I had been meaning to write something about the slowness of Pluribus (Apple TV+, 2025-present) for a while (especially after watching episode 7, “The Gap”, with my jaw on the floor for most of it, which may or may not be why the episode is named thusly), and then, there it was, a new CSTonline blog by Sérgio Dias Branco: “Slow Television, Vivid Crime: Steven Zaillian’s Ripley and the Aesthetics of Duration” (2026)[i]. Not only am I grateful to the author of this blog because it is a thrilling, excellent read about a mode of television storytelling that is certainly à la mode and that I wish to think and write about in much more detail in the years to come, but also because he has graciously done all the work of explaining the difference between the kind of slow television that his blog was concerned with and that I am interested in exploring in relation to Pluribus, as opposed to Slow-TV[ii] as in televised events that unfold in real time.
Pluribus premiered on Apple TV+ last November, and I had been anxiously awaiting it after seeing lots of very short teasers for it on my Instagram account (the algorithm knows me well). I simply couldn’t wait for this new programme about a female character played by the magnificent Rhea Seehorn whom I’d fallen in love with when she played Kim Wexler on Better Call Saul. The Pluribus promo posters also promised a narrative that would speak to my interest in the imperative of positivity within our current neoliberal times: a Petri dish with a smiley face and the tag line “Happiness is contagious” on a bright yellow background. So far, the show has exceeded my expectations. What I didn’t expect last November was how concerned with duration and slowness this narrative would be. Vince Gilligan’s previous programmes, Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008-2013) and Better Call Saul (AMC, 2015-2022) already frequently foregrounded duration and deliberate slowness through their carefully calibrated aesthetics, innovative (and often slow-paced) storytelling techniques, and intricate production designs.[iii] Now, Pluribus.
SPOILER ALERT
In Pluribus, Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) is a bestselling author of fantasy romance novels, and in the first episode, she and her partner, Helen (Miriam Shor), who is also her manager, return to their home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, from a book tour. This is after the series starts with a cold open during which we see how astronomers discover a mysterious radio signal that turns out to be a viral RNA sequence. One thing leads to another and soon, everyone (and I mean everyone) gets infected and people start acting in unison, collectively, quietly, efficiently, and contently. All infected humans now share one consciousness (no need to speak anymore), except for Carol and twelve others in the world who are somehow immune. Needless to say, the “Others” (henceforth just the Others) freak Carol out (not only, but especially due to their contentment and generally very pleasant demeanour), and on top of that, her partner, Helen, has died during the “joining” (which involved individuals starting to shake uncontrollably, collapsing, and just lying around for a while). I do not want to say too much more about the rest of season one’s plot, so I will just focus on a few instances that illustrate the programme’s commitment to slowness.
Throughout the first season of Pluribus, the aspect of duration I relished the most, apart from the questions the narrative asks about what makes us human, what might happen if efficiency in the age of AI truly trumps everything, what individualism is and means, etc., etc., was how slowness is more than a storytelling mode, but an indispensable narrative element, and something that distinguishes our main characters, Carol, and later, Manousos (Carlos-Manuel Vesga), from the Others. Scenes in which groups of humans who are now “joined” smoothly undertake tasks are juxtaposed with sequences during which characters who are still fully, or “originally” human—Carol and Manousos—engage in laborious activities during long takes or drawn-out sequences.
In one such sequence, in episode 5, “Got Milk,” Carol lays heavy stone tiles over her deceased partner Helen’s grave, finally placing a large, heavy tombstone on top of it. She does all of this by herself and does not ask the Others for help. One individual in particular, Zosia (Karolina Wydra), offers Carol help and reminds her to drink water as she is handling heavy tiles in her backyard in the New Mexico heat, but Carol is apprehensive and weary. This is another important aspect of the story: The Others are truly not the kinds of Zombies we may expect. They are helpful, non-threatening, and so pleasant. And Carol, on the other hand, is somewhat jaded, a romantasy author who does not think much of her readers, who feels that she has sold out, so it is not all that easy to be on Carol’s side here sometimes, even though she is grieving the loss of Helen. This particular scene and the significance of the ritual of a proper burial as a particularly human practice is juxtaposed with a discovery that Carol makes during the same episode, which is that the rest of the world—the Others—process the bodies of deceased individuals (if we can still call them that) and turn them into sustenance, in a twist that is decidedly not as shocking as it may have been back in 1973, in Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green. As the Others explain to Carol via a recording of John Cena as himself (although, of course, the individual John Cena technically doesn’t exist anymore after the “joining”), they consume food that was produced before the joining, but they will not harm living beings or, as it seems, plants, as they will not pick fruit or vegetables (like some fruitarians), so they predict that they will eventually starve to death, and consuming a drink that contains HDP (human derived protein) will at least delay that outcome. The moral unsavoriness of this practice notwithstanding, the Others are great for the Earth’s crumbling ecosystem as they conserve energy (the only reason Albuquerque is still illuminated at all times is that Carol wants the city lights on, and the Others all sleep in a large sports arena instead of their former individual homes) and do no harm to flora, fauna, or humans.
Carol, as much as she is appalled by and fundamentally opposed to the end of humanity (and individualism) that the Others represent, recognises that she is lonely without anyone around, accepts their help after a short period of apprehension at the start, and begs them to return after a period during which the Others have abandoned her (more on that in the next paragraph). She cultivates a relationship with Zosia, which turns into a romantic entanglement in episode 8, “Charm Offensive.”[iv] In contrast, we are introduced to Manousos, one of the other remaining “regular” humans in the world, a man who has shut himself in a storage management facility in Paraguay and is shown to want nothing whatsoever to do with the joined, refusing to eat the visually appealing meals the Others deliver to him, choosing to eat cans of dog food instead. When Manousos finally decides to venture from Paraguay to New Mexico to seek out Carol (the Others have faithfully delivered Carol’s video tapes to the other “regular” humans where Carol implores them to help her do something to reverse all of this–they are so helpful!), he continues to refuse any help the Others offer him along the way whatsoever to the point where he almost dies after the spikes of a Chunga palm tree impale him, with the wound getting infected swiftly. The Others transport him to a hospital in Panama via helicopter while he is unconscious, but upon waking, Manousos insists that they bill him for his hospital visit and promptly leaves again, on his own, still wounded and in need of care, “borrowing” an ambulance. The sequences along Manousos’ journey are deliberately drawn-out, accentuating the labour and time necessary to do, well, anything (driving, walking, hiking, learning a language with the help of old school tapes instead of Duolingo). We often just watch Manousos drive, walk, hike, and repeat to himself a few phrases he is trying to remember in English for when he meets Carol, particularly: “I am Manousos Oviedo. I am not one of them. I wish to save the world.”
Slowness and, particularly, repetition[v] are foregrounded whenever Carol calls the Others on the phone after they abandon Albuquerque in “Got Milk.” In the previous episode, “Please, Carol,” Carol tries to manipulate the Others into revealing any knowledge they may have that could reverse their joining. To do this, Carol injects sodium thiopental (effectively, a truth serum) into Zosia’s IV drip while she is in the hospital recovering from an explosion in episode three, “Grenade.” Carol rolls Zosia out of the hospital in a wheelchair and once the sodium thiopental starts taking effect, asks Zosia lots of questions to tease out useful information (by this point, Carol has already found out that the Others cannot lie, but when they do not want to reveal certain truths, they can choose to not say anything). Carol’s interrogation causes the Others that are currently working along quietly at the hospital to congregate in a circle around Carol and Zosia, imploring Carol to stop (hence the episode title), and when Carol does not stop, they experience a form of prolonged collective shock in the form of paralysis, which kills many “individuals” around the world. To protect themselves and avoid further harm, the Others vacate the city as to be far enough away from Carol. So, every time Carol calls them after that point, she is greeted with an automated voicemail (voiced by actor Patrick Fabian who played Howard Hamlin, Kim Wexler’s employer, who, in turn, was played by Rhea Seehorn, in Better Call Saul):
“Hello, Carol. This is a recording. At the tone, you can leave a message to request anything you might need. We’ll do our best to provide it. Our feelings for you haven’t changed, Carol. But after everything that’s happened, we just need a little space.”
In subsequent sequences and episodes before Carol asks the Others to come back, Carol calls them multiple times, and every time, this voice recording is played while Carol waits, and so do we. It’s slow. And like so many other deliberately drawn-out sequences in the show, that slowness asks us, or at least gives us ample time, to contemplate what we are watching. Of course, slowness might not turn out to be any sort of literal antidote to the genetic mutation that has connected everyone expect Carol and a few others in Pluribus, but the act of watching humans do difficult things that take a long time in this era of acceleration feels significant and I would love to read a lot more about these incorporations of slowness into TV narratives.
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Sarah Lahm is Lecturer in Media, Communication and Cultural Studies at the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. She is working on her first monograph, Fragmentation, Neoliberalism and Gender on TV: Serial Self-Replacement, which examines ‘self-replacing’ subjects in US-American dark comedy-dramas such as Severance(Apple TV+, 2022-present), Made for Love (HBO Max, 2021-2022), and Undone (Amazon Prime Video, 2019-2022), in an era marked by cultural anxieties, economic instability, and the pressures of neoliberal self-optimisation. Sarah’s work has been published in Critical Studies in Television, Journal of Gender Studies, and The European Journal of Cultural Studies, and she has contributed to several edited collections.
Footnotes
[i] Dias Branco, Sérgio. 2026 “Slow Television, Vivid Crime: Steven Zaillian’s Ripley and the Aesthetics of Duration.” CSTonline [blog], 6 February. https://cstonline.net/slow-television-vivid-crime-steven-zaillians-ripley-and-the-aesthetics-of-duration-by-sergio-dias-branco/
[ii] See, for example, Kroon and Nilsson, 2023 and Truong, 2025 in the context of Swedish television, and Jeffery and Hawkes, 2021, in an Australian context.
[iii] In relation to “quality,” “complex,” and “Peak” TV, see, for example, Jancovich and Lyons, 2003; McCabe and Akass, 2007; Mittell, 2006 and 2015; Lynch, 2022; Halfyard and Reyland, 2024.
[iv] When Carol tells Zosia in that episode, “Man, I love trains. There’s just something about the sound of a train horn, you know? […] It is the loneliest sound in the world” (“Charm Offensive,” 2025) I see Kelly Reichardt’s films–my favourite examples of slow cinema–flash before my eyes, especially Wendy and Lucy (2008) and Certain Women (2016). Long shots. Contemplation. Loneliness. Duration.
[v] James Walters’ Television and Repetition (Routledge, 2024) is a stimulating examination of various aspects of repetition in US and British television. He also published an excellent blog about Sex Education and The Mandalorian in relation to the subjectiveness of “quality” on CSTonline the same week Sérgio Dias Branco‘s was published.
