‘Hello Tomorrow!’ Review: Apple TV Plus Goes Retro-Futuristic To Tell a Story We’ve Seen Before
It’s becoming clear that, despite all the creative freedom that the platform may give its creators, most comedy shows on Apple TV Plus are following the same formula, simply changing the scenario and the cast of characters. Ted Lasso, Loot, Shrinking, and most recently Hello Tomorrow! have a lot of similarities in terms of structure and overall direction of the story, and the shtick is running out of steam.
Billy Crudup stars as Jack, a real-estate salesman in a retro-future world — imagine going back to the Space Race days and imagining what the future would look like. Floating cars? They’re in. Small, black-and-white TVs? They’re also in. People living in the moon? Well, that’s what Jack is trying to sell you. This is the general pitch of the show, akin to Shrinking‘s “imagine a therapist telling what he thinks to his clients” or Ted Lasso‘s “what if we had an American football coach at the helm of a British soccer team?”
And much like those series, Hello Tomorrow! also features an emotional hook for the main character. We learn early on that Jack, who dedicates his life to his work, was once supposed to have a family but got cold feet and abandoned his newborn and his wife. Years later, during the show’s main timeline, he’s brought back to his hometown and reunites with his young adult son Joey, only that the kid doesn’t know who he’s interacting with. He recruits him as a salesman for his company, and teaches him everything he knows. Jack chooses charisma and his work ethic to shield his troubled and regretful inner-self from the world, and tries to act as the father that Joey (Nicholas Podany) never had, because he actually is.
Billy Crudup in Hello Tomorrow!, now available on Apple TV Plus.
Hello Tomorrow! also features a few background-decorating characters, whose storylines sometimes take over from Jack’s arc but are never as interesting (except for maybe Alison Pill’s, who is just fantastic). Part of that is also the fact that Billy Crudup is by far the best part of the show, and in other acting hands it probably would have tanked. He is charismatic and engaging, but also has a more somber side as a product of the demons of his past. Think of Don Draper if he was in an Apple TV Plus comedy — the characters are not exactly cracking jokes every two minutes, but instead, the comedy arises from their own personalities and responses to particular situations.
Therein lies the main problem for me — Hello Tomorrow! would have probably worked much better if it had a serious tone. I can see the pitch being “Think of Mad Men in a retro-futuristic world, but it’s half-comedy”. Removing the comedy part and adding more stakes to the situations would have probably helped, at least for me, especially for the secondary characters, who are mostly treated as caricatures and not given a lot of time to shine. At the same time, the decision of having each episode of its ten episodes clock in at 30 minutes was a great one, as they never overstay their welcome. The storylines, though, are in general quite predictable and there is usually not enough to make us rush to click on the next episode, especially during the mid-season episodes.
Alison Pill in Hello Tomorrow!, now available on Apple TV Plus.
Something that I particularly appreciated about the series is that the retro-futuristic style never really takes over, and the writers were more focused on building the characters and the storylines rather than pointing to robot bartenders and saying “look at this!”, or wasting 20 minutes to explain how the rules of the world work. Instead, they let the viewers learn by themselves by living in it with the characters. Hello Tomorrow! runs into a wall during its mid-season episodes, when that background creativity is less eye-grabbing and the major elements have already been introduced. The (mostly predictable) storylines become much more interesting through the tail end of the series, which I wouldn’t be surprised to see renewed.
In the end, Hello Tomorrow! was a mixed bag of been-here-done-that plotlines and never-seen-that-before backgrounds and settings. All of it is elevated by Billy Crudup’s excellent performance — but make no mistake, he’s definitely not at the level of The Morning Show.
The first three episodes are currently streaming on Apple TV Plus, with new episodes coming out weekly.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
