Critic

It’s the End of the World on TV, and We Can’t Get Enough

Pluribus, from the creator of Breaking Bad, asks, what if the apocalypse was a happy place?

Rhea Seehorn in Pluribus.

Photographer: Jeff Neumann/Apple TV

The end of the world isn’t usually so cheery.

In Pluribus, the Apple TV series created by Vince Gilligan of Breaking Bad (Fridays through Dec. 26), scientists encounter a mysterious repeating signal coming from outer space. That discovery leads researchers working for the US military to encode a sort of virus that inevitably gets set loose and, after brief periods of mass seizures, leads to a psychic harmony among every human on Earth, who now operate as an “us.”