Hello Tomorrow!: Billy Crudup and Nicholas Podany Wanna Sell You on Their Retro-Futuristic Apple Dramedy
Though they merely play salesmen in Apple TV+‘s new comedy, Hello Tomorrow!, Billy Crudup and Nicholas Podany clearly learned a thing or two about hawking timeshares on… the moon.
“Tell me something, Matt — how’s that office there treating you?” asked Podany during a recent Zoom call with TVLine. “Is it big enough? You got enough light coming in? Well, up on the moon there’s nothing but acres for you to do whatever you like up there. You like seeing the stars? Boom, baby!”
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Crudup then chimed in, “And you can look down at all your troubles and say, ‘So long, suckers!'”
Hey, you don’t need to pitch me twice. Sign me up!
Co-created by Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen and debuting this Friday with its first three episodes, Hello Tomorrow! is set in a retro-futuristic 1950s as it follows a group of traveling salesmen touting lunar timeshares. The Morning Show Emmy winner Crudup (who is also an EP on the series), stars as Jack, a Brightside salesman whose unshakeable faith in “a brighter tomorrow” inspires coworkers and revitalizes customers, while Podany (Hart of Dixie) plays Jack’s new protege*, Joey.
The ensemble cast also includes Emmy winner Hank Azaria as a salesman with a gambling problem, Haneefah Wood (Truth Be Told) as Jack’s righthand man, Dewshane Williams (In the Dark) as Brightside’s hardest worker, Jacki Weaver (Yellowstone) as Jack’s mom, Alison Pill (Star Trek: Picard) as a perturbed timeshare buyer, and Matthew Maher (Our Flag Means Death) as an investigator.
Oh yeah, that asterisk (*) from above. Did we mention that Jack is Joey’s father? Only, Joey is oblivious to that fact? That secret is what motivates Jack to take an unproven salesman under his wing, while always nudging him to tell Joey the truth.
“The first meeting that they have, there’s a pause and Jack says, ‘Joey, can I tell you something?’ And he’s going to tell him right there. He’s going to wipe the slate clean, and then….”
And then… what?
If Jack were to share with Joey their family tie, “he will have to confront the reality of the present, the mistakes that he’s made, the fractured vulnerabilities that he has, the contorted humanity within him,” Crudup explains. “All of those things that he keeps at bay by thinking of ‘tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow,’ selling ‘tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow,’ would catch up to him. And I think he’s someone who is not sure how he would manage his day if he had to account for all the mistakes that he’s made in his life.”
Being a retro-futuristic comedy, Hello Tomorrow! vividly depicts a world with the expected sartorial and architectural trappings of the 1950s, but accentuated by robot bartenders and Studebakers that hover. Which such futuristic flourishes most tickled its cast?
“Listen, I love the self-popping popcorn thing; that’s a classic,” says Crudup, referring to a very nifty ballpark snack. “When they gave it to us first switched it on, the ingenuity that went into making that is so interesting it should be a show itself!”
Both Podany and Crudup were also impressed by the inelegant robots that float around town to perform municipal services, brought to life as they were by both puppeteers and remote-control operators. “It took a whole team of craftsmen to create this illusion that there’s this dumpy robot moving around clumsily,” Crudup marveled.
And those hover cars mentioned above? They were made possible by…. putting mirrors in front of the tires! “Seeing old Hollywood techniques being employed in a TV show about the ’50s was fantastic,” says Podany. “Mirrors in front of the wheels? Genius.”
Apple TV+’s Hello Tomorrow! premieres Friday, Feb. 17 with its first three episodes, followed by weekly releases through April 7. Watch the trailer below:
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