Hello Tomorrow! is a story about people who believe that telling enough lies will eventually make those falsehoods—and their dreams—come true. No amount of deceptions, alas, can turn this Apple TV+ series into a winner. Wasting a charmingly slick performance from star Billy Crudup, it’s a retro-futuristic affair that’s built out of unoriginal scrap and hollow beneath its shiny surface.
Created by Amit Bhalia and Lucas Jansen, Hello Tomorrow! (which premieres Feb. 17) is set in an alterna-1950s that’s awash in the latest and greatest techno-gadgets. Big chrome-fendered hover cars glide down suburban streets, passing by self-driving delivery trucks and mechanical dogs. Robots are ubiquitous, handling just about every service job society requires, from caring for lawns and tending to bars to functioning as desk clerks and police officers.
It’s The Jetsons come to brilliant, sparkly, smooth-edged life, and that includes the rocket ships that promise to transport humans to the moon—a destination that Jack Billings (Crudup) sells as the prime spot to achieve happiness, courtesy of one of his luxury Brightside timeshare properties.
Hello Tomorrow! is drowning in glossy sci-fi embellishments, but unfortunately, they turn out to be mere window dressing for a story that could—with almost no meaningful alterations—be set in any time and place. Jack is a salesman pitching folks on the promise of a better tomorrow, and the fact that his product is the moon rather than Boca Raton or the Amalfi Coast is simply a superficial detail.
As embodied by Crudup with performative big-smile gregariousness and earnestness, Jack is an age-old type of charlatan, and while he’s not immediately revealed as such, it’s impossible not to immediately deduce that he’s playing everyone for a sucker, including his colleagues, who themselves are all—in their own specific ways—hucksters desperate to hit the jackpot via dishonesty.
Shirley (Haneefah Wood) is Jack’s right-hand woman who runs his Brightside operation and is currently having an affair with colleague Eddie (Hank Azaria), an inveterate gambler who’s in constant debt to a violent bookie (W. Earl Brown). Herb (Dewshane Williams) is the cheeriest member of the team, a corny optimist who’s capable of putting a happy face on even the dourest of scenarios.
Together, they’re a squad dedicated to fulfilling Jack’s goal of selling as many timeshare leases as they can to the residents of their latest pitstop, Vistaville, where they’ve established a makeshift residence at a hotel that’s close by to Jack’s mother Barbara (Jacki Weaver), who lives in a nursing home and condemns Jack for always cutting and running.
As if these folks weren’t already lying to themselves, each other and their clients enough, Hello Tomorrow! also focuses on Jack’s decision—after one minor scolding from his mom—to try to reconnect with his son Joey (Nicholas Podany), whom he abandoned 18 years earlier.
Jack’s ex-wife is in the hospital due to a wannabe-comical accident involving an autonomous delivery vehicle, and when Joey attends one of Brightside’s seminars, he becomes sold on the idea of starting fresh on the moon. Jack, though, gives him a superior opportunity: a job at Brightside, learning the salesman trade. Joey bites, not recognizing that Jack is actually his absentee dad—a point that Jack himself keeps secret, figuring it’s the best way to mend their broken relationship.
This is a dumb ruse, but moreover, it’s one that’s been seen a thousand times before, and it plays out in the same fashion as in the past. Jack and Joey initially develop a chummy mentor-mentee bond, only to have their closeness threatened by revelations about Jack’s paternity. Adding to the hackneyed inanity of Hello Tomorrow! is the “bombshell” that Brightside is a quasi-Ponzi scheme; Jack owns no moon properties, yet he hopes that by selling enough timeshares, he’ll acquire the funds to build them, thereby making his scam a reality!
This ploy requires ripping off dupes as well as keeping the wool pulled over his cohorts’ eyes (they don’t know Jack is a fraud). Moreover, it’s complicated by the interference of Lester Costopolous (Matthew Maher), a regulatory agent who grows suspicious of Jack’s enterprise, and whose defining characteristics are ordering around his floating briefcase like a dog and mispronouncing words (“apogolize;” “impobbisle;” “edivence”) in what’s supposed to be a funny affectation.
Herb’s conniving wife Betty (Susan Heyward), ruthless local heiress Elle (Dagmara Domińczyk), and spurned housewife-turned-crusader Myrtle (Alison Pill) all assume secondary roles in Hello Tomorrow!, facilitating and/or stymying Jack’s grand plans. Too bad they’re all irritating one-dimensional characters, which can also be said of Azaria’s drunken-gambling lout and Williams’ sanguine doofus.
Wood may get the shortest end of the stick as Shirley, who’s meant to be tough and pragmatic but is still forced to do a litany of dim-witted and/or unwise things because the plots demand them of her. It’s cartoonishness on a series-wide scale, albeit minus the humor, as the show’s writing can’t locate a single funny one-liner, clever plot twist, or novel direction in which to head.
Fathers and sons, truth and lies, yadda yadda yadda. Hello Tomorrow! is a well-worn rehash retrofitted with Forbidden Planet-style trimmings that prove inconsequential, and ultimately less prominent, as the show navigates its familiar conflicts.
Only Crudup seems to be fully invested in these proceedings, embodying Jack with that sincere grifter belief that he can fulfill his every desire and make everything turn out okay with one homerun con, even as the glint in his eyes occasionally wavers from exhaustion, guilt, and a gnawing fear that he’s really a bum at heart. The actor’s commitment, however, isn’t enough to make Jack resonate as unique; on the contrary, saddled with his own daddy issues, Crudup’s protagonist is the giant cliché in a saga full of smaller ones.
With each episode only running a half hour, Hello Tomorrow! at least moves at a snappy pace. Without a single hilarious or moving moment to be found in its ten-installment first season, though, praising the series for getting to its (cliffhanger-y) end in a reasonable timeframe is, admittedly, damning with the faintest of praise. “Every crisis is an open door,” proclaims Betty, and hopefully that turns out to be the case here, with a swift collapse allowing these talented performers to move on to brighter future projects.
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