Hello Tomorrow! Review

I love a creative sci-fi drama. I also love a reto-set story that pulls from sci-fi to create a cool blend of mid-century style with futuristic elements that set the series apart from your usual 50s/60s-set stories. And that’s essentially what Hello Tomorrow!, a new AppleTV+ series from Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen is – a retro-futuristic series that tries to tell a unique story. Unfortunately, this tale fails to launch, with a story that goes around in circles, isn’t able to provide adequate character development, and makes it nearly impossible to root for or care about anyone within the narrative arc it’s trying (and failing) to tell. Sure, it looks great (and has a dream cast), but Hello Tomorrow! is a disappointment.

The basic story of the series is simple: Jack Billings (Billy Crudup, using his ability to be smarmy and charming to great effect throughout) leads a team of door-to-door salespeople who are trying to sell timeshares on the Moon. They travel from town to town, holding information sessions and try to sell as many homes as they can. However, when Jack decides to bring the team back to his former hometown – where his now-adult son Joey (Nicholas Podany) and his ex-wife still live – things start going pear-shaped for our sales team and some very big secrets come out. Just what those secrets are I’ll refrain from spoiling – although I suspect you’ll be able to guess one or two – but suffice to say the narrative arc of the season doesn’t really offer anything in the way of surprises.

It also doesn’t offer much in terms of a cohesive tonal arc either. Which is where the major issue with the series lies. Some of the cast – Crudup, Podany, Haneefah Wood’s Shirley – tackle the material as if they’re working in a dark dramedy with moments of levity, but always with a focus on trying to deepen the relationships of their characters. Other cast member, including Hank Azaria, Alison Pill, Dewshane Williams, and Matthew Maher, are working in a comedy that veers into screwball territory at various moments throughout the first season. Their characters are heightened, their delivery is over the top, they’re playing to the rafters. It’s jarring to jump from scene to scene as the tone swings wildly depending on just who we’re dealing with. Personally, I preferred the more grounded sequences, dealing with deeper human emotions and relationships to the more out there antics of the often ridiculous comedy that surrounds them, but frankly, the two tones of the series can’t coexist and still expect its audience to take the series seriously.

If a series can’t figure out its tone from moment to moment, what hope is there that it will do right by its characters? After all, if we don’t know if we should take Jack or Shirley or Joey seriously depending on which side of the series they’re acting in at a given time, well, how can we be expected to dig in and appreciate the positives the series has to offer. And those positives would be its stellar production design. Seriously, that alone was enough to make me wish the series had worked out the myriad of issues with the story, tone, and character development, because the show looks so darn cool. But if there’s one thing we can learn from Jack Billings it’s that just because something – or someone – looks slick and presents a cool front, it doesn’t mean they aren’t a complete mess underneath.

It’s particularly unfortunate that great actors like Crudup, Azaria, Wood, and Pill are wasted in this series – especially Crudup and Pill, who have also been left to wander in the narrative desert in recent projects (Apple’s own The Morning Show and Paramount+’s Picard, respectively). When you attract talented actors who you know can handle complex characters and then saddle them with half-baked ideas and poorly drawn characters, well, it’s just hard to watch them spin their wheels with no pay-off. As the streaming wars continue to rage, AppleTV+ keeps pulling in great talent but rarely providing them with the payoff one hopes in terms of complex, well-drawn stories to tell. If the network keeps this up, they will fall behind their fellow streamers. We need some better projects. Because Hello Tomorrow! is a miss.

Hello Tomorrow! Premieres on Friday, February 17 on AppleTV+. All ten episodes of the first season were provided for review.