I watched Apple's top sci-fi shows and this one is the winner

Apple TV+ has unofficially become the new sci-fi channel, spending hundreds of millions of dollars crafting huge elaborate science fiction shows that often run for years even if they aren't hugely popular: For All Mankind, Foundation, Invasion, Dark Matter, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Silo, See, Murderbot...it's clear that the people who run this studio are giant sci-fi dorks, and I couldn't be happier about it.

But two such shows have risen above the rest: Severance and Pluribus, which, for my money are the two best sci-fi shows running right now. You can, of course, enjoy both of these series without comparing them to each other...but it is fun to do that, so we're going to have them go head to head until we figure out a winner.

Severance vs. Pluribus Two shows enter, two shows leave, but one of them leaves with an imaginary gold ribbon we bestow on it

In terms of plot, Severance and Pluribus are very different. Severance is set in the bowels of a mysterious company called Lumon, which has created technology that can sever a person's consciousness, essentially creating a whole new person that lives in the first person's body. Our main characters are basically guinea pigs in this experiment; their severed selves go to work at Lumon during the day and remember nothing about what they did when they revert to their original selves at night. Meanwhile, the severed workers — who have never known life outside the Lumon building — start coming into their own as people and demanding more out of their strange half-lives.

Pluribus is about a kind of alien invasion, sort of. Scientists decode a message from space that, long story short, turns the great majority of the human population into a group of agreeable, pacifist pod people who all share a common hive mind, all except 13 individuals who are immune. That includes Carol (Rhea Seehorn), a self-loathing author who is one of only two immune people who actually want to reverse what has happened. But can she find the resolve to actually go through with that mission?

In terms of style, Severance and Pluribus actually have a lot in common. They both explore heady sci-fi concepts in a serious way, but include plenty of wry humor to help it all go down easily. They're both excellently paced, with writing that digs into the nuances of the characters. And they're both absolutely gorgeous to look at, with cinematography so good it'll make grown men cry, assuming those grown men are emotionally moved by beautiful shots of landscapes and perfectly composed, filmic transitions.

The truth is that it's very hard to pick a winner between these two series...but not impossible.

Pluribus edges just ahead of Severance Mileage will vary by a lot

At its heart, Severance is a puzzle box show, which means that a big part of the reason we keep watching is to find out the answers to questions like, "What is Lumon's ultimate plan?" and "What is the true nature of the severance technology?" The second season started to answer some of these questions and kept viewers hooked through to the end, but there's always a chance that a show built on mysteries can fall apart. Lost is a good example of a very popular puzzle box show that a lot of people ultimately found disappointing, because they weren't satisfied with the answers to the show's big questions.

Of course, Pluribus has unanswered questions, too; there are still things we don't know about the hive mind, but they are by nature much less secretive than the people at Lumon. By and large, the hive mind will tell you whatever you want to know; we already know that their plan is to beam this hive mind message out to other planets. The drama is more about whether it can be stopped. Can Carol fight back against the hive mind when they're more or less the only thing standing between her and bone-crushing loneliness? Will the stubborn Manousos (Carlos Manuel Vesga) aid in this quest, or will he see her as too compromised and become an enemy? Pluribus is created by Vince Gilligan, the guy behind Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul there are even hints that the shows may all take place in the same universe). He loves stories about unpredictable, difficult, morally compromised protagonists, so it's genuinely hard to predict the answer, and that's exciting.

Of course, there are plenty of great characters in Severance, too — the swaggering Dylan (Zach Cherry) is always a highlight, and I'm rooting for Mark (Adam Scott) and Helly R. (Britt Lower) to get their happy ending — but the characters in Severance are a little more subservient to the plot than the ones in Pluribus, and the show a bit colder overall.

I also like how the scale of Pluribus makes it feel more open. In the seventh episode, we followed one character's quest to cross the Columbian-Panamanian border through the deadly Darién Gap, a real trek that thousands of people cross each year, but which has almost never been dramatized in movies or on TV. Leave it to the best sci-fi show on Apple TV+ to fill that gap.

Release Date November 6, 2025

Network Apple TV

Directors Adam Bernstein, Zetna Fuentes, Melissa Bernstein

Rhea Seehorn

Carol Sturka

Carlos Manuel Vesga

Manousos

Congratulations to Pluribus! Also, who cares?

There are definitely drawbacks to Pluribus worth mentioning. Some say it's too slow, with long languid sequences that don't really go anywhere, like Carol hitting golf balls through Albuquerque skyscrapers. I think that kind of thing comes down to taste. I love how the show takes its time to explore the minutia of the characters' lives, and that it all adds up to something bigger in the end. If we hadn't seen Carol desecrate the Albuquerque skyline (and steal artwork, and play golf alongside a bison), we wouldn't understand how deep her loneliness ran, or why she does her pivotal about-face at the end of the episode.

I'll fully admit that I'm picking some serious nits here. But deciding which of two shows is "better" is always going to come down to preference. I'm just happy we have two shows so good that they can be compared to one another.

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There are other sci-fi shows out there made with the same kind of love and attention to detail as Severance and Pluribus, but it's clear to me that pretty much no one is doing it like Apple right now. Severance and Pluribus likely both have multiple seasons ahead of them, and if they keep up this level of quality, we could come out the other end with a couple of modern classics.

And Apple isn't done being unhealthily obsessed with sci-fi; they're readying a show based on Neuromancer, the classic cyberpunk book by William Gibson, for 2026. Maybe Severance and Pluribus will have some competition before long.