Hello Tomorrow! That was the phrase many have heard for this upcoming retro Sci-Fi dramedy starring Billy Crudup (The Morning Show, Gypsy). According to The Hollywood Reporter, the show “has much to say about hope, delusion and the American dream…” This Sci-Fi Dramedy revolves around a salesman who essentially promises an optimistic idea to escape the harsh realities of life.
Many people imagined what it would be like to live on the surface of the moon, and for many generations the general understanding of astronomy and science had made people even more interested, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. Hello Tomorrow! presents a take on this while combining many plot points relating to the market and capitalism and how nothing is ever as it seems. According to Apple TV, “…charismatic salesman Jack Billings (Billy Crudup) leads a team of fellow sales associates determined to revitalize their customers’ lives by hawking timeshares on the moon.”
Along with Crudup, the main cast of characters include Haneefah Wood (Nurse Jackie, Freedomland) as Shirley Stedman and Hank Azaria (The Simpsons, The Birdcage) as Eddie, along with Alison Pill (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Milk) as Myrtle Mayburn, Nicholas Podany (Archive 81, Hart of Dixie) as Joey Shorter, and Dewshane Williams (Defiance, The Expanse) as Herb Porter. The idea for the show was drafted by Amit Bhalla (Lago, Bloodline) and Lucas Jansen (Bloodline, This Is Not a Robbery) put into motion when Apple TV gave the green light in May of 2021. Both Bhalla and Jansen will be the showrunners for the series, which is their first large scale project together. Along with them would include Jonathan Entwistle (I Am Not Okay With This, The End of the F***ing World) who is the director for the first couple of episodes of the series and Ryan McFaul (Crashing, Lady Dynamite) who will direct some other episodes afterward.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, their review of the show is best summarized with pretty pictures and shallow promises, ironically what the main characters of the show seem to be selling. They go on by saying this, “For Jack to get caught up in his lofty ambitions, though, is one thing. It’s another for the series to do the same.” They go on by saying that the story is trying to sell something of an idea about greed in this dramedy, but instead, “The show’s reliance on grand thesis statements over emotional intimacy or narrative complexity begins to feel like its own form of malarkey.”
On the other hand, the show so far has gotten good reviews with a 70% Audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and 6.8/10 on IMDb. While speaking with Screenrant, the creators of the series sat down and discussed the process of bringing this show to life, “We kind of climbed up a big hill here. This is our first show, so by the time Billy was signing up to play the part, we were blown away. And then suddenly, it’s Hank Azaria, and Alison Pill, and Haneefa Wood. We’re watching these characters walk on set, and there is no way to prepare, other than to do it. I was lucky enough to have a child about a week before the writers room started, and it was my first child. It was tough, but it was a great joy,” commented Bhalla.
Jansen also chimed in, “We got to a point in the run where they had a pretty good idea of what the show was about. We would just put weird stuff in the scripts, make up names for stuff that we didn’t even know what it was, just to see what they would come up with…It’s as fun as it gets when you’re all working together and surprising each other like that. It’s why you do it.”
Whatever the case will be, Hello Tomorrow! is still a must to analyze its themes and visual representations of said themes. Apple TV+ released the first three episodes today on February 17th with the rest of the seven episodes airing weekly. It also shares the same release date with Sharper starring Julianne Moore (Boogie Nights, Far from Heaven). The first episode of Hello Tomorrow! is free to watch on Apple TV and on their website with a sign-in. You can watch the trailer for the series down below.