?

  Everyone else, because of how they lived their active lives, still has family.

• 19:20Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 19:21Andy Greenwald?

  Now, their family are also, as Carol points out, their gynecologist and also the prime minister and also everyone alive. But, you know, as we, maybe this is a little bit of the echo of COVID-2, of like, you kind of learn to make stuff work.

• 19:34Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 19:34Andy Greenwald?

  You know, as long as it resembles your real life, you can get along with it.

• 19:38Chris Ryan?

  Well, they put, and also, there's a story clock going, which is that this consciousness, be it alien or outbreak or both or whatever it is, they communicate to Carol that they are diligently working to figure out a way to bring her into part of the fold.

• 19:54Andy Greenwald?

  Upload her.

• 19:55Chris Ryan?

  And that that is something that obviously these other survivors, quote unquote, want. There's another wrinkle that happens that was revealed in Bilbao, which is that

• 20:06Chris Ryan?

  Carol obviously has, as we've referenced, some emotional problems or some emotional control problems. And that when she loses her temper, there is a ripple effect of that that winds up killing many of the thousands and thousands, millions of people when that happens.

• 20:25Andy Greenwald?

  So she, she basically puts joined up humans on tilt because they cannot handle her bad vibes.

• 20:32Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 20:33Andy Greenwald?

  And many die, which is, which is fucking wild.

• 20:37Chris Ryan?

  Yes. And they go into like basically an epileptic seizure when she freaks out.

• 20:43Andy Greenwald?

  And some of them worldwide are flying planes at that moment or lifting each other up on cranes and it doesn't go great.

• 20:48Chris Ryan?

  So there's a bunch of situations where I think you start with her in a place where she's being, you know, lauded for these books by her fans who she seems to have a best cynical relationship with.

• 21:00Andy Greenwald?

  She's not proud of her work.

• 21:02Chris Ryan?

  Then there is this point where she could be one of a dozen people in this world who get to just do whatever they want for this time being while they are work on this quote unquote cure to make her part of this collective. And instead she's miserable and just lives alone in her same house in New Mexico and...

• 21:20Andy Greenwald?

  On a cul-de-sac.

• 21:21Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, on a cul-de-sac and buries her partner out in the backyard. A very, very affecting moment there where you rarely get that in the horror movie, which is The Bury Your Dead. And having an episode that's equally treating the grief of a traumatic episode as it did the trauma itself or the, you know, exciting race to survival. And I, you get to the end of the second episode and you can see like a rhythm developing, but at the same time, anything can happen on this show. This show could be about anything. I also think that there's a very smart decision that they made where they've casted Seahorn. She's obviously the star of the show. A lot of unknowns after that.

• 22:04Andy Greenwald?

  And global actors like Samba Chute, we've never seen before. He's from Mauritania and he is the breakout character of episode two. It is such a confident flex. This is essentially a one woman show.

• 22:15Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 22:16Andy Greenwald?

  But also, any person alive could be on the show, real or imagined.

• 22:21Chris Ryan?

  But there's also that element because of the way they cast it. You're not like, well, okay, this person's hanging out for three episodes.

• 22:27Andy Greenwald?

  Correct.

• 22:28Chris Ryan?

  Or I know that this, they wouldn't bring Walton Goggins in just to do this. Now he's not on the show.

• 22:32Andy Greenwald?

  But also it would, this is just how, remember when we would talk about Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul? And we would talk about how every single detail matters. And it's almost an OCD commitment to the Post-it notes or whatever. This is a similar example of attention to detail in that I think he knew, even when the show only existed in his mind, that putting anyone recognizable on screen would tip it. And give us a sense, he knows how TV works.

• 23:01Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 23:02Andy Greenwald?

  When a famous, your point, when a famous actor shows up, we understand that that's someone who probably will either die dramatically or hang out for a while.

• 23:10Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 23:10Andy Greenwald?

  And we adjust our subconscious fandom intenne specifically.

• 23:17Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, when Joe Carlos Esposito shows up in Breaking Bad, you're like, ah.

• 23:20Andy Greenwald?

  Here we go.

• 23:20Chris Ryan?

  Here we go. And when he shows up in Better Call Saul, you obviously know, but like, he, there, there's ways to play that where you're like, you don't bring this person in unless you're serious. But the way that this show is cast is now like, not only do you feel like it can go anywhere, but it, it has made me think of, and I went back and watched some of his episodes just for fun of X-Files. Of In Skiligans, where he got to start underneath Chris Carter. And X-Files has a very durable, you know, and now in kind of out of date style, which was, there was a overall serialized story about aliens and about like the government conspiracy around it. And then there was monster of the week episodes where you could go off and just kind of have, are there vampires in Texas? No, but still.

• 24:07Chris Ryan?

  They could do something similar with Pluribus. Like, this could all be about what are these things and what am I to them and how will I survive? But Carol could do lots of different things here. They could do anything. They could do anything with this show. She could be a political leader. She could open a video store. She could do whatever she wants. They could do episodes of the, you know, monsters of the week within the world of Pluribus. And, you know, obviously, Apple has a long... They see the long game with a lot of these shows. Sometimes longer than they need to be on. So I'll be interested to see. You've mentioned already that they've moved up plot points that you would think would be like, oh, this could be the first season arc, and instead it's in the second episode.

• 24:47Andy Greenwald?

  And Pluribus is, you know, very rare, got a two-season commitment.

• 24:50Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 24:51Andy Greenwald?

  Which is exciting. But to your point, like, it doesn't have the shape of what we're used to. Most shows begin with a very provocative question. Um, or a bit of world building or world ending. And then you can kind of feel the seams of where it's going to have to get to. And are they going to slow walk it? Are they going to fast walk it? And this is just such a bold and confident paradigm shifting, yeah, I'm going to do something. That it feels exciting to be a part of it. And part of the excitement is you trust the bus driver who's taken us on this journey.

• 25:23Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 25:23Andy Greenwald?

  There is a confidence to that, both in terms of the filmmaking and in terms of our, like, connection. I just, I just didn't expect this. I don't know why. Like, I don't know whether that makes me jaded or whether it makes me just, maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention.

• 25:38Chris Ryan?

  I think they did a really good job of not tipping their hand. And I think they, they were like, hopefully Vince Gilligan gets people in the door. And once they see this, and I hope people aren't thrown off by the first half hour. And they're like, what is this show about? You know, like, I stick with it, stick with this first episode. But I even found the first episode, first half hour, pretty magnetic anyway. You know, just watching them kind of go through their daily life.

• 26:00Andy Greenwald?

  Quick, I did too. Quick question, because also it's funny. The opening is funny.

• 26:03Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 26:04Andy Greenwald?

  And, and I love that. It has a lightness to it despite what comes next. Um, do, just, just, just to check in here, and maybe you've watched ahead a little bit, so I don't want to spoil, but pass two. But the perception I have is that while Helen did not survive the great joining up, During the moments when she was connected to the mainframe, they had access to her.

• 26:24Chris Ryan?

  Yes, but her consciousness did not get up. They can't just give her somebody who's like new Helen.

• 26:28Andy Greenwald?

  Put her in a new body.

• 26:29Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 26:29Andy Greenwald?

  But they know everything she's ever known and feel everything she's ever felt.

• 26:33Chris Ryan?

  That's part of the invasive element that Carol does not like.

• 26:35Andy Greenwald?

  And that Zosha is now representing.

• 26:38Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 26:39Andy Greenwald?

  A little bit.

• 26:39Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 26:40Andy Greenwald?

  Awesome.

• 26:41Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 26:42Andy Greenwald?

  Awesome. Let's listen to you talk to Vince.

• 26:44Chris Ryan?

  Let's listen to me talk to Vince Gilligan. He was very nice to give me some of his time. We'll be back next week, probably Monday, I would hope.

• 26:50Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, Monday's good.

• 26:50Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, and thanks to Kai Kai, thanks to Bex, who's been setting us up here in London, and we'll talk to you next week.

• 26:57Speaker 04

  When the sun goes down, the appetizers come out. Yeah, you heard that right. Late night, half-price appetizers are here at Applebee's. Saucy, sweet and spicy boneless wings. Crispy, cheesy mozzarella sticks. Creamy spinach and artichoke dip. Your favorite apps, half-price, available every single night because why should appetizers have curfews? Tap the banner to learn more. Dining only for a limited time at participating locations. Restrictions apply. Copyright 2026 Applebee's Restaurant LLC.

• 27:28Speaker 05

  I used to wonder what I missed any time I stepped out of the shop. But with AT&T Business Wireless, my signal stays strong no matter where the day takes me. Like right now, I'm meeting a photography client

• 27:41Speaker 05

  out here. But I still have a reliable connection, even though I have no idea where I am right now. Keep your business connected with AT&T Business Wireless. Visit att.com/5g-network. When the connection matters, it has to be AT&T.

• 27:58Chris Ryan?

  Vince, thanks so much for joining me. I feel like you're like one of my white whales. We haven't had you on the watch, I don't think, before. We did a lot of Better Call Saul stuff, obviously a lot of Breaking Bad stuff, but it's an honor to have you here. It's an honor to be here. And. Man, this show, I'm gonna be careful about how I talk about it, cuz we're gonna put this up after people have had a chance to see the first two episodes. But obviously, I stopped myself at the first two episodes. I did not want to start confusing myself about kinda where it goes and everything.

• 28:26Speaker 06

  God bless you.

• 28:27Chris Ryan?

  For our pro, I know, I had to have some discipline. For our listeners, can you kinda give me a timeline of when you start thinking of this idea? And how it develops over the course of time? Kind of like with El Camino and then Better Call Saul in the background? And what's going on there?

• 28:42Speaker 06

  Better Call Saul was definitely going on and was in the background. I started to come up with the first stirrings of this idea about, gosh, it feels like it was about a decade ago. Might've been around eight years ago, thereabouts. I wish I'd written it down when I started thinking about it. I was working on Better Call Saul. Peter Gould and I had created that together. And I was having such a good time working on it that I didn't wanna leave. But it was between the start of Better Call Saul and El Camino. And we would take these lunch breaks where we would, you know, take a nap or, you know, do phone calls and whatnot.

• 29:23Speaker 06

  And I would take these long walks around the neighborhood, around Toluca Lake in California.

• 29:28Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 29:30Speaker 06

  Where our writers' room is. The idea that as it first came to me had something to do with, it was about a guy. Not a woman, but a man. Who, everybody was really, really nice to him. And people just loved him. And they had unconditional love for him. And they would do anything for him. They were solicitous to the extreme. And I thought, why? Why is that? And that came later, the why came later. But I was thinking, what would that be like to live that life? Then it started dawning on me, this could be maybe a TV show or a movie. You know, sometimes in the early inklings you have for an idea, you don't know, is it two hours worth of story?

• 30:15Speaker 06

  Or is it 100 hours? But as I was thinking about it, I thought, well, maybe it's a mini-series. Maybe it's somewhere in between.

• 30:22Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 30:23Speaker 06

  And maybe it's not a guy after all. Maybe I should write a female protagonist because...

• 30:30Speaker 06

  Here I am, working with, at the time, working with someone I was beginning to realize very quickly upon Peter Gould and I hiring her, Ray Sehorn. She is so good. She is so good. And, and so, you know, the first season or so of Better Call Saul, he and I are just pinching ourselves, thinking, we love everybody in this thing. From Bob, from Bob Odenkirk on down, everybody's just, you know, pulling their weight and then some. And Michael McKean, my God, getting to work with him. But this Ray Sehorn, that was the, the unknown in our lives, in my life. And we, I loved writing for her, as did all of the writers on that show. And the directors all loved directing her.

• 31:13Speaker 06

  And she was just an absolute breath of fresh air and a pleasure to work with. And so I thought, you know, if I'm smart, I'm gonna have something figured out for when this show ends.

• 31:23Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 06

  I learned that lesson a long time ago. After the X-Files, I learned you gotta have the next thing in the offing.

• 31:29Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, you get in too many meetings where you're just like, I don't know, I'm kicking some stuff around.

• 31:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm just hanging out. I'm just, you know, eating Cheetos and hanging out in the backyard, you know. I, I thought, my God, I should write a story for her and maybe it's this one. And that's my long-winded answer to that question.

• 31:44Chris Ryan?

  How much is the last, you said you started around eight years ago, how much is the last, say, five years? Because I think anybody who watches these first two episodes will see phrases, sensations, they'll have feelings that will remind them of what it's like to be alive over the last five years, whether it has to do with this idea of a viral infection, or we don't really know quite what it is, obviously, in these first two episodes, to, I think even some of the things that Carol says and does are very reflective of a certain state of mind, like I think people are going through and have been going through. So, how does this idea change with, kind of like, what's going on in real life over the last couple of years?

• 32:23Speaker 06

  That is a great question, and it's just, a lot of it is just pure dumb luck in terms of timing, on my part. I was thinking about this, as I said, the better part of a decade ago, and when COVID hit, I recall thinking to myself, oh crap, everyone's gonna think this is about COVID. Not only are they gonna think this is about COVID, but they're gonna be so sick and tired of COVID, that no one's gonna wanna order this thing. That was a real, true fear I had, all through.

• 32:55Speaker 06

  2020, 2021, 22. The good news and the bad news for me is I work so slowly. It's like watching a glacier melt, you know, how, how, how long it takes me to write stuff and come up with stuff that by the time we were, you know, ready to go on this thing, COVID was at least a little bit in the rearview mirror.

• 33:14Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 33:15Speaker 06

  Although I think we're still suffering from the general craziness that it inflicted upon all of us.

• 33:21Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I think you can see that, you know, everything from our current state of politics, but also in just like weird behavioral things that, you know, I don't know that they'll go away anytime soon where you're like, oh, like maybe we're all a little bit meaner, but we're also all a little bit more guarded of our space and, you know, it's, it's interesting to see it seep into things. I don't think, I think if you, if you did something like, if you were going to make the, the TikTok of COVID outbreak show right now, people might be like, man, I'd rather not. But, but I think when it's, when it's shot through with this kind of like, I don't know, would you describe it as a light sci-fi sensibility with, when it comes to this show?

• 34:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's, it's definitely not hardcore sci-fi, although the, the basic premise is I tried to make it as seemingly scientific as possible, as believable in terms of, of actual science. And we had a lot of technical help. We had wonderful technical help in terms of radio astronomy and in terms of genetic engineering. But, uh, yeah, it was fun for me to, to, to get to, uh, to flex some of those sci-fi muscles that I used to, uh, use on, on X-Files.

• 34:30Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 34:31Speaker 06

  And, and even before X-Files, I always loved science fiction, even as a kid in elementary school. I was writing stories about giant robots and spaceships and building spaceships and making monster masks and alien masks. And it's always something I've gravitated toward. And I, if you had told me... Twenty-five years ago, I'd been known mostly for writing hard-bitten crime dramas and stories about drug dealing, which I literally know nothing about.

• 35:00Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 35:01Speaker 06

  I would've said, "You're crazy. I'm gonna be a science fiction guy," or "I'm gonna be a light comedy guy," you know, but you kinda go where the characters take you and where the stories take you, and this one kinda fascinated me, so I figured...I didn't set out to say, "It's time for another sci-fi show."

• 35:19Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 35:20Speaker 06

  I just...I liked how this story was making me feel, or think.

• 35:26Chris Ryan?

  You know, the Breaking Bad pitch, or the tag logline for Breaking Bad is kind of legendary in the television industry, and I was curious whether you had one for Pluribus that you had kind of used in your head, whether or not with Apple TV or Sony TV executives, or even just to people that you're like, "Here's what the show is about." Have you kind of come up with something for this?

• 35:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, a good word to the wise folks, you know, doing this for a living wanted to...you know, it's a good thing is to have what they call the elevator pitch.

• 35:54Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 35:54Speaker 06

  Which is basically the one-sentence distillation of what it is you want the show to be, or at least what you think you want the show to be as you embark upon it, or what you want people to think of it. And, yeah, the one-line pitch for Breaking Bad was, "We're gonna take Mr. Chips and turn him into Scarface," and so I thought, "I gotta get a good pithy one for this new show." So, we didn't have one for Better Call Saul, by the way. We just, we didn't even know where the hell we were going with that.

• 36:26Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 36:26Speaker 06

  We just sort of roped our way through, and, but with this, with Pluribus, it was, "The most miserable person on earth tries to save the world from happiness."

• 36:37Chris Ryan?

  [laughing]

• 36:37Speaker 06

  So, that was the one-line pitch on this one.

• 36:41Chris Ryan?

  I know that when Breaking Bad was first conceived of, you know, you thought about it as a show maybe taking place in Riverside, is that correct?

• 36:48Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 36:49Chris Ryan?

  Riverside, California?

• 36:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:50Chris Ryan?

  And then, obviously, economics and whatever moves it to New Mexico, and now, I think when people still think of New Mexico, they think of the Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad universe, and this show is also shot in New Mexico, and it was... This almost like romantic feeling to like return to some of these vistas and I wonder as a filmmaker if you felt like there was like that same feeling of like it's like your home turf now.

• 37:15Speaker 06

  You know, it wasn't any kind of feeling of ownership or anything like that. It was, but I do love New Mexico. I love Albuquerque and the desert and the environs surrounding Albuquerque. And I thought long and hard about it. I thought I really probably should set this in a whole other place. And when you see the show, it could happen anywhere. Our main character Carol Sturka could truly live anywhere. And I thought it's probably be wiser to have a whole fresh new start. The reason it's set in Albuquerque is simply that we have a wonderful crew there that feels to me like family and I wanted to keep

• 37:59Speaker 06

  working with them. It was as simple as that. There is no story reason that I can think of that this show is set in Albuquerque. I just, I wanted to keep working with my same old crew. They're a wonderful bunch of men and women and you know, the people behind the cameras, people in front of the camera, they're some of the best people I've ever worked with and it feels like a family. And I wanted to do my part to keep them working and I wanted to continue selfishly to work with them.

• 38:27Chris Ryan?

  Are there parts of Albuquerque that you're still discovering?

• 38:30Speaker 06

  Yeah. It's not that big a city. It's a city of, I'm guessing here, but it's, I don't know, people can Google this and prove me right or wrong, but it's about half a million people, 400,000, 500,000, I think, in the greater metro area. Maybe it's less than that. I don't know. But it's, you know, we're always discovering neighborhoods in which to shoot and which to set things. And so far in season one, you'll see a few, you know, if you're a Breaking Bad fan or Better Call Saul fan, you'll probably recognize a few landmarks, certainly the Sandia Mountains to the east of town. But we've done a pretty good job of, you know, even in a medium sized city, you really could shoot in probably

• 39:15Speaker 06

  any medium sized city for years and years. And and find new places every episode and we have a wonderful location manager named Christian Diaz de Badoya who is so good at his job and he finds as he and his his guys, his scouts find us amazing places every every episode.

• 39:35Chris Ryan?

  So I want to talk to you about, you know, my favorite sequence of these first two episodes is this kind of bravura, 20 minute sequence as when Carol, when when I guess with the for lack of a better term, what if you were just watching it, you would be like, oh, this is the the invasion moment. This is the moment where everything is turning and all the people in in this bar that Carol and Helen are visiting turn. And it kind of turns into this, you got the Bernard Herrmann score going and it kind of, is that ever G. Robinson who's up on the mural outside of the bar?

• 40:09Speaker 06

  That is Al Capone.

• 40:10Chris Ryan?

  That is actually Al Capone.

• 40:12Speaker 06

  We didn't put that there. People are gonna say, what did he mean by having Al Capone? And that is a real, really wonderful bar and restaurant called Vernon's. You can you can go eat there. And I would recommend it.

• 40:27Chris Ryan?

  Maybe not after this episode, exactly. But yeah.

• 40:30Speaker 06

  But it's a really fun place to hang out. And it's an interesting little kind of a strip mall there because on on one of the walls of the strip mall there, they have Walter White's tombstone.

• 40:43Chris Ryan?

  No.

• 40:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, seriously. It's not necessarily part of Vernon's and I can't remember the exact story of who put it there, but.

• 40:49Chris Ryan?

  Well, you did, technically.

• 40:52Speaker 06

  Well, God bless the folks who who put their money together to put it up. It's really awesome. It's worth getting your picture taken in front of. And but yeah, the Al Capone mural is just there.

• 41:03Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 41:04Speaker 06

  And I thought it looks cool. There is no deeper thematic reason as to, you know, it just happened to be there. So we shot it.

• 41:12Chris Ryan?

  That whole sequence has got elements of horror. It's got elements of film noir to it. It's got, I mean, I have you. Trying to think if you had shot something, there's so many, obviously, like, moments in Breaking Bad, like, you know, the prison assassinations and things, but like, this seems like something that, did it take a long time to shoot that?

• 41:31Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:32Chris Ryan?

  Particular sequence, can you tell me a little bit about it?

• 41:33Speaker 06

  It took, I forget exactly how many days, well, just the, just the stuff at Vernon's took, uh, gosh, we were shooting at night, well, some of the indoor stuff we probably shot during the day, or we did splits, where you do half-day and half-night. Uh, probably were there five or six days, I think. Uh, 'cause I like, I got this kind of philosophy, I like to not reuse shots. Uh, and by the way, there's nothing wrong with reusing shots, the greatest movies far greater than I will ever make, uh, have repeated shots in them all the time, but I, I kinda, personally, I kinda dig, uh, you know, figuring out, doing my homework, figuring out, uh, the shots that are gonna make up the sequence.

• 42:15Chris Ryan?

  Do you storyboard or?

• 42:17Speaker 06

  I don't storyboard, I would, I love storyboards, but I'm too obsessive compulsive or whatever, I would take too long drawing the storyboards.

• 42:25Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 42:26Speaker 06

  Uh, so what I do, I do this thing where I do, and it, I think I, I, I think all the homework I do, so much of what I know and do, uh, comes from my days on, on The X-Files.

• 42:37Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 42:37Speaker 06

  I learned, I, I wouldn't be able to do any of that, I wouldn't be here now if it weren't for The X-Files, I wouldn't have had it, I wouldn't have known how to run a show. Uh, but as far as directing goes, I learned from some really excellent directors on The X-Files, Kim Manners and Rob Bowman.

• 42:51Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 42:51Speaker 06

  And these, just a, a bunch of really wonderful directors. Um, and I think the way Kim Manners used to do it, I think, no, actually, he would write in his scripts, he would write descriptions, I think, the, I, I probably stole this from a bunch of different directors, but I, I don't have, I don't have the time or the capacity to do all the storyboards, so instead, I'll, I'll get a plan view of the set, and I'll draw little circles with little triangles, indicating which way the camera's pointing.

• 43:21Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 43:21Speaker 06

  But I, I try to, you know, I spend hours and hours doing the homework, uh, and you don't have to do homework when you're directing, I, I find it... You know, invaluable. I, I wouldn't ever want to be on a set without having done my homework. Then you can throw it all away if you want, but at least you're prepared. And at least it feels like malfeasance otherwise to show up and have 300 people standing there on the clock.

• 43:45Chris Ryan?

  What do you think, guys?

• 43:46Speaker 06

  What do you think? I don't know. I'm not feeling it here. Let's go, come back another day. I know you, you got too much responsibility there to keep everybody employed.

• 43:56Chris Ryan?

  Okay. So you're shooting about a week of nights at this place?

• 43:59Speaker 06

  I'm sorry. I tend to digress. Even my digressions have digressions. But I, I like doing a sequence where I'm not repeating shots any more than I have to. And because of that, there's a lot of setups in that sequence, as you've seen. And so, yeah, we're shooting like a week of nights thereabouts. Yeah, I got off on a real tangent.

• 44:17Chris Ryan?

  It's okay.

• 44:17Speaker 06

  Sorry. I'll try to, I'll try to keep the answer short.

• 44:20Chris Ryan?

  I asked about the story, but I'm hearing about the process stuff. So, so you're, you're shooting at night and then I think that that sequence feels like, you know, it feels like War of the Worlds and it feels like the kind of hallmark of, of that moment where everything is changing. But it also, to my point earlier, it reminded me of looking around in 2020 and just being like, what the hell is going on? And like, what am I allowed to do? And what should I do? And is it, is it safe to do this? And is it safe to do that? What are you trying, without, without asking you to be like, explain yourself, but like, what were you trying to convey with that sequence? Where were you trying to put the audience?

• 44:55Speaker 06

  I was trying to remind the audience of every sci-fi and horror movie trope they've ever seen.

• 45:00Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 45:00Speaker 06

  I, cause I love, and I was doing it from a place of love because I am a big fan of sci-fi movies.

• 45:10Speaker 06

  Great ones, cheesy ones, movies of all sorts, going back to the, the 40s, you know, the 50s that I, I love. I love the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I love the remake of that. I love, uh, all these wonderful, uh, genre stories in which, uh, uh, the world is ending. Uh, I was trying to play with every, in the writing and in the directing, trying to think of every trope I could think of. And then wherever possible, turn those tropes on their ear.

• 45:41Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 45:41Speaker 06

  Not in any way to make fun of them, but just to, A, to do something new and something different. And B, to show the affection I have for them.

• 45:49Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 45:49Speaker 06

  But, uh, that, the first episode of this show, if you were to watch it and stop after the first hour of the first episode, you really. Would not have a good indication of what the show is. I'm really glad Apple's gonna show

• 46:04Chris Ryan?

  The two.

• 46:04Speaker 06

  The two together on the first night because the second episode, you don't, you're like, at the end of the first episode, you get an inkling of what's coming, but then you really have to watch the second episode to kind of really get what's going on. Cause the first episode is designed, by design, it's designed to be straight up genre, straight up horror, straight up sci-fi, uh, you know, uh, body snatcher type stuff, uh, apocalyptic type stuff. Uh, and then we, we, you know, endeavor to turn all that on its ear, uh, at the end of the first episode and then onward from there, the second episode and beyond.

• 46:41Chris Ryan?

  It is a pretty unique feeling to feel like it's a different show every, every episode. Like I most, I mean, I think probably we're conditioned to think, uh, you know, that there needs to be like this tonal balance to like our shows and that like you're kind of identifying something immediately as like, oh, they know what they're doing because it's gonna keep repeating, even in these limited series that have become so popular that we love so much. But I loved the feeling of starting the second one immediately. Not only did it feel different because I think it's in some ways more somber and in some ways much more funny, uh, but it then kind of, you get this whole other side of Carol as a character and you really start seeing what a five tool player Ray Sehorn is, which I already knew

• 47:26Chris Ryan?

  because Kim Lexler is one of my favorite TV characters, but is there any limit to what you can write for somebody like that? Like, cause she does so many different things just in two hours.

• 47:36Speaker 06

  She, she can do anything and it's, it's so much fun to write for her. And I'm speaking for myself and for the writers of, of Pluribus. Uh, this was definitely a group effort. Uh, we love writing for because.

• 47:51Speaker 06

  She can do anything. She can make you laugh. She can make you cry. She can scare you. She could be scary. She can, she could do anything. And it's fun finding new things for her to do.

• 48:01Chris Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:01Speaker 06

  And watching her, you know, hit it out of the park. It's fun watching her perform at such a high level consistently. I, I, I felt very confident. I, I never feel, I'm not a confident person by nature. I, um, as we record this, I still don't, we don't know yet how people are gonna receive this thing. I, I hope, you know, selfishly, I hope they dig it. And I'm always nervous about that, doing something new, you know, trying something, you know, people may or may not respond to, but I, I had the utmost confidence in Ray. I knew she could pull it off. And even then, she surprised me.

• 48:34Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 48:35Speaker 06

  Uh, as the episodes progressed, as we got into episodes I didn't direct, where I'm watching, you know, director's cuts, uh, cause I don't really watch dailies once we get rolling. Uh, maybe I should, but I, you know, it's held me in good stead so far. I've watched a lot of times I'm seeing a director's cut.

• 48:53Chris Ryan?

  Like the assembly that the director does, okay?

• 48:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. And just saying, my God, she is even better than I thought she was gonna be. Uh, I just, I, and also she is the sweetest person in the world. And she is so funny and so smart. And, uh, I just, uh, I love her, love her to pieces. I, I selfishly, for my own personal self-aggrandizement, I'd be, I'd love for this thing to be a hit, but more than any other reason, I want this thing to do well. It's for Ray.

• 49:18Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 49:18Speaker 06

  Cause she deserves to be number one on the call sheet.

• 49:20Chris Ryan?

  Absolutely. She's somebody you don't wanna take your eyes off of, but she has like qualities that are, you know, some of like, that's some of my favorite character actors have, where she can bring, just with a look of a face, you're like, I know exactly what I'm getting here, you know?

• 49:35Speaker 06

  I, I got in trouble. We were doing some interview, this is a month or two ago, uh, very early. Uh, something or other. Can't remember who we were talking to, but I said, the thing is so great about Ray is that she has a face like a Jumbotron screen.

• 49:49Chris Ryan?

  (laughing)

• 49:50Speaker 06

  And she looked at me and said, "What?" And I was like, you know, it's like a Monty Python sketch or something. The one where he's talking about, uh, you know, His Majesty is like a scream of bats.

• 50:01Chris Ryan?

  (laughing)

• 50:01Speaker 06

  But I didn't, I wasn't trying to be funny. I, I, I think it was after that thing happened with the Coldplay thing with the Jumbo.

• 50:08Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 50:08Speaker 06

  So I was, they had Jumbotron.

• 50:09Chris Ryan?

  Right.

• 50:10Speaker 06

  Screens on, on my mind, but I, what I meant, and I didn't word it well. Writers are like, we're all into our witty dialogue and all that, but it's, my favorite thing of all is when we can write a scene where there are no words, or there's no dialogue, and the actor just puts it across. And she has this ability to broadcast, that's what I meant with a Jumbotron.

• 50:32Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 50:32Speaker 06

  Screen analogy. She can broadcast her emotions. I don't know if she'd be a great poker player or the world's worst poker player, because she could act, she could act the poker hand, but on the other hand, you can read her emotions in her face.

• 50:47Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 50:49Speaker 06

  Like a Jumbotron screen.

• 50:50Chris Ryan?

  And you would also know how she was feeling about, I mean, there's scenes where she can go from bored to angry to lonely to bored again, and it's like sitting on a couch. And, and, but as a viewer, I'm getting that with, she doesn't have anybody to talk to, really. I mean, she can make this, you know, this operator phone call, but other than that, she's pretty much just going through these emotions and you're kind of imagining, you're putting yourself in her, her shoes and imagining this. Obviously, I think a lot of people are going to talk about what Pluribus is about and, you know, what are you trying to say with that? And I came across a quote of yours from a New Yorker interview, I think towards the end of Saul, and you were telling a story about working with Michael Mann. And, and you were talking about, um, you know, like, what am I, you were writing something

• 51:34Chris Ryan?

  for him, and really, what's it about? What am I doing here? And he was just like, your job is to come up with a script that inspires the actors and director, and then hopefully this work will be viewed by moviegoers and they'll say, "Oh, wow, that was interesting. I didn't see where that was going. I like the twists and turns. I like the characters." That's the job. The frou-frou thematic stuff is for other people to figure out, the college professors, et cetera. And I- I realize that this is my battle with the Vince Gilligan project is like what draws me to it is actually watching you and your writers and your directors and creative people think through things outside of what it's about. And so the second episode is actually

• 52:17Chris Ryan?

  like, what would you do the next day? What would happen? And how would you grieve? And how would you get rid of a body? And how would everybody start to connect with each other all over again, this completely new reality? Do you find that it's useful for you to kind of keep it at that, not surface level, but like, practical? Because like so many of your, my favorite moments in your shows are someone doing something. And what are the, all the little things that has to be done to get like, this postage situation worked out, or to get something loaded up, or taken off of a truck? And I've always wanted to ask you about how you go about that kind of writing?

• 52:56Speaker 06

  You know, I gotta say, I've never actually met Stephen King, but his book about writing, I think it was, was it called On Writing? I really enjoyed it. I learned a lot from reading that very slim book about how he went about writing. And one of the things that always stuck with me from his book was, he said, people love process. People love watching other people do their jobs. Especially if it's a job you yourself are not familiar with. And especially if that person is actually good at their job. And sometimes the people we present on these shows are not so good at their job.

• 53:34Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 53:35Speaker 06

  But I really took that to heart when I read that. And I read that, God, back probably when I was in college, or shortly thereafter. And it really, I kind of knew innately he was right.

• 53:48Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 53:49Speaker 06

  I thought about it. I thought about, you know, you have to be your own first fan. And I don't mean that in terms of a fan of yourself, but you have to be the first reader or the first viewer of the thing you're writing.

• 54:00Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 54:01Speaker 06

  And you have to, I mean, you don't have to, you don't have to do anything. But I mean, the way I like to think of it is, it helps me to... Try to please myself, you know, you want to write something, oh, that's funny, or that's sad, or that's, you know, and, and I, I thought, well, you know, I do like watching process. I like, and so let's not skip it, let's not skip on it, let's, and that really started with Breaking Bad for a twofold reason, A, I'd always wanted to kind of show that kind of stuff, and B, we had the great luxury on, on, on Breaking Bad of serialized storytelling, which we didn't have on The X-Files, The X-Files was, was the greatest job ever, but

• 54:45Speaker 06

  it was, or second, very close second greatest job ever, but it was very episodic, and it was very tight in terms of running time, and you, you know, you have to, you have to cut out a lot of that process, but when you get a chance, through more leisurely running time and serialized storytelling, when you get a chance to show that stuff, you know, you just, you gotta, I think you gotta have confidence in the audience, and, and I always have confidence in the audience that they are smarter than I am.

• 55:17Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 55:18Speaker 06

  And I, and I, and I don't believe this thing about, yeah, we live in a world of diminishing attention spans, and there are certain people who, for whom Breaking Bad, and better call Saul, and Pluribus are not intended, I don't mean that in a, in a, in a hoity-toity, or, you know, in a, in a sense of, oh, you know.

• 55:37Chris Ryan?

  They're specific.

• 55:38Speaker 06

  But they're, you know, everything is now specific, isn't it, it used to be, in the, back in the old days, you'd, you'd write a TV show, and you'd, if you were really successful, actually, most of America, well, why, and the last episode of MASH, a hundred million people.

• 55:53Chris Ryan?

  I was looking at some X-File, I was doing some re-watching of episodes of yours from X-Files, and when I would look at the Wikipedia, and it would show the rating, I had to make sure I hadn't taken melatonin, I was like, that's it, sixteen million people watch this.

• 56:06Speaker 06

  There's a famous story about Veronica's closet, a, a show being canceled when it had a viewership of only twenty million viewers, I mean, it's just, it's not that world anymore.

• 56:16Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 56:17Speaker 06

  And, and so, that is a, I guess you could say it's a curse, but it's, I, I prefer to see it as a blessing, because I think it's a wonderful. Boone, as a writer, to get to tell a specific story, to get to put in as much process as you want to make the storytelling leisurely, up to a point. You don't want it to be slow, but it doesn't necessarily need to be super fast either. And yes, we perhaps do live in a world of diminished attention spans, but that's not everybody. So, thank God, we don't have to attract 20 million viewers, because you and I wouldn't be talking. I wouldn't be anywhere. The fracturing of the television audience, which is not always a good thing,

• 56:58Speaker 06

  but it allows shows to be a success, with big finger quotes, when it only has, you know, a million or two million viewers, however many. And I love the viewers we attract, and I know they're all smarter than I am, and I write for them, so.

• 57:16Chris Ryan?

  I think about why I get drawn to certain genres, and, you know, I'll wa- there are things that I will watch where it'll pretty much be like you could put anything with certain hallmarks of like a spaghetti western, and I will give it a solid 45 minutes before I turn it on. And it could be really bad dubbed spaghetti western. But the things I love the most, like whether it's like a heist genre, heist movies, right? It's not really because I think it's so cool that these guys are robbing banks or cracking safes. It's because most of the best ones, like Thief, or Heat, or whatever, are about, all right, how would you do this? And then how would you get away with it? And what happens if getting away with it goes wrong? How would you get away with that? Like, where

• 57:57Chris Ryan?

  would you go next? And, you know, it's those moments in these movies where you're like, God, everything has gone wrong for these guys, but they're still thinking it through. And that's the same thing Saul and Breaking Bad and this do, where you're like, how's she gonna do this? I mean, I know she wants to bury her lover in the backyard and have this moment, but... I've never dug a hole. That's hard, you know?

• 58:19Speaker 06

  Digging a hole is hard.

• 58:20Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 58:20Speaker 06

  Especially in that part of Albuquerque where it's just truly just nothing but lava rock.

• 58:26Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 58:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, you just can't do it.

• 58:27Chris Ryan?

  And then the great thing about it is Carol's character comes through. And that's the coolest thing about all of these shows and stuff we're talking about is Carol being stubborn.

• 58:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 58:37Chris Ryan?

  And Carol thinking that like, you know, no one can possibly understand my personal experience because now they're all sharing one experience.

• 58:45Speaker 06

  Right.

• 58:46Chris Ryan?

  It comes through because she doesn't have the right tool to dig in the ground.

• 58:50Speaker 06

  And she refuses, you know, here, go get, no, I don't want any help. I'm doing it myself. Yeah, she's, she's a stubborn, she's a stubborn hero.

• 58:59Chris Ryan?

  Do you have to have rules or principles about, okay, you know, we have this, we have a sequence here. We want her to get this to do this, or she's got to get to this other country. What would happen? How would, what flight would she book? Where would she sit on the flight? All that stuff. Do you have to have kind of like a part of your brain that's like, okay, but now I need, we need to then cut back to some emotional balance or character beat that goes beyond just the lifting up and down of a tray table or whatever it might be?

• 59:31Speaker 06

  The best version of this job is, is when you, when you approach it organically. I, I have come to find when you're in the writer's room and you're surrounded by really smart folks that you like spending 12 hours a day with, the, the best version of this, of this job is when we sit there and we say to ourselves, where is Walter White or Jimmy McGill or Carol Sturka's head at right this minute? What does she want to do next? And what obstacle is, is arrayed before, obstacles plural are arrayed before her? When you slow it down and you, and you granularize it, if that's a word.

• 1:00:08Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Speaker 06

  To that degree, that's, that's where the good stuff happens, I think. And, and then every now and then to, to kind of blow, blow some fresh air through your brain, you, you think ahead and you say, you know, what would be a really cool place to get to? You know, where are we, where do we want to head this season?

• 1:00:25Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:26Speaker 06

  Where do we want to head by the end of this episode? So that's helpful too. And I, I, that's always can be a good thing to do, but.

• 1:00:34Speaker 06

  The version that doesn't seem to work, at least for me, is when you get too, you, you, your, your vision becomes too distant and you're like, I gotta get to this scene. It's gonna be a cool scene. Well, how do you get there? Because this character would never do thus and so, which would put them in a position, if you, when you get lazy about character, you're done for, I think. That's if, if people, it's the, this old thing we've all heard, you know, okay, Bill, we gotta check out this haunted house. Oh, my flashlight just went dead. I tell you what, I'm gonna go to the attic. Yeah, we should split up. You know, it's, it's, uh, that's a, that's a fun one to ponder because it's like the movies we all love or the movies that worked harder to

• 1:01:19Speaker 06

  explain basic human behavior. Everyone, everyone is an expert in human behavior. Everyone of a certain age, you know, you, probably not even adulthood, you, you get to be around 12 or 13 years old. You were an expert on human behavior. You, you can, and you can call BS on behavior that is not human, that is not recognizable, that is not legit or kosher. So, so often in, in some, still some movies we love, we, we kind of turn a blind eye to it, but it, you know, there'll be characters doing, you know, heading to the attic of the haunted house all by themselves just because it's gonna be a scarier scene, but it always works better still if there's a reason they have to split up that you can actually buy, you know, that, that's what takes, that's where

• 1:02:03Speaker 06

  the hard work comes in. That's, that's where the, you know, it's like pulling teeth or pulling your hair out, trying to figure the stuff out.

• 1:02:09Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. And I also think that when you watch Carol go through what she does in the first episode and a half, when you get to the second half of episode two, and she's actually interacting with people nominally like her, you know, it goes poorly, but you know why. And you can understand, this is a, this is a person who assumes that everybody's gonna think the way she does, or see things the way that she does. And when they don't, that's just, that sets her off. That's a complete deal breaker, you know, and she may have these unarticulated feelings for this person that she feels like represents something in her life, but it's fascinating to watch. I have, you know, I have so many questions, but I'll, I'll wrap up with this one because I, you know, you've talked

• 1:02:52Chris Ryan?

  in the past couple of years about your desire to write something that was about more of a good guy.

• 1:02:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01Chris Ryan?

  Jury's out on Carol. She seems like a good person-ish, you know? Maybe not a nice person, super, but I was curious whether or not, without giving away what happens in Pluribus, you felt like you were able to do that this time around?

• 1:03:15Speaker 06

  You're always reacting to the last thing you did when you're writing, you know, like, what have I done in the past, you know, and for me, it's like, what can I do different next time? I had seven wonderful years on The X-Files, and I took it for granted, the idea of writing heroes. But Mulder and Scully were heroes. Old-fashioned, wonderful heroes that I started to take the idea of writing for heroes for granted, because I thought, yeah, that's what everybody does. And then, when I had a chance to write an anti-hero, and the way for me was paved by The Sopranos and The Shield, I thought, this would be great, and what a breath of fresh air, the world needs this, you know? And then, now it's been 20 years now, of just, I feel like, I feel like we've got so many

• 1:03:59Speaker 06

  anti-heroes, or just flat-out villains that we root for in our fiction, that it's starting to leak into the real world. We got, we got real-life people who are like, yeah, the lesson to be taken from Breaking Bad is, you know, just stick it to everybody and make as much money as you... Yeah, yeah. You know, to me, it's a cautionary tale, to some folks, it's aspirational, you know? And so, I'm not trying to save the world or anything, although if I could, I would. But it's not, it's not that so much, it's just, I kinda did, I had my, I wouldn't say I got tired of writing bad guys, but I kinda had my fill of it. It's kinda time to push back from the table.

• 1:04:41Chris Ryan?

  Well, if you're gonna do so much process stuff, you have to put your mind in there, the character's point of view of like, alright, how am I gonna...

• 1:04:49Speaker 06

  That's true, and I remember a night, and I, I mean, I just, it was the greatest thing in my life, was getting to write Breaking Bad, getting to work on it with all these other great people. But I remember driving home late at night from the writers' room, one time, and this was probably season five or so.

• 1:05:04Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, pretty dark.

• 1:05:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, and it was dark, and I, a car pulled up next to me, and I just had this... Brief weird certainty that someone in the next car was eyeballing me and they were gonna shoot me.

• 1:05:16Chris Ryan?

  And I blame Todd for that.

• 1:05:17Speaker 06

  And I finally like, I look over, cause you know, yeah, cause when you do that 12 hours a day, 14 hours a day, it starts to get in your head a little bit. And I looked over and it was a soccer mom and coming back with her kids from some, you know, like a Honda Odyssey or something, coming back from some late soccer game. But at a certain point, it's just like, ah, I've kinda had enough of this, you know, and, and it doesn't mean I will never write a bad guy again, but I like the idea of writing, to me, Carol is a flawed hero.

• 1:05:49Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:50Speaker 06

  An imperfect hero, but she's trying, and is, is, is the quest she's on even the right thing to be doing? I'm not even sure the jury, I think the jury's out on that.

• 1:05:58Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:59Speaker 06

  But she's trying to do the right thing versus Walter White and, and for most of his run, Jimmy McGill as well. They weren't necessarily trying to do the right thing. And it's, it's refreshing. It's, it's a lot easier, I will say, to make bad guys interesting than good guys.

• 1:06:15Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 1:06:16Speaker 06

  It's, it's tougher making the good guys, which is a shame, a weird irony and a shame, but it's, it's worth attempting, I think.

• 1:06:23Chris Ryan?

  Well, Vince, thank you so much for joining me today.

• 1:06:26Speaker 06

  Thank you, Chris.

• 1:06:27Chris Ryan?

  And thank you so much for the show. It's gonna be so exciting to go over it, episode by episode. I can't wait to dig deeper into the first season.

• 1:06:31Speaker 06

  Thank you, man. This was fun.

• 1:06:32Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, thanks for coming there.