Hello tomorrow! review: Apple TV’s sci-fi crypto critique

A man is at the end of his rope. His life has fallen apart. The world is filled with incredible technology these days, wonders of science fiction, but it’s not like he’s reaping any of the benefits. He has lost his job; his family wants nothing to do with him. All that work, a life’s work, has come to nothing. He cries into a beer that his robot bartender doesn’t even bother to pour right.

But then a man sits down 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 unfair. But there is one way he can make the world work for him. It’s a way to take this bizarre technological future they find themselves in and actually achieve happiness. Get your daughter to talk to him again, even. And it moves to the moon.

This is the opening scene to Hello tomorrow!, a new Apple TV Plus show starring Billy Crudup. While Hello tomorrow! indulges in a bright and shiny retrofuture, “The World If” meme comes to life, until recently, similar scenes have been taking place in America for years. They took place in Discord chats and YouTube streams, mainstream publications and countless commercial breaks filled with celebrities in every sporting event imaginable. Until the real pipe dream of crypto collapsed.

The similarities between Jack (Crudup) and his plan to sell lunar timeshares in a development called Brightside and crypto become more and more apparent as he tricks his way through each person he meets: His sales subordinates (Hank Azaria, Haneefah Wood and Dewshane Williams) , the retired actor who plays at his courts (Frankie Faison), and by the end of the first episode, his own son, Joey (Nicholas Podany).

Image: Apple

There are elements of swindlers and swindlers of yesteryear in Crudup’s performance, recalling everything from Robert Preston’s iconic Harold Hill in The music man to the determined badger-like sales calls captured in Albert and David Maysle and Charlotte Zwerin’s 1969 documentary Salesman. At first glance, the last person he resembles is a crypto-swindler 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 simple comparison between Jack and Bankman-Fried is that they both had uniforms that gave them credibility, just mirror opposites of each other. Bankman-Fried, who is currently facing charges of wire fraud, commodities fraud, securities fraud, money laundering and campaign finance law violations, made it her mission to be the anti-lawyer. Like Mark Zuckerberg before him, Bankman-Fried made a bold statement about not caring what he looked like. Jack’s sense of sense contrasts with that of his crypto brother: He is the brother who rises and paints. 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 tips on TikTok.

But the real genius of Hello tomorrow!, along with the strong 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 each new step in the reality of his own invention. The only thing that throws him off his game is the sudden appearance of his son in his life, which causes him to spend like crazy trying to win over a child who still does not know who his father is.

That, and run over customers who work with regulators. Lester Costopoulos (Matthew Maher) and Myrtle Mayburn (Alison Pill) have the makings of a charming, odd couple who want to win the rights of customers everywhere. Costopoulos has everything that can be done for another sissy, but his focus on forms and rules keeps him on the straight and narrow. His best friend seems to be his suitcase, which is almost a pet. He’s like a less sexy, more awkward Paul Giamatti Billions.

With cute sci-fi aesthetics hiding darker realities, Hello has found a clever way into a topic that has been debated to death. There are already several series about Bankman-Fried in the “ripped from the headlines” pipeline, all of which will draw from salacious stories of whiz kids and polycules. But for all their research, they’ll be hard-pressed to match the crypto-like feel Hello do. The show asks viewers to believe in a world where technology is inseparable from magic, and then asks how easy it would be to fool people in a place like this. Doesn’t sound terribly foreign, does it?

Image: Apple

The show has a strong understanding of how romantic fraud can be, which makes the way it takes on itself all the more perplexing, with executive producer and writer Stephen Falk telling The Hollywood Reporter that in keeping with the sci-fi utopian nature of its setting, ” we wanted to live in a world where” neither racism nor sexism existed. “The politics of 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” from each other. Sure, you can do that, but you end up with an extremely limited view of the capitalist American dream. Ground zero of the dream after World War II was the suburbs. Starting with Levittown, Pennsylvania, these suburbs had white supremacy baked right into the leases; Levitt & Sons explicitly would not sell homes to black families, and when a black family moved into a Levittown home in 1957, they were routinely harassed. Not all suburbs had racism built in in the same way, but Levittown cemented the lily-white vision of the American dream.

And suburban dreams are over Hello, including a particularly gruesome package delivery in the first episode, “Your Brighter Tomorrow, Today.” What is interesting about Falk’s quote is that Hello tomorrow! feels like it works against a comment about racism anyway. No one does more work for Brightside than Shirley (Wood), who manages the entire operation on a day-to-day basis. Like the others, she is a true believer in lunar life, but works with Jack to ensure that their operation is indeed successful. She takes his sales pitches to heart, working day and night to find the right audiences for their so-good-it-can’t-be offers. It’s easy to imagine Shirley falling for Jack’s con, in other words. And whatever Jack’s personal feelings towards Shirley, it’s hard to ignore the optics of the situation.

The racism is implicit Hello, and knowing that the show actively cuts off that reading feels like a waste of a wonderful storytelling opportunity. It’s not that capitalism stopped being racist after Levittown. The crypto industry propped up white supremacy, tokenized its black employees, and oversold its “digital rebellion” with the help of celebrities like Spike Lee and Steph Curry. Crypto sought out black wallets to prop up a house of cards, just like how Jack sought out Shirley. The comparisons are right there.

None of this should take away from the performances Crudup and Wood put in – they’re the most dynamic pairing of the show. One is a walking bullshitter, and the other has a great bullshit detector that has been blinded by lunar interference. The show remains a fascinating look at how a scam like crypto can feel as real as the moon in the sky and just out of reach. Maybe if they get another season they’ll really start selling how the great American scams are connected.

The first five episodes of Hello tomorrow! now streaming on Apple TV Plus. New episodes come every Friday.