A sad salesman in a ‘Jetsons’ setting
Welcome to the future, where the 1950s never end. Billy Crudup stars in the Apple TV+ science-fiction satire “Hello Tomorrow!” as Jack Billings, a smooth salesman with some major holes in his emotional life. He travels from town to town to hotel lobbies selling strangers on homes or time-shares in a new development — on the moon.
“Hello” takes place in a vision of the future riveted to the early Eisenhower years. Bulbous cars without tires hover over the roads. Drinks are served by bartenders shaped like round washing machines. Packages are delivered by hovering self-driving vans with a cartoon bird appearing where the driver should be. All the design seems taken from a slice of the 20th century between the era of Art Deco and the advent of the Space Age. It’s kind of neat, as they might say at the neon-lit malt shop — and creepy, too. And both feelings are intentional.
Jack has a son he never sees from a marriage that failed some two decades in the past. These details come up after his mother tells him that his estranged wife has been hit by one of those cartoon-driven vans. There’s more to the story, but it would spoil things to discuss them here.
Look for Hank Azaria as Eddie, Jack’s sales associate, a slick operator with a gambling problem. Haneefah Wood and Dewshane Williams also star as Shirley and Herb, Jack’s sales associates and “closers,” ready to lure in disenchanted suburbanites eager for a chance to start over on the lunar surface.
If you think of this as “Death of a Salesman on the moon,” you’d only be half wrong. Crudup, recently seen in the Apple TV+ project “The Morning Show,” is really good at conjuring the desperation of a man who sold his soul some time back and has run out of ways to bluff his way through his own upholstered hell.
If anything, all the retrokitsch gadgets and gizmos distract from the emotional resonance of Crudup’s performance. And truth be told, they seem to fade into their mid-century backdrop once the action gets going.
It’s interesting that this homage to the futuristic design of America’s optimistic mid-20th century should stream on Apple TV+. No company has better evoked the future with industrial design than the manufacturer of the Macintosh computer, iPod, iPad and iPhone. There’s a good chance that many viewers will be streaming “Hello” on an Apple device. It seems odd and a little ironic that it wants to conjure a vision of tomorrow that doesn’t surpass that of “The Jetsons.”
› Apple also streams the second season of “Make or Break,” an eight-episode docuseries following the world’s best surfers.
› The elaborate fantasy series “Carnival Row,” starring Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne, enters its second and final season streaming on Prime Video. The visually ambitious series follows a world where mythical creatures coexist with humans in a period setting vaguely resembling Victorian London as imagined by a comic book artist. The first season unspooled in 2019, so viewers may need a remedial catchup.