Why Pluribus Season 2 Is Taking So Long Explained By Vince Gilligan: “Don’t Hold Your Breath”
Vince Gilligan explains the long wait for Pluribus season 2.
The Breaking Bad creator's science-fiction show quickly became Apple TV's most-watched original series of all time and received widespread critical acclaim, as per the near-perfect 99% score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. While Pluribus season 2 was ordered alongside season 1, previous updates revealed that the scripts are still being worked on, an official filming start date has not been set, and late 2028 seems to be the soonest that the show would be able to return at this point.
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🍪Ted
LassoBiscuits with the boss
🧠SeverancePraise Kier
🐎Slow
HorsesSlough House
☕Morning
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MankindWhat if...?
01
Apple TV+’s breakout comedy about a relentlessly optimistic American football coach hired to manage an English Premier League team won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series back-to-back in 2021 and 2022. Who plays Ted?
✓ Correct! Jason Sudeikis — the former SNL cast member who originally played Ted in 2013 NBC Sports Premier League promos. He co-created the series with Brendan Hunt (who plays Coach Beard), Bill Lawrence, and Joe Kelly. Sudeikis won back-to-back Emmys for Best Actor in a Comedy. A Season 4 is officially in production for 2026.
✗ Cut it off! The answer is Jason Sudeikis. Jon Hamm is Mad Men (and later showed up as himself in Ted Lasso Season 2). Will Ferrell hasn’t done an Apple TV+ show. Brendan Hunt plays Coach Beard — Ted’s silent assistant — and was a co-creator, but Sudeikis is the title character and won two Best Actor Emmys for the role.
02
Ben Stiller-directed sci-fi thriller Severance became a cultural phenomenon with its eerie Macrodata Refinement floors and “praise Kier” cultishness. What is the name of the sinister biotech corporation at its centre?
✓ Correct! Lumon Industries — the unsettling corporation founded by the cult-like Eagan family, whose “severance procedure” surgically splits an employee’s work memories from their outside life. Weyland-Yutani is from Alien; Umbrella Corp is Resident Evil; Apex is fictional but not this show. Lumon’s retro-futuristic aesthetic (beige Macbook-era CRTs and long hallways) has become instantly iconic.
✗ Cut it off! The answer is Lumon Industries. Weyland-Yutani is the Alien franchise’s evil megacorp. Umbrella Corp runs Resident Evil. Apex isn’t a recognisable fictional company. Lumon is the creepy biotech behind Severance — with its Kier Eagan cult of personality, waffle parties, and surgically separated “innies” and “outies.”
03
In March 2022, Apple TV+ made streaming history when one of its films became the first from any streaming service to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Which film was it?
✓ Correct! CODA (Children of Deaf Adults) — Sian Heder’s drama about a hearing daughter of a deaf family in Massachusetts — won Best Picture at the 94th Academy Awards, beating The Power of the Dog (the heavy favourite). Troy Kotsur’s supporting-actor win was the first for a deaf male actor. The Morning Show is a TV series, Greyhound is Apple’s Tom Hanks WWII film, Killers is an Apple film but was released later.
✗ Cut it off! The answer is CODA. The Morning Show is a series. Greyhound is Apple’s 2020 Tom Hanks WWII film (a solid hit but not an Oscar winner). Killers of the Flower Moon — Scorsese’s 2023 Apple release — was nominated for 10 Oscars but won none. CODA’s 2022 Best Picture win made Apple the first streamer to break through in the category.
04
The scruffy, flatulent, ruthlessly cynical MI5 exile Jackson Lamb — running the Slough House dumping ground for disgraced spies — is one of modern TV’s most acclaimed performances. Which veteran actor plays him?
✓ Correct! Gary Oldman — Oscar winner for Darkest Hour — plays Jackson Lamb opposite Kristin Scott Thomas’ glacial Diana Taverner. The series adapts Mick Herron’s Slough House novels and has become Apple’s most quietly successful long-running drama, renewed through at least Season 6. Oldman has repeatedly called Lamb his favourite role of his career.
✗ Cut it off! The answer is Gary Oldman. Anthony Hopkins hasn’t done an Apple TV+ series of this prominence. Colin Firth was reportedly in contention for different spy roles (including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’s George Smiley, which Oldman also played). Jim Broadbent appears elsewhere. Oldman’s Lamb is one of TV’s most delightfully unpleasant protagonists.
05
Apple TV+’s flagship prestige drama on launch day — a #MeToo-era newsroom saga about the on-air partners of a fictional morning TV show — was anchored by two huge Hollywood names as its co-leads and producers. Who are they?
✓ Correct! Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon — both also executive producers — anchor the show as Alex Levy and Bradley Jackson. Reportedly each earned a then-record $1.1 million per episode. Steve Carell co-stars as the disgraced anchor whose firing kicks off the entire series. Aniston earned her first Emmy nomination for dramatic work for the role in 2020.
✗ Cut it off! The answer is Jennifer Aniston & Reese Witherspoon. Witherspoon & Dern did Big Little Lies (on HBO). Kidman was also in Big Little Lies. Meryl Streep joined The Morning Show in later seasons (a supporting role). Aniston and Witherspoon lead and produce — both reportedly making $1.1M per episode in one of streaming’s richest-ever deals.
06
Ronald D. Moore’s alt-history space epic For All Mankind — one of Apple TV+’s original launch titles — jumps forward in time each season. What is the show’s central point of divergence from real history?
✓ Correct! The Soviets beat Apollo 11 to the Moon in June 1969 — keeping the Space Race alive and turning NASA into a permanently ascendant institution. That single change cascades across decades: women astronauts are pushed early, lunar bases are built in the 1970s, Mars is reached in the 1990s, and so on. Each season time-jumps ahead a decade, showing how this different history snowballs.
✗ Cut it off! The answer is the Soviets landing on the Moon first — June 1969, beating Apollo 11. That single change drives everything: continued funding, expanded NASA, women astronauts, a permanent lunar base by the 1980s, Mars missions in the 1990s. Aliens aren’t in the show. Mars gets colonised, but much later. NASA remains public throughout the series.
07
Apple TV+ launched with a small lineup of nine originals — including The Morning Show, See, Dickinson, and For All Mankind — at the aggressively low price of $4.99 a month. When did the service officially go live?
✓ Correct! Apple TV+ launched on November 1, 2019 — just before Disney+ beat it to market by 11 days. Apple went in with a tiny roster of about nine originals (versus Disney+’s massive back catalogue) but compensated with $1 billion in original content spend and a one-year free trial for Apple hardware buyers. Its quality-over-quantity bet has since paid off in awards and prestige.
✗ Cut it off! The answer is November 2019 — specifically November 1st, just 11 days before Disney+ launched (a deliberate piece of scheduling brinkmanship). Apple launched with only nine originals and priced at $4.99/month to try to get ahead of Netflix and Disney. The service went live just before the pandemic turbocharged streaming growth everywhere.
08
Apple TV+’s post-apocalyptic thriller Silo — starring Rebecca Ferguson in a 10,000-person underground society — adapts a bestselling series of novels originally self-published as a 2011 short story. Who wrote them?
✓ Correct! Hugh Howey self-published Wool as a short story on Amazon in 2011; word-of-mouth turned it into a trilogy (Wool, Shift, Dust) and eventually a publishing phenomenon. Apple’s adaptation, retitled Silo, premiered in 2023. Andy Weir wrote The Martian and Project Hail Mary. Blake Crouch wrote Dark Matter and Recursion. Ted Chiang wrote the novella that became Arrival.
✗ Cut it off! The answer is Hugh Howey. Andy Weir is The Martian/Project Hail Mary. Blake Crouch is Dark Matter/Recursion (also recently adapted to Apple TV+, hence the mix-up). Ted Chiang is Arrival’s source. Howey’s Wool trilogy — Silo’s source — started as a self-published Amazon short story in 2011 before exploding into a bestseller.
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In an interview with Decider at Televerse, Gilligan was asked when Pluribus season 2 would be released. He admitted that it will "be a long time," that he does not like how long it takes, but it is inevitable given the complex global story, the filming logistics, and an overlooked challenge of this show's post-production process. Check out his comments below:
I'm not even sure if I'm supposed to say, but it's going to be a long time. It's going to be a while. That is not on purpose. That is not to make the fans frustrated with us. That is my least favorite thing about the process, is how long it takes. But it takes what it takes because it takes us quite a while to figure out this very complex story.
Now we've got it figured out for season 2. Now we got to shoot it and that takes a long time because it's a story about a worldwide event, so we have to range all over the world, which is fun, but it takes a lot of planning, takes a lot of scheduling. And then the post-production process takes a lot longer than people think because, for instance, in every shot, we have to erase the background. The world has not been depopulated, but sometimes people are just leaving our main character alone, so there's always some car in the background that an artist has to digitally erase or someone walking in the background. The visual effects, which most of them you would never know are visual effects, take forever, so it takes quite a while.
Gilligan quipped at the end of his response that, "My mom is always on me about it. She's always saying, 'I'm not going to live to see this damn season 2 of yours.' And I say, 'Mom, we're working as fast as we can.'" He then asked viewers to "please bear with us. Don't hold your breath; it's going to be a while."
While Gilligan once again confirms that it will be a long wait, his comments do come with a positive update, which is that he and the show's creative team have figured out the season 2 story. This doesn't mean that the scripts are complete, as less than a month ago he addressed the Pluribus season 2 filming timeline by saying they were "about halfway through figuring out" the story and "it'll be months before we start shooting it again." Having nailed down the overarching direction of the season should help immensely with finalizing the scripts, though.
Even though long waits between seasons of streaming shows have become more common, Gilligan's remarks do clarify why this is especially the case for his Apple TV science-fiction series. Much of the story is set in Albuquerque, which is also where filming primarily takes place, but the story also features scenes across the globe due to the alien virus having infected almost the entire worldwide population. This creates narrative and logistical challenges that many other shows and their localized, smaller-scale plots don't have to deal with.
More so than the story's global scale, Gilligan's explanation of the post-production process is something that most audiences likely are not as aware of. Erasing any visual details from the background that would break the immersion of Pluribus' alien virus hive mind is important and easy to take for granted, but it's also a painstaking endeavor, and one that is still far from beginning for season 2 with filming not having started yet.
As for what the upcoming episodes will entail, Pluribus season 1 ended with Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) returning home with an atomic bomb and poised to now work with Manousos Oviedo (Carlos-Manuel Vesga), the only other individual immune to the virus who wants to restore the world to what it used to be. Carol leaves behind her romantic relationship with Zosia (Karolina Wydra), a member of the hive mind, which is still searching for ways to affect the rest of the immune.
Pluribus season 1 received 18 Primetime Emmy Award nominations, including Outstanding Drama Series, Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series (Seehorn), Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (Vesga), Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series (Wydra), Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series (Gilligan), and Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series (Gilligan).
All episodes of Pluribus season 1 are now streaming on Apple TV.