Shows Like
Shows Like Pluribus: Sci-Fi That Gets Under Your Skin
By Jordan A. · · 5 min read
Pluribus is a hard show to recommend around, because the thing that makes it work isn't the premise. Plenty of shows have done "alien thing changes humanity." Almost none of them have made the change look pleasant. The hive in Pluribus is kind. It's patient. It wants Carol to be happy, and it will wait as long as it takes. That's what gets under your skin.
All nine episodes are on Apple TV, running November 7 to December 23 of last year. A second season has been ordered and Apple hasn't dated it. So here's what to watch in the meantime, split by which part of it hooked you.
What Pluribus actually is
Vince Gilligan's first show since Better Call Saul. An extraterrestrial virus turns nearly everyone on Earth into a single contented consciousness. Thirteen people are immune. Rhea Seehorn plays Carol Sturka, a novelist who is one of the thirteen and is absolutely not taking it well.
Seehorn won Best Actress in a Drama at both the Golden Globes and the Critics' Choice Awards for it, and she's nominated for the same at the Emmys on September 14. The show is up for Outstanding Drama Series against The Diplomat, The Gilded Age, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Paradise, The Pitt, Slow Horses and Your Friends & Neighbors, per CBS News.
If the hive-mind premise hooked you
The Leftovers is the one. Three seasons on HBO Max, starting the day after two percent of the world's population vanishes with no explanation. It's not about the event. It's about what people do with a reality that no longer makes sense, which is the exact problem Carol has. Season 2 is one of the best seasons of television anyone has made.
Invasion on Apple TV takes the slow, ground-level approach to first contact: multiple countries, ordinary people, very little spectacle for long stretches. It tests some viewers' patience. If you liked how much time Pluribus spends on Carol just existing in an empty world, you'll be fine.
Silo, also Apple TV, is about a society that has been told a comfortable story and mostly believes it. Rebecca Ferguson plays the one person who won't stop pulling the thread. Different mechanism, same central question about whether contentment is worth what it costs.
Dark on Netflix is German, three seasons, and demands a notebook. Worth it. It's the other recent show that trusts you to sit in confusion for a long time before it explains itself.
If you're here for Rhea Seehorn
Better Call Saul is the answer and it isn't close. Six seasons, and Kim Wexler is one of the great television characters of the last twenty years. Seehorn spent most of that show acting with her face while other people talked, which is exactly the skill Pluribus is built on. It's on Netflix.
Start with season 3 if you're impatient, then go back. Or watch the whole thing properly, because seasons 1 and 2 are doing setup work you'll be grateful for later.
If you've somehow never watched Breaking Bad, that's also on Netflix, and it's the other half of the Gilligan project. Pluribus is a much quieter show, but the DNA is visible: ordinary person, impossible circumstance, terrible choices made slowly.
If you loved the Gilligan tone and pacing
What Gilligan does that almost nobody else does is let scenes run past the point of comfort. A character walks across a room. You watch the whole walk. It builds a kind of pressure that jump cuts can't.
Severance on Apple TV has that same discipline, plus the same interest in what happens when a system offers you peace in exchange for your self. Season 3 is filming and isn't expected until 2027, so it's not a bridge to anything, but as a companion piece to Pluribus it's the strongest match on this list. We went deeper on that family of shows in shows like Severance.
Devs is eight episodes, Alex Garland, and it moves like a hymn. Some of the dialogue is stiff. The dread is not.
The Americans is the other show that understands slow. Six seasons of two people lying to everyone including each other, and the tension comes almost entirely from silence and timing.
Slow-burn dread over spectacle
Five more if the tone is what you're chasing. Station Eleven, for the post-collapse world that's somehow gentle. The Terror season 1, for men in an impossible situation being slowly unmade. Slow Horses on Apple TV, for the small-scale, no-spectacle version of a genre that usually can't resist explosions. Legion, for pure formal weirdness. And Counterpart, two seasons with J.K. Simmons playing two versions of himself, which deserved far more attention than it got.
None of these are as strange as Pluribus. Nothing currently airing is as strange as Pluribus. But they're all playing in the same key.
Where each of these lives
Apple TV has Pluribus, Severance, Silo, Invasion and Slow Horses, which makes it the obvious single subscription for this list. Netflix has Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad and Dark. The Leftovers is on HBO Max.
For more from the Apple shelf, our Apple TV guide has the full picture, and the 2026 sci-fi rankings cover the genre side.
Pluribus season 2: what's confirmed
A second season has been ordered. That's the whole of it. Gilligan has talked about it in interviews without committing to anything resembling a schedule, and Apple hasn't announced a date. Given how long Better Call Saul seasons took to arrive, patience is the correct posture here.
The upside of a nine-episode season is that a rewatch costs you one weekend, and Pluribus is a show that changes on a second pass once you know what the hive actually wants.
Fourteen shows and you're going to start exactly one of them tonight. Tell BingeNext you loved Pluribus, add one more show you're into, and it'll rank these by what's most likely to work for you, filtered down to the services you already pay for.
Topics covered: pluribus, vince gilligan, apple tv plus, sci-fi, rhea seehorn
About the author
Jordan A., Founder, BingeNext
Jordan A. is the founder of BingeNext and writes every guide on this site. He built the recommendation engine after one too many nights lost to the streaming menu, and he still tests every pick the hard way: by watching it.