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Even for Vince Gilligan, the legendary creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, art still needs to have limits.
‘The Mona Lisa has a frame around it,’ he tells me. ‘It’s not infinite, it’s not endless. You’ve got to have some sort of limits on your art to make it better, to make you work that much harder to make it succeed.’
But for his latest Apple TV series Pluribus, which airs on November 7, Gilligan’s budget was certainly a step up from his AMC days with Walter White.
‘It is wonderful, I’ve got so say,’ he tells Metro. ‘It was a step up budgetarily with Apple, but they’ve also given us the time. They haven’t been breathing down our necks, which to me is just as important, probably more important.
‘AMC was very generous to us on breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, but this show is at a whole different level scope-wise. But even then, the budget was barely enough. At a lot of times we were running out of money.’
The series in question is a sprawling nine-part sci-fi thriller about a ‘friendly’ apocalyptic virus that spreads across the globe, and transforms everyone’s mentality into that of tranquility.
In what is his first project since Saul Goodman’s storyline ended three years ago, the story centres around romance author Carol (Rhea Seehorn), who has to save the earth, despite being the ‘most miserable person’ on it.
The show, which like the Last Of Us is about a virus outbreak, has already drawn comparisons to Apple TV’s monumental success, Severance.
But for Gilligan, whose main character is a fed-up author tired of her overbearing fans, his main concern is that ‘people are going to think I’m kind of subtly pooping on my fans when I really am not’.
Discussing Carol, he says: ‘We have something in common in the sense that when people have been so wonderful to you, you’re afraid suddenly you wake up one morning and you realise it was all a dream. You realise people are not into you so much anymore.
‘I think that’s kind of what makes her tick and what’s makes her say the thing she does. I’m not the happiest guy in the world, but she’s more of an open misanthrope than I am because that’s more dramatic.’
Talking about how he came up with the series, he explains: ‘I don’t know where the ideas come from, but I know this one hit me while I was taking long walks around Burbank, California.
‘I started daydreaming about a guy who everybody’s really, really, really nice to. Everybody loves him. Everybody would do anything, even jump on a hand grenade for him.
‘Any fantasy, any whatever, this guy would have. And I found that to be an interesting thing to ponder.’
As the series explores this alternate world where everybody’s minds are connected together and individuality is incinerated, viewers will likely draw parallels to the looming threat of artificial intelligence.
Chuckling to himself, however, he tells me: ‘It’s funny. People will probably make a connection to AI with this story. I’ve heard some people say this is about COVID.
‘People don’t realise how damn long it takes me to come up with things. It’s been the better part of a decade.
‘When COVID hit, I remember thinking, oh, damn, everybody’s going to think this is this is about COVID.
‘And then I guess, luckily, it took me so many years to get this thing on the air because I’m so damn slow, so mercifully that is fading into the rearview mirror for all of us, I hope.
‘But then AI comes along, and, I all I can say is I wasn’t thinking of either of those things actively. But if people watch Pluribus and they say to themselves, “It’s about AI, or it’s about viruses infecting the world”, more power to them. It’s up to the viewer to decide what it means.’
Props to him for not taking the credit, I say.
His latest project also marks his second collaboration with Seehorn, who starred in Better Call Saul.
‘She was the newcomer on Better Call Saul and I really liked her,’ he tells me.
‘I thought, man, she could be so dramatic, but she could be so funny. I’d like to work with her again.
‘[I thought] it’s probably time I have a female protagonist, and that’s when the idea came.’
Pluribus is also the third consecutive series that Gilligan has set in Albuquerque.
As I ask him whether he’s only ever going to set his shows there, the 58-year-old – who radiates a warmth that seems totally at odds with the dark characters he writes – adds: ‘It’s kind of a muse to me.
‘But selfishly, I wanted to continue working with my crew that I’ve been working with for the better part of two decades and that’s where they all live. They all live in the greater Albuquerque area.
‘I was reluctant to set yet another show in Albuquerque, especially one that had nothing to do with the Breaking Bad universe, but at the end of the day, I thought, well, what the hell? Let’s just go for it. There was no reason to do it other than I love my crew.’
Before we wrap up our chat, I have to ask him about future seasons, given that season two was already renewed before the first had even aired.
‘I’d like it to go at least three seasons, he says. ‘But, I just don’t know yet.
‘As Apple’s been wonderful to give us a second season from the get go, I think we have more story in us than that. How much story exactly? I don’t know, because Breaking Bad, if you had asked me in season one, how many seasons it should go, I would have said, two or three and then it was six.
‘So I’m not being coy when I say I really don’t know. Just like we did in the last two shows we’ll see where it takes us.’
For Gilligan’s sake, and for mine, I’m hoping for six seasons again, just like Breaking Bad.
Pluribus premieres on Friday November 7 with the first two episodes. This will be followed by one new episode weekly through to the finale on December 26.
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