‘Hello Tomorrow!’ brings retro flair to a futuristic sales pitch: Living on the moon

Review by Brian Lowry, CNN

Mixing a retro design and tone with futuristic elements, “Hello Tomorrow!” creates a rocket-powered vehicle for Billy Crudup (after his yeoman work for Apple TV+ in “The Morning Show”) as a fast-talking salesman peddling property on the moon. It’s a perfect metaphor for the value of dreams, in a series that occasionally goes through weaker phases but seldom proves less than interesting.

Indeed, the off-kilter combination of material in the series evokes comparisons to Apple’s “Severance,” with a cast of quirky coworkers interacting against the backdrop of a rather enticing mystery. Here, the nagging question from the get-go, listening to Crudup’s Jack paint a beguiling picture of rocketing into a new life, is how much of the spiel and his moonlight serenade viewers, like his clients, should buy.

Still, that’s only part of the drama baked into this series created by Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen, which takes an extended detour into Jack reconnecting with his long-lost son, Joey (Nicholas Podany), whose mom is in a coma, and who only knows that dad took off before he was old enough to know him.

Jack’s fellow salespeople at Brightside Lunar Residences — who don’t understand his interest in the kid — are an equally eclectic and problem-plagued bunch, from the married tandem, Eddie and Shirley (Hank Azaria and Haneefah Wood), complicated by the former’s gambling troubles; and Herb (Dewshane Williams), whose need for those sweet commissions stems in part from the prospect of fatherhood.

What really sets “Hello Tomorrow!” apart is its juxtaposition of ’50s-style motifs with robots, wheel-less cars and the idea of lunar colonization. In that sense, credit Apple with another distinctive concept, one that bears some similarities to the recent movie “Don’t Worry Darling” but does so in a more compelling way.

The importance of believing in something, however out of reach it might appear to be. While Jack is a classic salesman in the sell-sand-in-the-desert mode, Crudup invests him with an inherent goodness, or at least a strain of optimism hidden within his relentless pitching, a quality he even brings to his interactions with Joey.

“These folks will never not be miserable,” a wealthy investor, played by Dagmara Dominczyk, tells the usually upbeat Jack in one of the later episodes, reflecting a level of cynicism that, all evidence to the contrary, he seeks to resist.

The net effect isn’t perfect, but the series should effectively pull the audience that wants to know where that rocket goes from one episode to the next. Because while Scarlett O’Hara famously said, “Tomorrow is another day,” thankfully, “Hello Tomorrow!” isn’t just another streaming show, but rather the kind of out-there concept that dares to shoot for the moon.

“Hello Tomorrow!” premieres February 17 on Apple TV+. (Disclosure: Lowry’s wife works for a unit of Apple.)

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