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

The end is near for a man. His entire life is now in disarray. The world is filled with incredible technology these days, wonders out of science fiction, but it’s not like he’s reaping any of the benefits. He’s lost his job; his family doesn’t want anything to do with him. All that work, a life’s work, has amounted to nothing. He’s crying into a beer that his robot bartender can’t even bother to pour right.

A man then sits up beside him. A younger man. An older man wearing a suit. The man in the suit tells him that he is understanding. He knows that the world is unfair, cruel and uncaring. But there’s a way he can make the world work for him. There’s a way to take this bizarre technological future they find themselves in and actually achieve happiness. His daughter should talk with him once more. And it’s moving to the moon.

Here is the opening scene for Hello Tomorrow!A new Apple TV Plus series starring Billy Crudup is called ‘The Message from Billy Crudup. While Hello Tomorrow! gussies itself up in a bright and shiny retrofuture, “The World If” meme come to life, up until recently, similar scenes have been taking place in America for years. You could see them in Discord chats or YouTube streams. They also appeared in mainstream publications. This was until the crypto-realistic pipe dream collapsed.

The similarities between Jack (Crudup) and his scheme for selling lunar timeshares in a development called Brightside and crypto become more and more apparent as he cons his way through every person he meets: His sales subordinates (Hank Azaria, Haneefah Wood, and Dewshane Williams), the retired actor who stars in his pitches (Frankie Faison), and by the first episode’s end, his own son, Joey (Nicholas Podany).

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There are elements of scammers and hustlers of years gone by in Crudup’s performance, which calls to mind everything from Robert Preston’s iconic Harold Hill in The Music Man to the determined badgerlike sales calls captured in Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin’s 1969 documentary Salesman. He looks very much like a scammer named Sam Bankman-Fried. After all, crypto’s not the first big scam in history, and it sadly won’t be the last.

The easy way to compare Jack and Bankman Fried is that both had uniforms which conferred credibility. Bankman-Fried is facing charges for wire fraud and commodities fraud as well as securities fraud and money laundering. He also faces campaign finance laws violations. As Mark Zuckerberg did before him, Bankman Fried made bold statements about how he didn’t care about his appearance. Jack’s sartorial sense contrasts with that of the crypto bro: He’s the rise-and-grind bro. He makes such a show of being on top of the world — and beyond it, with his fake lunar family — that it’s easy to imagine him offering sales tips on TikTok.

However, the true genius of Hello Tomorrow!This is Jack’s way of spreading his gospel. He does this with an impressive cast and fabulous outfits. Crudup’s face is a marvel to behold as he adjusts to each new step in the reality of his own invention. The only thing throwing him off his game is the sudden appearance of his son in his life, which has him spending like crazy trying to win over a child who still doesn’t know who his dad is.

These customers are often manipulated and unable to cooperate with regulators. Lester Costopoulos (Matthew Maher) and Myrtle Mayburn (Alison Pill) have the makings of a charming odd couple looking to strike a win for customers’ rights everywhere. Costopoulos is a sucker with all the trappings, but his attention to regulations and forms keeps him focused. He considers his hover-briefcase to be his best friend, almost like a dog. He’s like a less sexy, more awkward Paul Giamatti in Billions.

It’s a cute sci-fi style that conceals darker reality. Hallo! has found a clever way into a topic that’s been discussed to death. There are already multiple shows about Bankman-Fried in the “ripped from the headlines” pipeline, all of which will pull from salacious stories of whiz kids and polycules. But for all their research, they’ll be hard-pressed to match the feeling of crypto like Hallo! does. It asks viewers to imagine a world in which technology can be confused with magic. Then, the show questions how easy it is to con people. Doesn’t sound terribly foreign, does it?

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The show has a strong understanding of how romantic scams can become, which makes the way it pulls its punches all the more bewildering, with executive producer and writer Stephen Falk telling The Hollywood Reporter that in keeping with sci-fi utopian nature of the setting, “we wanted to live in a world where” neither racism or sexism existed. “The politics in the show are more about capitalism and the American dream than about 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. While you can do this, it leaves you with a limited understanding of what the capitalist American dream is. The suburbs were the foundation of this post-World War II dream. Those suburbs started with Levittown, Pennsylvania, and had white supremacy baked right into the leases; Levitt & Sons explicitly would not sell homes to Black families, and when a Black family did move into a Levittown home in 1957, they were routinely harassed. Although racism wasn’t universally prevalent in all suburbs, Levittown was the most prominent example of American dream that is lily-white.

The suburbs are the future Hallo!, including a particularly gruesome package drop-off in the first episode, “Your Brighter Tomorrow, Today.” What’s interesting about Falk’s quote is that Hello Tomorrow! feels like it’s working toward a commentary on racism anyway. Shirley Wood (who manages Brightside on a daily-to-day basis) is the one who does most of the work. Like the others, she’s a true believer in moon living, but works with Jack on making sure their operation actually succeeds. She takes his sales pitches to heart, working day and night to find the right audiences for their so-good-it-can’t-be-true deals. It’s easy to imagine Shirley taking the fall for Jack’s con, in other words. And whatever Jack’s personal feelings toward Shirley, it’s hard to ignore the optics of the situation.

On the other hand, racism is implicit Hallo!It feels as if the show is wasting great storytelling opportunities by cutting off this reading. It’s not like capitalism stopped being racist after Levittown. The crypto industry propped up white supremacists, tokenized its Black employees, and oversold its “digital rebellion” with the help of celebrities like Spike Lee and Steph Curry. The crypto industry was looking for Black wallets in order to support a house full of cards just as Jack did with Shirley. You can see the similarities.

None of this should take away from the performances Crudup and Wood are putting in — they’re the most dynamic pairing of the show. One’s a walking bullshitter, and the other has a great bullshit detector that’s been blinded by some lunar interference. This show still offers a great look into how crypto scams can seem as real as the stars in the sky, and as far as possible. Maybe if they get another season, they’ll start to really sell how the great American scams are all related.

These are the first five episodes Hello Tomorrow!Now streaming via Apple TV Plus New episodes drop every Friday.