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The new Apple TV Plus series tells a story of trickery and deception in the bright and sunny style of 1950s retro-futurism.
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Everything seems idyllic when Hello Tomorrow starts. The new half-hour sci-fi series on Apple TV Plus is a throwback to the future, with the hope and optimism that a 1950s Tomorrowland might bring. Technology has made life perfect. people ride in flying cars like Cadillacs, robots deliver mail and beer, companies use jetpacks to get to work, and all kinds of weird gadgets make housework a headache. Well, there's also a cartoon bird driving a delivery truck announcing that he's "bringing smiles" to the world.
But cracks soon begin to appear. Hello Tomorrow uses this contrast between dreams of a better future and the harsh reality of today to tell a surprisingly tense story about life's struggles with the choices we make. It starts out bright and fun, but when reality sets in, the show feels like something out of Uncut Gems , filtered through pre- Fallout moments.
Note: This review is based on the first three episodes of Hello Tomorrow . Contains very mild spoilers for these episodes.
The story is about Jack (Billy Crudup), a salesman who runs a small group that sells housing for a lunar colony called Brightside. They go door to door making big promises about life in space before moving on to the next small town. Jack is particularly good at this; In one of the first scenes of the series he manages to sell a piece of land to a drunk and lonely stranger in a bar. The lifestyle suits most team members. This allows Eddie (Hank Azaria) to continue selling to pay off his gambling debts while Herb (Dushane Williams) tries to build up savings for his soon-to-be-expanding family. Shirley (Hanifa Wood) does her best to keep everyone in check as she climbs the corporate ladder.
But their nomadic lifestyle comes to an abrupt halt. Eloquent Jack has some secrets of his own, including his 20-year-old son Joe (Nicholas Podany), whom he doesn't even know exist and doesn't want to know. The combined circumstances mean that Brightside's sales team is forced to stay in Joe's hometown for an extended period of time, where sales are low, but Jack at least manages to fit into his son's life.
What quickly becomes clear is that almost everything in the world of Hello Tomorrow is fake. You can see this in many of Brightside's potential customers, who are mostly very happy to have this amazing technology at their disposal. Some have lost their jobs, been replaced by technology, and others have drifted away from family and friends to pursue a sci-fi dream. No one exemplifies this better than Jack, whose hard work has allowed him to avoid all the real problems in his life. For years this has included his son, but that's changing because he's not so subtly trying to be a part of Joey's life without hinting at their true relationship with each other.
Things get pretty stressful. Jack's world, both personal and professional, is built on an unstable house of cards. When she lies about her relationship with her son, her work life also begins to fall apart. Soon it's not enough to meet Joe, so he ends up offering his married son a job as a salesman. He devotes his time, energy and money to this new project, much to the confusion and anger of his colleagues. With everyone else willing to move to a city with better sales opportunities, Jack keeps finding excuses to stay.
This is what the Brightside rockets do, in the third episode, unsure if they really exist outside of the holographic sales videos, they keep getting delayed, forcing customers to wait for the next release or ask for a refund. (Reminds me of a one-track episode of The Simpsons , but without the musical numbers.) You can feel the house of cards start to shake, but at least in the first few episodes, Jack manages not to fall under the sheer force of will.
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What really sells the "back to the future" idea (besides Jack's emotional sales pitch) is how good Hello Tomorrow is. The production design is top notch. Hair and cars became a natural part of life in the 1950s, and everywhere you look there are plenty of modern gadgets, from popcorn cans flying during a baseball game to a dictation device attached to a typewriter. Video calls are conducted via black-and-white televisions and cylindrical robots that do every little job you can think of. Some, like the hotel bartender, also have experience. The functional and tangible nature of these technologies seems ingenious, even if they never existed. And on the surface, this version of the 1950s seems much more prosperous than ours, mostly because it avoids talking about real issues like race (at least for now).
It's hard to tell where Hello Tomorrow is going at this point (the entire season is 10 episodes). But it's definitely a long way off, at least for the actors. A glimpse into Jack's life is like a particularly stylish car accident in which something goes wrong. The only question is how bad it is and whether anyone will be able to handle it.
Hello Tomorrow premieres February 17 on Apple TV Plus , with new episodes every Friday.
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