“Hello Tomorrow!”: It’s only a paper moon
“The moon belongs to everyone,” declared “The Best Things in Life Are Free.” This was an easy enough sentiment to sing in 1927, before anybody planted a flag up there.
In “Hello Tomorrow!,” a 10-episode comedy on Apple TV+, Jack Billings (Billy Crudup), a traveling real estate salesman, would like to offer you different terms. The moon, or at least a piece of it, can be yours for zero down and $150 a month, courtesy of Brightside Lunar Residences. Just don’t look too closely at the fine print.
Is he selling a chance at a better life, or just a load of green cheese? What’s striking is not only how well Jack, with his spit- shined zeal, sells his earthbound customers on his blue-sky pitch; it’s how deeply he believes himself. “Hello Tomorrow!” spins out a galaxy of deceptions both personal and professional, devised by Jack and those around him, to show how the most powerful and important lies are the ones you tell yourself.
The first thing that catches your eye about “Hello Tomorrow!” is, well, everything. While its conflicts are familiar — too much so, at times — it is visually unlike anything you’ve seen on TV outside “The Jetsons.” The creators, Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen, have conceived an alternative, future-past Earth that looks like an illustrator was hired to design a spacethemed malt-shop menu in 1955 and got hopped up on bennies.
Tin-can robots in avocado green and goldenrod yellow float about serving drinks and spraying shrubbery. Deliveries arrive to ticky-tacky suburban houses in a hovervan “driven” by a cartoonvideo bird. A paperboy pulls a wagon that shoots today’s news out of pneumatic cannons.
Some things haven’t changed, however: Money is still green and foldable and the source of heartache. The rich still get richer, and now they also have the moon as a luxury playground. To everyone else it’s a taunt, one more shiny thing that someone else gets to touch.
The opening scene plays like a Buck Rogers burlesque of the “Mad Men” pilot. Jack sidles up to a miserable barfly (Michael Harney) and fires up his pitch, producing a rock from his pocket that he says came all the way from the lunar Sea of Serenity. “Wow,” his mark says. “That,” answers Jack, “is the one word none of us can live without.”
Jack himself leads a distinctly wow-less life, as do his sales associates. Eddie (Hank Azaria) is an unlucky gambler who believes that “desperation is a salesman’s greatest asset.” Herb (Dewshane Williams) is an anxious expectant father of twins. Shirley (Haneefah Wood), Jack’s right-hand woman,
sees through his upbeat blarney but is herself cheating on her husband with Eddie.
Jack’s own personal secret is Don Draper-sized: He abandoned his wife and baby years ago. When a tragedy brings Jack to his old hometown, he longs to reconnect with his now-grown son, Joey (Nicholas Podany), the only way he knows how: deceitfully, by offering Joey a
sales job without identifying himself as Joey’s father. That lie, and the questionable machinations of the mooncondo business, are the twin nuclear reactors that power the first season.
“Hello Tomorrow!” is a hell of a looker. Its midcentury-modern version of steampunk — chromepunk? — is packed with analogtech wonders like self-popping popcorn buckets at a ballgame. But the early episodes left me wondering if there was anything behind its polished facade.
“Pleasant v i l le”- s t yle spoofs of 1950s suburbia have been done to death. The society of “Hello Tomorrow!” is not exactly Eisenhower-era America; on the one hand, it’s casually racially integrated, but on the other, women still hold preBetty Friedan housewife roles. There are vague references to a past “war” and hints that automation has cost some people their jobs and purpose, but no explanation of how technology has made the world so small while leaving America so homogeneous.
In general, “Hello Tomorrow!” breezes past the world-building, hoping, not unlike Jack, that you’ll get too caught up in the pretty pictures to worry about the details. And damned if it doesn’t work, some of the time.