‘Hello Tomorrow!’ Review: It’s Only a Paper Moon

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This comedy about hustlers selling lunar condos launches with visual pizazz. The emotions take longer to land.

By James Poniewozik

"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 starting Friday 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 space-themed 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 hover-van "driven" by a cartoon-video 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 moon-condo 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 analog-tech wonders like self-popping popcorn buckets at a ballgame. But the early episodes left me wondering if there was anything behind its polished facade.

"Pleasantville"-style 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 pre-Betty 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.

Crudup is marvelously cast, letting Jack's inner aches occasionally slip past his practiced smile. (Among a slew of quirky supporting performances, Susan Heyward is an absolute pip as Herb's shrewd wife, Betty.) The season builds screwball momentum as Jack and company try to outrun the consequences of their choices.

But the series is so stylized, not just in the design but also in the performances and the "Guys and Dolls" dialogue, that the characters often feel cartoony and unconvincing. Alison Pill, as a customer determined to expose Jack as a fraud, is like a black-and-white floor-wax commercial come to life. The sales staff's various personal conflicts are weightless and one-note.

What is thoroughly, achingly real is the pervasive theme of lies and why people tell them. Falsehoods are an effective plot engine, of course, but here they are also about character; they’re the sad, sleazy cousins of wishes.

The deeper you get into Jack's business and personal deceptions, the more you realize that every character here — even the most upright — is lying to someone, or to themselves, in the sad belief that voicing the lie can somehow make it true. Underneath the show's sleek shine is a story of beat-up dreamers trying to convince themselves that, with one lucky break, they might lasso the moon.

You could ask whether they might be better off being honest with themselves, just as you could ask whether Jack couldn't make a simpler living by selling some nice encyclopedias. But "Hello Tomorrow!" suggests that deceptions, self- and otherwise, are the rocket fuel that keeps us moving through an otherwise indifferent universe. "What's life without a dream to make it go down easy?" Jack asks. It's the oldest story under the sun.

James Poniewozik is The Times's chief television critic. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics. He is also the author of "Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television and the Fracturing of America."

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