Summer and early Fall on American television in 2025 have been macabre. The two biggest breakout hits, Netflix’s Dept Q and HBO’s miniseries Task, explore worlds of violence so gruesome that not even the fifth season of the uproarious spy spoof Slow Horses can lighten the mood.
Thankfully, the best new TV shows to delight in bring the plain-old-bizarre back. Following on the runaway success of FX’s quirky detective satire, The Lowdown, these three shows bring some of the most refreshingly weird stories since Severance.
Cue plenty of uncomfortable laughs, tongue-in-cheek social commentary, and, sure, some macabre violence as well (that part seems somehow inevitable). It’s time to snuggle into a weighted blanket — this cozy season is gonna be an exciting, strange ride.
Death By Lightning – Creator: Mike Makowsky (Netflix)
When Charles Guiteau set out to make his place in American history in 1880, he never imagined the result would be first seen as a tragedy, then as a farce. Netflix never misses an opportunity to capitalize on its modes of production for its TV shows, so here we are.
The tired adage that truth is stranger than fiction is given new life in Death by Lightning, a four-part miniseries about the assassination of the 20th President of the United States, James A. Garfield, by Guiteau. The show, created by the Bad Education writer Mike Makowsky and based on the 2011 book Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard, tells a true story so bizarre that the assassination (attempt) is somehow its least shocking part.
Starring a titanium-hard ensemble, Death By Lightning pulls narrative double duty. On one side, we have Garfield (Michael Shannon), a righteous Republican whose speech at the 1880 Republican National Convention makes him a presidential candidate despite not being on the ballot; on the other, Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen), a delusional, failed lawyer, threatens to implode because of a mistaken belief he helped Garfield take office. The developments to follow in 1881 are so strange that you will be triple-checking Wikipedia just to confirm the account.
Shannon is his usual commanding self as Garfield, an honest man whose meager three months in the office prior to disaster got him no further than a pesky footnote for history majors. Still, it’s Macfadyen’s stupendous lunacy as Guiteau that elevates Death By Lightning above a mere historical curio and into a wild dramedy about hubris and the instrumentalization of zealous individuals for insidious political purposes. Narcissistic and insufferable, Guiteau is also a victim of the more seasoned players with deeper pockets and better teeth.
Speaking of more seasoned players, it is Shea Whigham as the bullish Roscoe Conkling, Bradley Whitford as James Blaine, and Nick Offerman as Vice President Chester A. Arthur, who grind their bones to make Death by Lightning a fertile allegory for (American) politics. You know well what this means: at best, scheming and manipulation, at worst, conspiracies to rule at any cost.
While Whitford keeps his slithering on the slick side as Secretary of State Blaine, Whigham and Offerman let loose to delightful effect as wealthy Republicans whose power play gets thwarted (inadvertently) by Shannon’s Garfield. Conkling and Arthur march around with such a profound lack of self-awareness and respect for their fellow men that, in the hands of lesser actors, this boorishness would be painful to watch. Nevertheless, the hilarious duo takes the least flattering features of these caricatures and runs with them, turning the often dry political dialogue into comedy gold.
In the end, however, it is Garfield’s and Guiteau’s grim destiny that anchors Death by Lightning, proving that politics is neither for the just nor for the rash. If Guiteau remains (just barely) remembered as an assassin and a madman, here Macfadyen charitably extends him some sympathy, portraying him as a confused, discarded man whose American dream is but an illusion. By doing so, he turns a relatively formulaic miniseries into a memorable, perhaps even tragic, one.
PLUR1BUS – Creator: Vince Gilligan (AppleTV)
In Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, Alberich, the dwarf, exclaims at one point: “Hasse die Frohen!” (Hate the happy!) Still, the aggravation of the pained antagonist of the epic music tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung pales in comparison with that of Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), a miserable writer who ends up the world’s loneliest person after most of humanity becomes infected with an alien virus that… spreads peace and happiness.
Yes, Vince Gilligan is back to his creative roots with his latest TV show, PLUR1BUS, another smorgasbord of metaphysical quandaries. In his unique dramatic style, which combines comedy, horror, and philosophy without sacrificing clarity, the creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, two of the most iconic shows of all time, seems to have scored another home run. Nevertheless, this time around, he draws most heavily on his fantastic beginnings as one of The X Files’ most recognizable writers.
Gilligan, who penned some of the most intense and comical episodes of The X-Files, delivers a mashup of his authorial quirks with PLUR1BUS. Fast-evolving and slow-burning, it is a fresh-looking sci-fi drama with plenty of laughs and gasps to season the offering. Like Breaking Bad and Saul, it is set in Albuquerque, features a thorough exploration of capitalism and what it means to exist in today’s society, and anger. It is entirely predicated on anger.
Transplanting Better Call Saul’s Rhea Seehorn into a well-deserved leading role as Carol, PLUR1BUS gives us a thoroughly X-Files-y pilot, one of the best of the decade. Earth’s insatiably curious scientists make contact with an alien civilization and receive a mysterious code. Turns out the code is a highly contagious, strange virus. It poses no threat to the body, but it makes the infected person exceedingly happy and peaceful.
The virus also “connects” the minds of every person on Earth, creating a literal hivemind in which everyone knows everyone else’s entire history and every thought. I wish there were a less wordy way to explain it, but you get the gist. It is all meant to be weird to the point of throwing you off.
What follows is even more challenging to explain succinctly, but assuming you belong to about 90% of the Earthlings who are Gilligan fans, you know what to expect. This is a slow-burning, world-building story told through darkly humorous vignettes, confusion, and the hope that anger will save the world before it destroys it.
Like Walter White and Jimmy McGill (and Fox Mulder, don’t forget him!), Carol Sturka is a person lost in a world she cannot reconcile herself with. A writer of dubious talent, she’s a cynical woman who earns a fortune by writing fantasy romance novels she calls “mindless crap”. When the happy virus strikes, she loses everything but turns out to be among a handful of people worldwide who are immune to it. This leaves Carol completely alone, a stranger on a strange Earth.
While some would just give up in this bizarre scenario, Carol refuses to roll over and commits herself to “fighting” the hivemind. Seehorn gives one of the fiercest performances in ages as a sad, refreshingly unlikeable woman who will not surrender her humanity. Her interactions with the unbelievably cheerful, entirely pacifist infected make for some of the most distressingly uncanny television since The Leftovers.
Typical for Gilligan, PLUR1BUS writes an off-kilter philosophical treatise on much of life in our current era. In general, being a part of a loving, entirely pacifist community where everyone is their simple, happy selves, seems like a far superior alternative to the hell our civilization is steeped in. Sure, there are no novels or theater, but who really needs art when you understand life as a wholesome occurrence in which everyone shares in the joy?
Still, the panspectrocism of the “hivemind”, besides being something to counteract the otherwise fortunate scenario of being infected, reads like the end of civilization. In an unsubtle allusion to modern technology, surveillance ideology, and social networks, PLUR1BUS points to how history itself disappears within the monopolistic capitalist telos of manufacturing identical desires for everyone. Well, that’s one way of reading it. Such are Gilligan’s singular, loaded shows.
Carol’s hypersaturated run-in with this uncanny world, then, unfolds like a fever dream, a reality within a reality that, for now, remains mostly inscrutable. That’s also where PLUR1BUS could go wrong. Critics have not yet seen the season one finalé, but the first seven episodes move at a glacial pace, marked by numerous protracted silences and sparse, rudimentary dialogue. Little, apart from the world-building, happens, but the world-building itself doesn’t give us much to chew on, apart from the premise.
It is therefore yet to be seen whether PLUR1BUS will rise to a canonical work of art. However, if there’s a person to be given the benefit of creative doubt, it’s Gilligan.
The Beast in Me – Creator: Gabe Rotter (Netflix)
Here’s the premise of this TV show: a solitary, standoffish, famous writer sees her world shaken to the core when a real estate mogul, who possibly murdered his wife some years ago, moves into her affluent suburban neighborhood. You’d be right to scoff and keep scrolling after reading this, but you’d be missing out. The Beast in Me is a thoroughbred winner.
Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys dominate, devour, and burn through the celluloid in this masterfully crafted psychological thriller, created by Gabe Rotter, a writer for the 2015 X-Files revival. A metafictional narrative about narratives, written and oral, fictional and real, prepared for an audience or nested deep within oneself, The Beast in Me elegantly reveals some nasty truths about our most debased impulses. It is also whipcrack smart and surprisingly light on its feet, with some of the most electrifying tension and dialogue in recent memory.
Danes stars as Agatha Wiggs, a bestselling author struggling to write a new hit. Haunted by a horrific trauma, Aggie withdraws into herself, wishing the world away one day at a time in her dilapidated home in a tony neighborhood.
Nile Jarvis (Rhys), on the other hand, is just about everything Wiggs is not: charismatic, extroverted, hugely ambitious, overly pragmatic, and (of course) filthy rich. Having such a man for a neighbor would never intrigue Wiggs, were it not for a highly publicized matter of Jarvis possibly killing his wife some years ago.
Then there’s the inconvenient matter of Nile’s interest in Aggie, so to speak. An avid runner, he’s looking to set up a running track around the woods, but he’d need a piece of her land to do so. Not the kind to beat around the bush, he insists Aggie sells him the land, showing up at inconvenient times and probing into her psyche in the process. Irritated as she is by him, in the true manner of her namesake Christie, Aggie (Agatha) starts putting together a puzzle about Nile and his (mis)deeds in her head. Eventually, she even starts writing his memoir, pitching it to her exasperated publisher as a sure shot next bestseller.
If you’re still not convinced, witnessing Rhys’ and Danes’ acting for a mere hour will do. Rhys’ Nile is magnetic as a histrionic alpha dog who resents just about everything apart from himself; Danes’ Aggie, while highly neurotic and smug, comes across as real and even relatable in some uncomfortable ways. With plenty of crisp, incisive dialogue, the tandem makes The Beast in Me a compelling watch.
There are other ways in which The Beast in Me sets itself apart from the related thriller “content”. For one, it is in many ways smarter and more provocative than your usual “did he or didn’t he” caper. Two episodes in, and you will have forgotten about Nile’s late wife, as the focus keeps shifting to new stories and characters. Then there is Rhys’ satanic presence as Nile, who might be a sociopath, but who certainly pushes all the right buttons to expose the people around him, Aggie included, for the morally dubious creatures they are.
Finally, the metafictional component, including embedded narratives such as Aggie writing a book about another character, spices things up enough to make The Beast in Me a standout early-winter offering. By dissecting its characters raw from multiple storytelling angles, it doesn’t keep us at arm’s length from their inner lives, but pulls us all the way in. You won’t be surprised to hear that you may not like what you discover, but you’ll surely enjoy this wild, strange ride.