How The X-Files Is Still Informing Vince Gilligan's Pluribus Writing Today

Published Aug 8, 2026, 1:59 PM EDT

Gilligan first made his mark with the screenplay for 1993's Wilder Napalm, starring Debra Winger, Dennis Quaid, and Arliss Howard. Though he jokes that the "best thing" about that movie is that Winger and Howard have been together since it was filmed, his most consistent work has been in serialized TV scripts, and he partially credits X-Files showrunner Chris Carter with modeling what a creative visionary looks like: "It was going to film school and getting paid to attend."

At a Beverly Hills event hosted by the Paley Center for Media on August 5, Gilligan embarked on a discussion about his role in the changing face of television. The award-winning writer detailed how he evolved from movie scripts to television writers' rooms, how The X-Files "saved" him, and why the chances he's taken with Pluribus seem to be paying off so well.

How Vince Gilligan Went From The X-Files To Pluribus By Way Of Breaking Bad

During the Paley Media Council conversation, Gilligan revealed that he was offered the position of staff writer on The X-Files after penning the season 2 episode "Soft Light" as a freelance writer. Surprisingly, he turned it down at first, not being ready to make the move from Virginia to Los Angeles and still working on crafting and selling movie scripts ("I had a lot of inertia going on," he recalled). But six months later, he changed his mind, "and thank God it was still available to me."

Gilligan wrote 30 episodes of The X-Files over the course of its 9-season run. "My life changed," he says of the experience, despite it not being the typical writers' room of today. Given that the Emmy-award-winning creator declares, "​That ​​​​​​was my second favorite job after being my own showrunner," it's clear he took many lessons away from that time in his life.

The writers' room, such as it was, was a bit hybridized. We'd work on our own in our various offices on the Fox lot, and we'd plug away and come up with our monster of the week. And then at the end of the week, or the end of every two weeks, we'd all get together and pitch each other. "This works. This is pretty cool. This part, I don't know. This part's not working," and we'd write it all with Sharpie ink pens on three-by-five cards and tack them to a [board]. Cards are non-linear, like editing. You can move them around.

We'd be helpful to each other, and then when we felt we had enough of something, we'd carry the board across the lot to Chris's office and worry about the wind taking them all away. Then we'd go pitch to Chris, and he was very constructive. Sometimes we'd walk back, and we called it the Walk of Shame, carrying it back after he's like, "Make it better." But it was a great job, man.

"Chris expected us writers to be producers, even if we didn't have the job title," Gilligan explained, a fact which understandably comes through in how deftly he handled Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul on cable television, and now Pluribus on streaming. Even as the landscape of the industry changes, though, Gilligan remains focused on quality and human creativity. He actually singles out reduced episode counts as one of the boons of the streaming age — at least in his eyes.

Courtesy of Apple TV

"I don't know how the hell you can do 9 or 10 episodes in two or three years and make it go of it," he jokes at first. "I don't know how it works, but I'm gonna ride this f--king gravy train until the wheels fall off the engine." On a more serious note, he details just why the new process works for him:

"We did 22 episodes a year on The X-Files in a light year," he recalls before doing a hypothetical breakdown of the quality. "8 of them will be pretty good, maybe 3 or 4 of them will be great ones. But it's a bell curve, and then [maybe there are] 3 or 4 stinkers that should be handled with radioactive tongs." His reasoning is sound, even if one believes he's rating his old work too low. "Because you can't go that fast and that hard and that long and have everything be great."

From a creator's point of view, if I'm doing 10 episodes in a season, I can make them as good as I can... It's a group effort. We can make them good, starting with the writing of it. And by the way, that's the cheapest part of the process. If anybody in the room is in the position of lighting a fire under the writers' butts and saying, 'You gotta have it by September,' and you haven't given the writers enough time, you are being pennywise and pound foolish.

Pluribus fans may hear the echoes of Gilligan's season 2 updates in that speech, but they can rest assured that when that sophomore season does come, it will be the absolute best he can make it. "We're not messing around. We've got to get it all figured out, and it's a big deal because it shoots all over the world, and there are so [many] visual effects."

He returns to The X-Files once more, remembering that in those days, "We had to learn discipline, and it was hard because we had to get it down to the frame." Despite the freedom of runtime he experiences now on Pluribus, that earlier discipline has taught him how far he can push moments of real-time anticipation and exploration of process while maintaining the audience's engagement. The fact that the world is waiting on pins and needles for news of the next episode of Carol Sturka's saga is perhaps proof that his calculations have indeed been exact.

Release Date November 6, 2025

Network Apple TV

Directors Adam Bernstein, Zetna Fuentes, Melissa Bernstein

Writers Ariel Levine