Gordon Smith finds unsettling drama in people who believe they are doing the right thing. We rate his work as a writer-director alongside Vince Gilligan, though Pluribus sometimes asks for more patience than it earns.
Fi1m perspective
In Pluribus (2025), the collective wants Carol to be happy and cannot see why she might object to its help. Gordon Smith and Vince Gilligan find something frightening in how reasonable that offer sounds to the people making it. We felt hemmed in by their eagerness to put her discontent right. Rhea Seehorn gives Carol’s resistance a stubborn human centre, but the writing does not assume that her immunity makes her a sound judge of everyone else. That is a complication worth spending time with.
Smith joined Better Call Saul (2015) as a staff writer and wrote episodes including “Five-O” and “Chicanery” (2017). He moved into directing with “Namaste” (2020), working from his own script, and later directed “Rock and Hard Place”. It is a progression that makes sense for someone whose writing concentrates on character backstories and moral difficulty. We are interested in that move because the person staging a scene also needs to understand why its characters might misunderstand one another.
On Pluribus, he is a writer, director and executive producer; his episode “Got Milk” (2025) balances large set pieces with intimate character moments. The combination suits a programme in which one person’s unhappiness deserves as much attention as the science-fiction premise. Gilligan remains the central collaborator, and we would not credit Smith alone with the series’ strengths. His contribution to the writing is clearest in the idea that helping Carol might be precisely what she does not want.
The reservation is pace. Pluribus sometimes takes so long to work through a question that we grow tired of considering it. Carol’s uncertain judgement is a good reason to stay with her, but it cannot make every delay rewarding. Start with Pluribus, but expect to spend some of the evening wishing it would get on with things.
Biography
Gordon Smith is an American screenwriter, producer and director. He was born in Michigan and studied at the University of Michigan before earning an MFA from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts in 2008.
Smith began his career as a production and writers' assistant on Breaking Bad. He joined the writing staff of its prequel Better Call Saul (2015–2022), where he wrote multiple episodes including "Five-O" and "Chicanery", served as a producer across all six seasons, and directed one episode. He also wrote episodes of Outsiders (2016).
Smith is an executive producer, writer and director on Vince Gilligan's Apple TV+ series Pluribus (2025–), for which he has received Primetime Emmy nominations for writing and a Writers Guild of America Award for the Better Call Saul episode "Chicanery".
