‘Hello Tomorrow!’ Is a Lunar Mission That Stalls Out: TV Review
Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Last year, Apple TV+ had a zeitgeist hit with “Severance,” a show that leveraged a high-polish gleam and an eerily out-of-time aesthetic to tell a story of people who were ultimately strangers to themselves. The streamer could be said to be attempting the same feat twice with “Hello Tomorrow!,” set in a 1950s idea of the future and centering an affably empty salesman played by Billy Crudup. Here, though, the ideas are unrewarding enough that the worked-over look of the show grows tiresome, as though it’s covering for a lack in the series’ writing. Created by Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen, “Hello Tomorrow!” features Crudup in something like the mode for which he won an Emmy as “The Morning Show’s” devious executive. Here, he plays Jack, a wheel-spinning operator who is selling timeshares on the moon. His customers are people who, as in our collective memory of our nation’s midcentury past, have a fixation on the possibilities space offers but who, unlike ‘50s Americans,— see getting there as feasible. Joey, the young man Jack takes under his wing (Nicholas Podany), is an ungifted salesman at first. But he makes an emotional impression upon Jack, who is concealing that he is Joey’s father.