What if your protagonist isn’t built to be likable and that’s exactly what makes them unforgettable?
That’s the question Jake digs into as he breaks down the pilot and second episode of Pluribus. Rather than forcing his hero to “save the cat,” Vince Gilligan builds empathy by designing a world and a structure that reveals her point of view, sharpens her contradictions, and surrounds her with characters who illuminate the parts she can’t see in herself.
Jake shows how contrast, irony, and even the mysterious cold open teasers function as emotional tools, creating space for the audience to invest in a difficult protagonist long before she has earned their affection. More importantly, he demonstrates how writers can apply these same tools when working with negative-valence characters protagonists who are angry, stuck, passive, or miserable without sanding down their truth or bending them to formula.
By the end, you’ll understand how world-building, structure, and point of view can do the heavy lifting that “saving the cat” or other likability tricks never could, and how embracing the uncomfortable parts of your characters may be the very thing that unlocks their humanity and yours as a writer.
You’ll Learn
° How the pilot and second episode of Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus are structured, and how to apply those lessons to writing your own series.
° How Pluribus uses teasers and cold opens to help an audience get emotionally invested before we even meet the main character.
° How Pluribus makes a wealthy, miserable, negative-valence protagonist compelling without softening her or turning her “nice”.
° How point of view and want not likability become the real engines of character empathy.
° Why forcing a “save the cat” moment can actually weaken or even make an audience care less about a complicated main character.
° How Vince Gilligan uses world-building to reflect and challenge the inner life of his characters.
° How Pluribus uses moral ambiguity and competing ideas of paradise and free will to keep the audience questioning whose side they’re on.
° How to mine your own emotions and spiritual questions as raw material for complex characters and worlds.
° How trusting your disruptive ideas, instead of clinging to formulas, can lead to more original, career-making scripts.
° How Vince Gilligan uses foils to reveal the protagonist’s blind spots and emotional contradictions.
° How meaningful consequences, even catastrophic ones, can deepen empathy even for an “unlikable” character.
° How Pluribus leverages irony between what the audience knows and what the protagonist believes to drive emotional engagement.
🎧 LISTEN NOW to learn how to build real empathy for even your most difficult characters without betraying their truth or imprisoning your writing in “save the cat” formulas.
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