Future Apple TV + Billy Crudup Drama – The Hollywood Reporter

If there’s something Apple TV+ Hello tomorrow! You know, that’s how to paint a good picture. The exterior of its nostalgic futuristic world is filled with sleek flying cars and friendly-looking robots, the interior with elegant medieval furniture. In that mile, well-dressed characters conjure up a brighter vision: Brightside’s sales team, led by Jack (Billy Crudup), fuels fantasies of affordable luxuries on the moon — 200,000 miles away from Earth’s drudgery of debt, broken marriages, and death — finished the job.

This dream is so compelling that Jack himself often seems to lose sight of the distance between the pitch and reality – much of the plot focuses on his attempt to conceal that the moon coins he earns not all they are made of. . However, letting Jack get caught up in his lofty ambitions was one thing. It’s another set to do the same thing. Hello tomorrow! had much to say about hopes, illusions, and the American dream, but struggled to create characters that were grounded enough to sell his ideas.

Jack understands better than anyone the allure of simply running away from one’s problems. By the time we met him, he had been away from his family for so long that the son he last saw at the age of two was now a grown man (Nicholas Podany’s Joey) with no signature. What about him? But when an urgent announcement pulls Jack and his team — Herb (Dewshane Williams), reckless Eddie (Hank Azaria) and pragmatic Shirley (a very tough Haneefah Wood) — to his suburban hometown of Vistaville. , Jack has constructed exaggerations and fictions. His life around is in danger of falling apart.

As a main character, Jack has a bit of Don Draper in him – a silver tongue, an admirable look, a gift for filming irresistible crap – and Crudup was cast as a man who had just spent his life. his whole adult life to get away from everything. and live in fear that one day he will be gone. But his potential as an all-American villain has been misled by a scenario whose broadness makes him obscure. How much of his own hype Jack buys seems like an interesting question at the start of the show; it gradually becomes less appealing when it becomes clear that the show doesn’t know what the answer might be or what to do with it in any case.

The crew around Jack is drawn in even less detail than he is. Most are defined by a single stubborn obsession – Herb’s ambition, Eddie’s gambling addiction, etc. Combined with a black-comedy-leaning tone that isn’t quite achieved, they come off like cartoon; even the typically brilliant Alison Pill can only turn Myrtle, a disgruntled Brightside customer, into a caricature of a 1950s housewife who ends up falling for the net. And if the characters fail, so do their emotions. A major storyline with great potential for drama – Jack’s decision to hire Joey, who sees Jack as a friendly stranger – is theoretically credited with being sadder than actually moving.

Hello tomorrow!Its bluntness extends to its dialogue, which tends to discard extra content in favor of just plain text. The first volume, written by creators Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen, gives Jack not one but two monologues about the heavy frustrations of modern life. (Certainly, some of this is a perfect fit – Jack is the sweet talker type who can declare “We’re not just selling, we’re changing lives,” and pretty much mean it. ) The show’s reliance on grand thesis statements that transcend emotional intimacy or story complexity begins to sound like a form of malarkey itself. “Why run a home business when we can do a trust business?” It’s both a succinct summary of the series’ content, and an incredibly intellectual way for two con artists to discuss the scam they’re about to pull off.

Inevitably, where there is a lot of hot air like this, there will be bloating: Hello tomorrow! has the sluggish pace and apathetic multi-episode structure of a feature-length script that spans ten half-hour episodes for no other reason than that streaming prestige shows is where money is at the moment. in. There are pretty frequent half-jokes and side-scrolls that spin their wheels during the half-season; a tighter edit may have helped distill the series into its finest material.

Not yet Hello tomorrow! it is difficult to abbreviate completely, if only because the themes that serve as its foundation feel so resonant: the importance of hope but also its toxicity, of the frustration of existing in a capitalist society delivers much less than it promises. Particularly believable are concerns about technology and corporate culture. In a well-deserved bleak detail quitOne of Jack’s closest clients was a janitor who was fired for damaging company property while rescuing a man who tried to drown himself after firing “supported.” by the processor” (i.e. determined by an algorithm).

Faced with such great, long-term, and intractable problems, Hello tomorrow! can hardly be blamed for not providing a solution, or even a coherent statement of the things it is struggling with — who could? But with curiosity about the inner lives of the desperate strivers that populate its world, it frustrates them in the same way as any other system: It forgets to consider them human, worthy being empathetic and attentive rather than just making sense of an ending.