‘We had a list of over 100 titles’: Pluribus creator Vince Gilligan admits his new Apple TV series was incredibly difficult to name

Pluribus has been on my radar for quite some time. I even suggested that I think it could steal Severance’s crown, and I’m confident it would become one of the best Apple TV Plus shows when it arrives on November 7.

After seeing the first few episodes, I can confirm that it’s as good as it looks, and I was bursting with questions afterward. Thankfully, I had the honor of chatting with Vince Gilligan about the show, where I was quick to bring up the unique, impactful title.

Any writer knows that titles can be hard, and Pluribus was no exception. When I asked about the naming process, Gilligan admitted it was incredibly hard to settle on a name for his new series.

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Speaking to TechRadar, Vince Gilligan said: “This was the single hardest thing I’ve ever created, to title. It took years to come up with this title. Breaking Bad came easily, Better Call Saul came even quicker, and El Camino, that wasn’t hard either.”

“For Pluribus, we probably spent, and, and this is a lot of us together, all of us, all of my writers, my brilliant writers all in a room together. We’d be working on the show and every week or so I’d say ‘we gotta come up with a damn title for this thing. What is it?’. We had a list of over 100 titles.”

“We had Pluribus pretty early on and I said, ‘no, it’s gotta be something else’. And then we came back to it after about 2 years. I could not think of a title that really satisfied me, but now that we’ve lived with it for a while and now that it’s out in the world, it, it seems to me like, yeah, ‘why was that so hard’?”

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Pluribus — Official Trailer | Apple TV – YouTube

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Pluribus follows Rhea Seehorn’s character, Carol, a woman who seems to be the only person immune to an unexplained virus that turns the world’s population into content, optimistic people.

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Because the series focuses on a collective, Gilligan went on to explain why the word Pluribus, taken from the Latin phrase “E pluribus unum”, was perfect for his mysterious new show.

He added: “It’s a tip of the hat to the unofficial motto of America, ‘E pluribus unum’, the Latin phrase. It means ‘Out of many, one’.

“But the show is not intended to be just American, I really want this to be a show for the whole world, and I liked the idea of out of many, one, in reference to the democracy of the United States, but also out of many people from all around the world, one.”

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Considering Carol is so isolated during the events of Pluribus, and she is a single outlier, the title is very fitting indeed. I loved learning about the origins of the show, and it’s given me a greater appreciation for it.

I’m so excited to see people’s reactions to Pluribus, as it’s another smart TV show from Vince Gilligan, and jaw-droppingly shocking in places, too.

Watch Pluribus from November 7 on Apple TV.

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