Hello Tomorrow! Review: There’s Less to This Retro-Futurist Dramedy Than Meets the Eye

The closer the series gets to its destination, the more it invites skepticism of whether there’s really much there at all.

Hello Tomorrow!
Photo: Apple TV+

Jack Billings (Billy Crudup) seems destined to fail at the start of Hello Tomorrow!, Apple TV+’s new sci-fi dramedy. The traveling salesman approaches an old man (Michael J. Harney) at a diner and gets rebuffed before he can so much as pull out a brochure. But Jack persists, relating to the embittered man’s fatigue with a compassion that suggests that he’s been in his position before. Purely through the gift of gab, Jack sells the man on a solution courtesy of the Brightside Corporation: to leave his terrestrial troubles behind by living on the moon.

That proposition is less preposterous than it sounds, as the series takes place in the future, albeit one rooted in the culture and style of the 1950s. A robot works behind the counter of the diner, and the cars parked outside are era-appropriate except for the fact that they have no wheels and are floating in the air. In a sense, Hello Tomorrow! performs a similar maneuver on viewers as Jack does on his buyers: drawing us in in by the promise of a handsome exterior.

But by the end of the first of the season, we learn that Brightside has no housing on the moon. Jack is selling one lie while living multiple others. For one, he manages a sales team that’s oblivious to the scam, as they’re not even aware that their orders come from Jack rather than some faceless moon-based HQ. More importantly, he’s lying to Joey (Nicholas Podany), a local hire who has no idea that Jack is actually the father that abandoned him 18 years ago.

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As Jack, Crudup exudes a genial warmth while imparting a sense that something is off about the man. Jack is an enigma, preying on desperate and dissatisfied people without revealing any malicious intent; there’s never a scene across the season’s 10 episodes where Jack drops the act and loosens his tie or chuckles to himself about what rubes people can be. He appears totally earnest, which only raises further questions about the degree to which he might be lying to himself about his own actions and the consequences they will undoubtedly have.

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The question of what Jack thinks he’s up to carries Hello Tomorrow! a long way. The series is also buoyed by gorgeous set design and a supporting cast—including Hank Azaria as a gambling-addicted Brightside salesman—whose distinctive appearances and dialed-up mannerisms are funny without veering into cartoonish terrain. The retro-future technology even manages to be fun and clever without pulling focus from the character-driven story.

But for as pleasurable as Hello Tomorrow! is to behold in just about every sense, the answers to the questions that it presents tend to be ill-defined. The series is about how living in want of a dream or a purpose allows darkness to seep in, but it fails to ruminate on the hardship and existential dread that would lead people to want to leave our planet behind.

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Thus, societal discord is left largely implied. It’s as if the makers of the show believe that their gee-whiz ’50s setting, by its very existence, says all that we need to know about racial and gender inequality. And barring a handful of mentions about robots replacing humans at certain jobs, Hello Tomorrow! ends up selling escape from strife that it never actually portrays.

Clearly there are meant to be modern parallels in this tale of hucksters duping people who will believe whatever they want to believe. But the themes never quite gel, leaving even the histories of more complex characters like Jack feeling undercooked. That the series tends to deal with its plot turns by introducing new characters doesn’t help, leading to an overcrowded climax that recalls the moon property scam at the show’s center: The closer Hello Tomorrow! gets to its destination, the more it invites skepticism of whether there’s really much there at all.

Score: 
 Cast: Billy Crudup, Haneefah Wood, Alison Pill, Nicholas Podany, Dewshane Williams, Hank Azaria, Matthew Maher, Susan Heyward, Jacki Weaver, W. Earl Brown, Dagmara Domińczyk  Network: Apple TV+

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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