‘Pluribus’ Built the Cul-de-sac for Carol to Set on Fire

According to Production designer Denise Pizzini, give Vince Gilligan a house, and he'll want to build the whole neighborhood.

[Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for Episode 7 of “Pluribus.”]

Production designer Denise Pizzini has a picture of Vince Gilligan holding a Post-it up to the camera. On that note is a very rough plan of Carol Sturka’s (Rhea Seehorn) whole cul-de-sac with a “C” for where Carol’s house is. “OK, so we’re doing a neighborhood?” Pizzini asked the “Pluribus” showrunner when she saw the note. When you’re working on a Vince Gilligan show, Pizzini has found, you’re always doing a neighborhood. 

“Pluribus” charts the adventures of unhappy writer Carol versus the rest of humanity, now united in an unnervingly cheerful hivemind. Visually, Gilligan and his team of directors (Gordon Smith, Adam Bernstein, Melissa Bernstein, Zetna Fuentes, and Gandja Monteiro) use the whole buffalo when it comes to sets and locations. The show doesn’t just want to find the right unexpected, emotional angle on an event; it wants to take an expansive view of a location to create the sense of Carol furiously problem-solving, or of the Others watching her try. 

“As soon as I saw the word ‘drone,’ I thought, ‘Well, OK, that’s that,” Pizzini told IndieWire. It wouldn’t be enough to do the exteriors’ front facades for the creepy neighborhood kids to try to get Carol’s attention. The production design team could not simply build Carol’s backyard to airlift a backhoe into it. VFX of the roofs wouldn’t quite read for the shots where we’re looking down on the neighborhood in Albuquerque, where Carol has stayed in light exile, up until the end of Episode 7, when she uses the cul-de-sac itself to let Zosia (Karolina Wydra) know she’s finally too lonely to stay away.  

“If we were already up there doing roofs, I said, ‘Let’s just do it for real,” Pizzini said. 

When Carol decides to put on a depression-fueled fireworks show in the middle of the cul-de-sac in Episode 7, the explosions aren’t imperiling fully built homes. But they’re pretty close. “We were duplicating the front room, and we were duplicating the kitchen, and then we realized we can’t really turn around during a scene, so we started adding more and more. We have about two-thirds of Carol’s house duplicated. We have it on a stage, and then we have a big part of it out on the location, too,” Pizzini said. 

The location, which just started out as a dirt lot, doesn’t have plumbing in the houses, but they’re otherwise pretty complete. The construction started almost a year in advance of shooting, and the pause for the WGA and SAG strikes didn’t prevent the building from continuing.

“Once we decided we’re going to do this, you can’t just stop in the middle,” Pizzini said. “We were essentially building real houses without electrical and plumbing, you know, laying slabs, doing full roofs, the whole bit.” 

The duplicated sets and near-complete location builds enable the filmmakers to make the most of Carol’s house as a setting. It opens up a lot of coverage options, of course, but also ways to do what the show does best — put more pressure on Carol. For instance, in order to add depth when Carol shuts herself off from the world and show how she cannot completely escape from the Others, Pizzini designed an atrium to run through both stories of the house. 

“With the atrium, we could have some plant life and show some progression of time. You can get some natural light into the house even with all the windows and doors shut,” Pizzini said. “We can add little subtleties in Carol’s house, like the plants haven’t been watered. [We can make it] messier out in the world. We kinda let our neighborhood get overgrown, as nobody’s cutting anything or taking care of anything.” 

The subtle details are used to particular effect in Episode 7, not just as a contrast to the continent-spanning journey Manousos (Carlos-Manuel Vesga) goes on but as a subtle way to accentuate the crushing loneliness Carol goes through in her lockdown period break from interacting with the Others. (For Manousos, Pizzini and her team designed the hostile environment to match between shoots in New Mexico, Spain, and the Canary Islands.) The fact that director Adam Bernstein can place the camera at any point along the cul-de-sac means “Pluribus” finds the spots that make Carol look the smallest, the most isolated against the abandoned neighborhood, the most adrift. 

“[Gilligan] always promises me, he goes, ‘Believe me, Denise, I’ll shoot everything.’ And he really does, which is a dream for an art department and a production designer to have a showrunner who says we’re going to see it all. It brings everything to a higher level. Because I tell my team, it has to be perfect, you know? It’s never ‘good enough.’ If you notice it, the audience will notice it, too.” 

“Pluribus” is now streaming on Apple TV.