Adam Bernstein

The compulsory happiness in Pluribus (2025) runs up against Rhea Seehorn’s stubborn human presence. We found it unsettling because her performance makes the science-fiction premise feel personal. Adam Bernstein is among the directors of Vince Gilligan’s series, which is worth the time it asks for even when its pace becomes frustrating. It is a useful introduction to a director whose work moves between comedy and drama without treating sincerity as something to be embarrassed about.

Bernstein began in animation and directed more than 70 music videos during the 1980s and 1990s, a background that informs his experiments with visual technique. His feature debut, Six Ways to Sunday (1997), sits alongside a career increasingly concentrated on television. The pilots for 30 Rock (2006) and Fargo (2014) are more useful markers of where his particular skills have been put to work. A pilot needs to establish how a programme looks and feels before anybody has learnt its habits.

Setting that tone is one of Bernstein’s strengths, and his work in both comedy and drama makes him well suited to the task. His comedy can accommodate sincerity; his dramatic work has room for levity. His collaboration with Gilligan gives another measure of his place in television: he directed eight episodes of Breaking Bad (2008), across all five seasons. That is a different job from making a pilot, requiring a director to contribute without behaving as though the programme begins afresh whenever he arrives.

Pluribus also suggests why we should be careful about assigning a whole series to any one of its directors. Gilligan’s science fiction and Seehorn’s performance are central to what works, and it would be careless to credit Bernstein with all of it. Nor does the programme’s deliberate pace become rewarding simply because the questions are worth considering: sometimes the thinking has finished before the scene has. We recommend starting here, with the caveat that a taste for slow television will help.