TV's best sci-fi show is finally coming back to life, and no one is ready

Summary

The remainder of 2026 should be interesting for fans of sci-fi and fantasy on TV. In November, Amazon Prime Video will air Blade Runner 2099, its TV version of the iconic sci-fi series, as well as the third season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. And in December, HBO will air its Harry Potter show, which will adapt J.K. Rowling’s book series from scratch. All of this is exciting, but the never-ending stream of reboots, sequels, and prequels can get tiresome. That’s why Pluribus, a new sci-fi show that aired on Apple TV in 2025, was so refreshing. Hailing from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, not only was it a gripping series, but it was a completely original idea. Pluribus may have been the best TV show of 2025, but it’s been too long since we’ve heard anything about its future. That’s finally changing. Pluribus is a masterpiece in the making Hello, Carol Pluribus is about Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), a romance novelist who is tired of writing derivative drivel for her fanbase. She gets a whole new problem when an alien virus quickly spreads throughout the Earth, subsuming almost everyone on the planet and turning them into members of one big, great, happy hive mind. Everyone on Earth now knows everything that everyone else knows, and they’re all directed by a singular consciousness. Everyone except Carol and 12 other people, who are immune for reasons we don’t yet understand. Carol loses her wife, Helen (Miriam Shor), during the initial spread, and is initially hostile towards members of the hive mind, sometimes called the Others (I prefer calling them “the Plurb”). But she also makes use of them, since they’re unfailingly helpful and will do anything she asks. Pluribus poses the question: if the members of the Plurb are happy, does it matter that their individuality has been taken away? And for the immune, is life better or worse than it was before? Most of the immune seem to think it’s better, and aren’t eager to reverse things. One of them even volunteers to become part of the Plurb, which eventually hopes to convert everyone; it’s their biological imperative. However, Columbian man Manousos Oviedo (Carlos-Manuel Vesga) is dead-set against this idea, and is willing to kill every member of the hive mind if that’s what it takes to wrest back control of the Earth from him. The season ends with him and Carol teaming up to take on the Plurb and to end their eternal happiness forever. At long last, Pluribus Season 2 is on the way But will it take too long? The first season of Pluribus ended in December of 2025. It’s been almost a year since then, and there’s little hope that we’ll see Season 2 anytime soon. That said, things are finally moving. “It took us a while, but we figured out Season 2,” creator and showrunner Vince Gilligan said backstage at Emmys in September, per Gold Derby. “It is technically not all written; it is broken, which is the hard part. We figured out the plot of all the episodes. The first two are written. The rest of them are at various stages of being written. But we know what the whole season is.” There’s even a production date. According to Production List, Season 2 begins shooting on October 31, 2026, on Halloween. Given how complicated a show like Pluribus is to produce, it’s unlikely we’ll actually see any new episodes before late 2027 at the very earliest. Long waits between seasons are becoming a bigger and bigger problem for prestige TV series, a problem that networks like HBO are trying to solve by making shows on a smaller scale; The Pitt and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, both of which aim to get out new seasons every year, are good examples of this. But Apple TV is sticking to an older model, and it remains to be seen if it will pay off. How can Pluribus be worth the wait when the wait is so long? Quality over quantity? The longer fans have to wait for a new season of their favorite, the better that season needs to be when it arrives, and to be fair to Apple TV, that strategy has worked for them before. Severance, one of the network’s other great sci-fi series, took three years off between its first and second seasons, and the second was even more popular. Pluribus has a lot going for it. As mentioned, Vince Gilligan created both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, considered two of the best shows of the 21st century. Rhea Seehorn won an Emmy for playing Carol. The cast and crew are more than talented enough to recapture our attention. Hurry up and wait Obviously, Apple TV has not set a release date for Pluribus Season 2. I think the second season will be good enough to draw back even people who will have forgotten the show exists by the time it finally returns. I’m happy that some networks are finding ways to produce shows quicker, but there’s also something to be said for a long, drawn-out production process where ideas can take time to marinate. If the final product is as good as it can be, people will forget how long they had to wait.