People, by and large, are not great fans of reality.
Oh, we’re stuck right in the middle of it, like a ’50s movie serial character stuck in quicksand at a cliffhanger moment, but we don’t much like it; while we watch epic love and thrilling action and huge twists and turns that make you gasp and shudder and sigh in rapt appreciation, reality is all sadness and weariness and hoping that the one foot in of the other schtick we have to keep up just because we do is actually going to lead somewhere good.
To combat this sense that we’re stuck in an unfulfilling story of our own making, we resort to all kinds of things – drugs, alcohol, social media, movies and way more, which in Hello Tomorrow! includes an addiction to the optimistic idea that we can actually outrun the sense that life is not as great as advertised.
Weaponising optimism in this scenario is salesman Jack Billings (Billy Crudup) who goes from town to town in what can only been an alternate history of good old planet Earth where all those lush retro future stylings of flying cars and robot helpers have come to pass, spruiking the highly appealing notion that things will only be better if we commit to buying a home on the Moon.
Yes, the Moon, that orbiting body 384,000 km from Earth made of cheese and various glowing shapes and responsible for the lunar calendar and Buzz Aldrin’s fame.
Jack is a salesman for Brightside, a company that promises luxurious living for common folk who are otherwise caught somewhere down in the grinding gears of the American Dream, stuck in a cycle of scrabbling to put food on the table and look after those they love and who have precious little reason to cling to hope of any size, shape or stripe at all.
And yet somehow optimism persists in these battered souls and Jack, who’s all charm and friendly veneer atop a steely determination to see his vision through – thankfully, Hello Tomorrow! doesn’t leave him in this one-note character suit, sending him through an arc that shows how vulnerable and fragile he is beneath the hand-shaking, sweet-talking bluff and swagger – makes the most of it, reaching his sales goals, though never quite as extravagantly as he wants to, by selling the idea that hope has substance and form.
But, of course, nothing can ever be as good as the sales spiel, and despite the assurance that “That’s the dream you all deserve”, what ever lives up the hype?
Sadly, not much, and a great deal of what drives Hello Tomorrow!, which carefully and thoughtfully uses its 10-episode allotment to slowly and remorselessly dissect why hope powers us so fundamentally and what happens to us when revived hope runs out of steam or finds its exposed as schlock and scam, is given over to examining how hope can blind to the truth standing right in front of us.
Even the salespeople in Jack’s team – right-hand-woman Shirley Steadman (Haneefah Wood), gambler Eddie (Hank Azaria), ambitiously comical Herb Porter (Dewshane Williams) and newbie Joey Porter (Nicholas Podany) who has some major issues of his won to contend with – fall prey to the glitz and glamour of what might be if only they can sell enough, their Moon-adjacent jobs proof that hopefulness and optimistic eagerness do have a place in the grim landscape of real life.
Each of them, of course, like the people they sell to such a housewife Myrtle Mayburn (Alison Pill) who finds what she signed for with Brightside bearing no resemblance to what she needs setting off some potent narrative twists and turns, need what the company is selling.
But in the end, each has to reckon with the chasmic gap between the sparkling vista of what is promised and what they actually end up holding in their hands in a world which, should be rights if all that pulp ’50s optimistic retro charm bears out, should be one long bliss ride into tomorrow.
Where Hello Tomorrow! is brilliantly clever is in cloaking its dark nights of the human soul and joyful romps to the warmth of a hopeful sun in the gloss of what we always think the future should be.
In Jack and Shirley, Joey and Myrtle’s world, racism is reassuringly absent, floating robots walk dogs and trim hedges, cars glide above the roads, no sign of a pneumatic tyre anywhere, packages are delivered by algorithmic-storks driving vans and everything glows in smoothly angular shapes and smart, playful fashion.
This is the future made pleasantly bright and cheery, that good old vision of what lay before us in the ruins of post-World War Two society given enough gloss and charm to drown us if we let it.
How can anything be bad when everything looks down playfully, cutely, imaginatively alive?
What can go wrong when briefcases float next to you and deliver up the document you need without any fumbling for the right folder? How can life be boring and soulless when rockets routinely scream up to the Moon and back and our bartender is made of metal and able to dispense anything from a database so big nothing is beyond it?
A lot apparently and Hello Tomorrow! mines the scarred humanity and broken dreams that lie scattered on this highly attractively vista – the town in which this all takes place is called Vistaville, which, like the promises made in the show, sounds luminously lovely and empty of real meaning all at once – to an affecting degree which, while not perfectly realised, hits home with the idea that we want more from reality than it ever actually deliver.
With that type of outlook, Hello Tomorrow! can often be bleak, deep diving to the depths of the worst of the human condition, and while some people like Jack’s mother Barbara Billings (Jackie Weaver is sublimely warmly dark mode that works a treat) and there’s a lot of people realising just how much they have been conned and hoodwinked, not just by Jack but by life itself which seems not averse to disappointing at the drop of moon rock-coated hat.
But while Hello Tomorrow! does get lost in this darkness and disillusionment to the point where some episode drag more than they should, it’s also unnervingly funny too, thanks largely to Eddie’s unfailing belief that he can outrun his gambling addiction and the criminal thug that violently cleans up its aftermath and Herb’s desperate belief (match only by Jack’s manically charming need to prove himself), encouraged by his mercilessly ambitious wife Betty (Susan Heyward) that he, and only he, should be the top seller for Brightside and its dubious pitch that you can leave your flawed Earth self behind for blissed-out lunar happiness.
As dark in its soul and as bleakly honest about the human condition as a therapist determined to bring their patient to account, Hello Tomorrow! is a mostly well-realised show, draped in a glossy retro fabulousness which, while it amuses with its ubiquitous utopian cheeriness, belies a world where everyone is hoping and praying for good things to happen and yet are still stuck somewhere nastily in the middle where all those dreams have nowhere to go but up, which is fine, if UP is every bit as good as it’s cracked up to be which, as we all know and see, is highly unlikely to ever be the case.
When the truth is almost exposed …
Check out this fun review with stars Billy Crudup and Nicholas Podany …