Critical reception
The first season of Pluribus received widespread critical acclaim, with critics praising Seehorn's performance, Gilligan's writing and direction, and the series' originality, tone, and stylistic influences. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the season holds a 99% approval rating, based on 186 critic reviews, with an average rating of 8.7/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "Genuinely original science-fiction fare from television veteran Vince Gilligan, Pluribus leads Rhea Seehorn through a brave new world with plentiful returns." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, gave the season a score of 87 out of 100, based on 38 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
Nicholas Quah of Vulture called the series "an entrancing piece of television", writing that Seehorn's "remarkable" performance "makes it easy to comply with Pluribus's insistence on total presence as it meditates on something essential about humankind." He compared Gilligan's direction to his work on the Breaking Bad franchise for sequences that "luxuriate in depicting process and atmosphere", describing the series' pace as "both thrilling and confounding in its refusal to yield payoff, immediate or otherwise" and praising its "gorgeous" cinematography and production design. Kaiya Shunyata of RogerEbert.com called Pluribus "one of this year's most complicated and thrilling television series", describing the series as a "bewildering mix of science fiction and noir". She praised Seehorn's performance for "commanding" the screen, while describing the "push-and-pull" between her and co-star Wydra as "fascinating to watch".
Linda Holmes of NPR felt Gilligan's "genius" to be in "the deft way he marbles brutality, humanity and humor into a single creation in which each element retains its punch, but the whole still makes sense". She praised the collaboration between Gilligan and the "extraordinary" Seehorn for tapping into the actress's comedic sensibilities, while also praising the series's "crushingly sad" depiction of existential loneliness, as well as its "philosophical frankness", which she found "more refreshing than didactic". Ben Travers of IndieWire gave the show a B+, writing that the series "rewards acute attention and an engaged mind, which would be more than enough reason to recommend it even if it wasn't also a sharply observed celebration of the human condition". He praised the "steady and stunning" cinematography and the "colorful and clarifying" production design, but in contrast to Quah, felt that Gilligan's "devotion to process" as a director "throws off the pacing, which is already unsteady thanks to the general shapelessness of our protagonist's overall journey".
James Poniewozik of The New York Times likened the series to several others, while considering Pluribus to be "its own mystifying thing" and "a wildly fanciful series that feels unsettlingly real at its core". He praised Gilligan as "a master of disorientation" and called Seehorn's performance "enormous, in quality and quantity". Summarizing the first season's pacing, Variety critic Alison Herman wrote, "Pluribus may be slow, but it was never boring." The scholar Hollis Robbins examined the influence of tracking shots used and cited Jacques Lacan in a reading of the show's focus on language.
In contrast, negative reviews focused on the show's slow pace and underdeveloped ideas. Erik Kain of Forbes expressed that his "frustration with Pluribus stems largely from two major problems. First, the pacing and repetitiveness. Second, the stretched-thin plot. This show's story is like too little butter spread over too much bread." Nick Hilton of The Independent concluded that "Where Pluribus could be an authorial send-up of modern America – a compelling vision of trying to stay sane in destabilizing times – it ends up being a bit listless." James Delingpole of The Spectator found that "most of the time it's too busy being ponderous, dry, uncertain of tone (the black comedy isn't funny enough; the dark bits aren't dark enough; the moral message is incomprehensible) and hinting at depths it resolutely fails to fathom." Hannah Brown of The Jerusalem Post found Pluribus "incredibly slow-paced, with awkward dialogue that makes its points over and over." Inkoo Kang of The New Yorker found that "the A.I. analogy gives way to something much less satisfying: a horror story about what their version of living in harmony would really entail."
