'Hello, Tomorrow!': Apple TV+ Takes Billy Crudup Off the Bench for a Retrofuturistic Dark Comedy

By Alberto Cox Délano | TV | January 19, 2023 |

By Alberto Cox Délano | TV | January 19, 2023 |

If The Morning Show proved anything, it was that we had been sleeping on Billy Crudup as a character actor for the better part of three decades. Cory Ellison is such a delight to watch that he basically became the star of a show starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston doing their career-best performances. Since it takes a long-ass time to produce each season, with or without a pandemic, Apple TV+ is wisely loaning him to another one of its series. If the trailer is correct, we’re once again seeing Crudup having the time of his life playing the ultimate, neutral-evil version of his charismatic jerks: The sales manager.

Set in the 1950s version of the future, complete with levitating cars, robot-helpers designed in post-war Deco style, jet-packs, and space rockets. Crudup is Jack Billings, the supervisor tasked with onboarding traveling salesmen (and women) with one product the 20th Century failed to deliver: Timeshares on the Moon. Shadiness shenanigans will shake up these shifty characters. The cast is PACKED, with Hank Azaria, Haneefah Wood, and Alison Pill as the hapless salespeople or frustrated suburbanites, and featuring Jackie Collins as the mother of Crudup’s character.

The trailer is stunning. We can thank streaming for saving innovative sci-fi ideas, and for once, focusing on regular civilians dealing with the parts of the future that are too similar to our present. However, this will be one of many retrofuturistic sci-fi productions to come out over the next few years, including the Russo brothers’ The Electric State, Prime Video’s TV adaptation of Fallout, and the underseen Tales from the Loop, from the same writer-illustrator as The Electric State, plus the forever-delayed adaptation of Bioshock. I do fear that this trend might give people the wrong impression, making them forget that the aesthetics of ’50s America hid every single thing that is wrong with the World right now. But that’s just me; I’ve always been more of a fan of Socialist-Modernist-punk and Art-Deco… punk.

The first three episodes of Hello, Tomorrow! begin streaming on February 17th