Hello tomorrow! review: Apple TV sci-fi crypto review

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A man is at his wit’s end. His life collapsed. The world is filled with incredible technology these days, science fiction wonders, but it’s not like he’s reaping the benefits. He lost his job; his family wants nothing to do with him. All this work, the work of a lifetime, was for nothing. He’s crying into a beer that his robot bartender can’t even bother to pour properly.

But then a man slips in next to him. A younger man. A man in a suit. He tells this crying man that he understands. The world is cruel, indifferent and unjust. But there is a way for him to make the world work for him. There is a way to take this bizarre technological future they find themselves in and achieve happiness. Getting his daughter to talk to him again, even. And he’s headed for the moon.

Here’s the opening scene of Hello Tomorrow!, a new Apple TV Plus show starring Billy Crudup. While Hello Tomorrow! spoils itself in a bright and shiny retrofuture, “The World If” meme comes to life, until recently similar scenes have been going on in America for years. They were performing in Discord chats and YouTube streams, mainstream posts, and countless celebrity-filled commercial breaks at every sporting event imaginable. Until crypto’s real-world pipe dream came crashing down.

The similarities between Jack (Crudup) and his lunar timeshare sales scheme in a development called Brightside and crypto become increasingly apparent as he weaves his way through everyone he meets: his business underlings ( Hank Azaria, Haneefah Wood, and Dewshane Williams), the retired actor who stars in his pitches (Frankie Faison), and at the end of the first episode, his own son, Joey (Nicholas Podany).

Image: Apple

There are elements of crooks and hustlers of years past in Crudup’s performance, reminiscent of everything from Robert Preston’s iconic Harold Hill in The Music Man to the determined badger sales calls captured in the documentary by 1969 by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin Salesman. At first glance, the last person he looks like is a crypto scammer like Sam Bankman-Fried. After all, crypto isn’t the first big scam in history, and unfortunately it won’t be the last.

And yet, the easy comparison between Jack and Bankman-Fried is that they both had uniforms that gave them credibility, reflecting just the opposites of each other. Bankman-Fried, who is currently facing charges of wire fraud, commodities fraud, securities fraud, money laundering and violations of campaign finance law, has come forward to mission to be the anti-prosecution. Like Mark Zuckerberg before him, Bankman-Fried made a bold statement about not caring about his appearance. Jack’s dress sense contrasts with that of the crypto brother: he’s the brother of the climb and the grind. He makes such a show of being on top of the world — and beyond, with his fake moon family — that it’s easy to imagine him offering sales advice on TikTok.

But the real genius of Hello Tomorrow!, with the solid cast and great outfits, is how Jack spreads his gospel with the investment of a true believer. Crudup’s face is a wonder to behold as he adapts to each new step in reality of his own invention. The only thing that baffles him is the sudden appearance of his son in his life, which makes him go crazy trying to convince a child who still doesn’t know who his father is.

That, and crazy customers working with regulators. Lester Costopoulos (Matthew Maher) and Myrtle Mayburn (Alison Pill) have the makings of a charming odd couple who are out to win everywhere for clients’ rights. Costopoulos has all the trappings of another sucker, but his focus on forms and regulations keeps him on the straight and narrow. His best friend seems to be his briefcase, which is almost a pet. He’s like a less sexy, clumsier Paul Giamatti in Billions.

With a cute sci-fi aesthetic that hides darker realities, Hello has found a clever way to tackle a topic that’s been discussed to death. There are already several Bankman-Fried shows in the “headline snatch” pipeline, all of which will pull salacious stories of child prodigies and polycules. But despite all their research, they will struggle to match the crypto sentiment like Hello does. The show asks viewers to believe in a world where technology is indistinguishable from magic, then asks how easy it would be to rip people off in a place like this. That doesn’t sound terribly foreign, does it?

Image: Apple

The show has a good understanding of how romance scams can get, which makes the way it pulls off its shots all the more confusing, with executive producer and writer Stephen Falk telling The Hollywood Reporter that, in keeping with nature sci-fi utopian setting, “we wanted to live in a world where” neither racism nor sexism existed. “The politics on the show are more about capitalism and the American dream than things like racism and sexism,” Falk said.

But the problem here is that you can’t separate things like “capitalism”, “the American dream” and “racism”. Sure, you could, but you end up with an extremely limited conception of the American capitalist dream. Ground zero for this post-World War II dream was the suburbs. These suburbs started with Levittown, Pennsylvania, and white supremacy was built into the leases; Levitt & Sons would explicitly not sell homes to black families, and when a black family moved into a Levittown home in 1957, they were regularly harassed. Not all suburbs had racism baked in the same way, but Levittown cemented the vision of the American Dream as a white lily.

And suburban dreams are everywhere Hello, including a particularly gruesome package drop in the first episode, “Your Brighter Tomorrow, Today.” What’s interesting about Falk’s quote is that Hello Tomorrow! it feels like it works towards a comment on racism anyway. No one works for Brightside more than Shirley (Wood), who manages the entire day-to-day operation. Like the others, she is a firm believer in living on the moon, but works with Jack to make sure their operation is actually successful. She takes her selling points to heart, working day and night to find the right audience for their offerings that are so good it can’t be true. In other words, it’s easy to imagine Shirley taking the blame for Jack’s scam. And whatever Jack’s personal feelings toward Shirley, it’s hard to ignore the optics of the situation.

Racism is implicit on Hello, and knowing that the show is actively cutting that reading is like wasting a fantastic storytelling opportunity. It’s not like capitalism stopped being racist after Levittown. The crypto industry has backed white supremacists, tokenized its black employees, and oversold its “digital rebellion” with the help of celebrities like Spike Lee and Steph Curry. Crypto was looking for black wallets to back up a house of cards, much like Jack was looking for Shirley. The comparisons are there.

None of this should take away from Crudup and Wood’s performance – they’re the most dynamic couple on the show. One is a walking bullshit, and the other has a super bullshit detector that’s been blinded by lunar interference. The show is always a fascinating look at how a scam like crypto can feel as real as the moon in the sky and just as out of reach. Maybe if they get another season, they’ll start to really sell how big American scams are all connected.

The first five episodes of Hello Tomorrow! are now streaming on Apple TV Plus. New episodes are released every Friday.

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