This intriguing series from Vince Gilligan stars Better Call Saul's Rhea Seehorn as a cynical woman living in a world where people are suddenly happy all the time. The result is George Orwell meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

If a mystery man talks directly to you by name through your television, and you're not dreaming or hallucinating, it's safe to assume the world has shifted. How and why is the question that winds through Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan's delightful new series. Pluribus plays like George Orwell meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it still has Gilligan's distinctive voice, blending the real and the outlandish. After all, how preposterous was it for a high-school science teacher to become a drug lord, as Walter White did in Breaking Bad, or for a slimeball lawyer like Saul Goodman to be the hero we root for? Here Gilligan wraps timely social commentary in sci-fi tropes – and centres the story around a prickly but sympathetically down-to-earth heroine – to create one of the smartest, most entertaining shows of the year.

That heroine, Carol Sturka, is played by Rhea Seehorn – Kim from Better Call Saul, without Kim's distinctively unstylish ponytail – and she is perfectly in sync with Gilligan's mix of genuine emotions and wild plot turns. A cataclysmic event occurs which leaves Carol surrounded by people who are happy all the time. She was already one of the least cheerful people on the planet, and seems immune to whatever's going on around her. A best-selling romance novelist, she privately says her readers are "a bunch of dummies" for gobbling up her books, which have titles like Bloodsong of Wycaro. She is cynical and acerbic, and her droll scepticism is a great, refreshing quality in this world of people who might as well be walking, talking smiley-faces. "Nobody sane is that happy," she insists. The series puts us in Carol's place, and Seehorn's empathetic performance is both dramatic and witty, grounding the sci-fi plot in her visceral, fearful, determined reactions.

Although the show's premise........

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