Apple TV has an absolutely wild batting average when it comes to hit series, and another home run was Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus, the sci-fi series starring Better Call Saul’s Rhea Stillhorn. It’s up for a number of Emmys this year, but it has a problem. Like its sci-fi cohort, Severance, there are going to be yawning gaps between its seasons, something Gilligan has not tried to hide.
Now, at least, we have a fresh update from Gilligan. On a recent podcast with Deadline, Gilligan confirms that season 2 has been written, and filming will start “in a couple months.” Given the production timeline of season 1, we can map out when a likely release date would be.
- Pluribus season 1 started filming in February 2024 in Gilligan’s favorite city, Albuquerque. The show then released on November 7, 2025, 21 months later, and aired weekly through December. That was 7 months of filming with 14 months of post-production.
- Now, here we are a long, long while later. If “a couple months” means, say, two, taking us to October 2026, it will be close to a year since season 1 of Pluribus premiered before it even starts filming season 2. Then, if we’re taking that original timeline, 21 months after filming starts in October 2026 would be July 2028 for a release date.
- That is 2 years and 8 months between seasons. That is just under the Severance season 1 to season 2 gap, 2 years and 11 months. That was extended a bit because of the SAG-AFTRA strikes, but Pluribus season 1 filmed after that.
While there are many reasons that shows take so, so long to come back in the streaming era, in this case, some are specific to Gilligan, who has previously said that he does not write multiple-season arcs ahead of time:
“We break story brick by brick, and we regularly write ourselves into narrative corners… then we spend months figuring out how to break back out of them.”
Then, he’s spoken about about why season 2 is taking so long specifically, with this filming gap now almost a year:
“We are breaking the season right now. It is not going quite as fast as I would hope… We’re looking forward to people seeing it in eight or nine years when we get Season 2 finished.”
Ha ha. We laugh so we don’t cry.
It seems a bit frustrating for Gilligan himself, but also fans. Not just because of the long wait, but because it’s confusing to look back to his previous work and see that it took just over five years to air 62 episodes of Breaking Bad. We are getting 17-18 episodes of Pluribus in three years, it seems.
At least we finally have confirmation that writing is over and filming is starting soon, but yes, it’s going to be a long, long wait from here, and I’m not sure how much patience fans will have, no matter how much they liked the original offering.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.