“Hello Tomorrow!,” a new 10 episode, half-hour dramedy that follows a group of salesman hawking lunar timeshares in a retro-future world, officially launched on AppleTV+ on Friday, and for lauded actor Billy Crudup, the series hit close to home. TheWrap spoke with co-creators Lucas Jansen and Amit Bhalla and stars Crudup and Nicholas Podany to learn more about the show’s characters and themes, and how the series tackles the “disastrous ramifications” of radical optimism.
Crudup plays Jack Billings, a salesman of great talent and ambition, whose unshakeable faith in a brighter tomorrow inspires his coworkers and revitalizes his desperate customers – but threatens to leave him dangerously lost in the very dream that sustains him.
“We were told we were going to meet Billy to play the role and we were like, ‘Oh my God, this guy’s goddamn perfect. We gotta sell him, what do we even say, how do we talk about the show’,” Bhalla recalled. “We get on the call and Billy is like, ‘Put me in, this is the story I’ve been waiting to play.’ He’s selling us on it, and he goes, ‘Jack isn’t a salesman, Jack is a priest,’ and we’re like, ‘Oh man, this guy gets it, this guy knows exactly what we’re going after.’ There’s no ‘Hello Tomorrow!’ without Billy, there’s no Jack, that character is his and he imbued it with an immense amount of craft and talent.”
In addition to Crudup, the series’ ensemble cast includes Haneefah Wood (“Truth Be Told,” “One Day at a Time”) as Shirley Stedman, Alison Pill (“Them,” “The Newsroom”) as Myrtle Mayburn, Nicholas Podany (“Harry Potter And The Cursed Child”) as Joey Shorter, Dewshane Williams (“The Umbrella Academy,” “In the Dark”) as Herb Porter, Emmy Award winner Hank Azaria (“Brockmire,” “Ray Donovan”) as Eddie Sharples, Matthew Maher (“Our Flag Means Death”) as Lester Costopolous and Academy Award nominee Jacki Weaver (“Silver Linings Playbook,” “Animal Kingdom”) as Barbara Billings.
“Every day on set were like, ‘Oh man, we’re in great hands’,” Bhalla added. “We can’t really explain it. It’s a beautiful mix of characters. We’re so deeply grateful for the cast that we have. They brought to life all of these characters in a way that’s a profound experience for us to witness. I don’t know what forms something like this but what we know is that they’re all amazing.”
A major theme explored in “Hello Tomorrow!” is “how far hope will take you and where to hang that hope,” Podany told The Wrap.
“It’s a lot of lies, it’s a lot of crumbling scams and it’s a lot of human to human relationships and heartache and heartbreak and heart healing,” he said.
Co-creator Lucas Jansen told TheWrap that Crudup’s Jack is a character who “is possessed of such a potent and such a desperate hope.”
“It has almost the power to transfigure reality itself both for him and the people around him. It can save lives and it could also ruin them,” Jansen said. “The kind of inspiring and then also disastrous ramifications of radical optimism struck us as the tragic American theme of our day, or at least one that we really wanted to interrogate.”
Crudup told TheWrap he was immediately drawn to the way the Jack spoke about hope, which he said was “a very familiar feature to me from my dad.”
“My dad was constantly running into obstacles in his life but he woke up every day,” Crudup explained. “He was one of those people who had the word of the day calendar, those old tear off calendars, and he would call us and say, ‘alright, leave a message saying the word of the day is optimism.’ Whatever it was, he was ready to turn the page every day with the promise that today was going to be better than tomorrow and that was with him until his dying days. And I was fascinated by that and Amit and Lucas to my mind captured that perfectly.”
He added that Jack is “invested in curiosity about the human condition” and “desperately wants to be an agent of change in a positive way, bring some hope to people’s lives and is simply struggling with the capacity of how is he going to make that happen.”
Another theme that “Hello Tomorrow!” covers is the pitfalls of chasing the American dream.
“I want to think the show is saying that the American dream is, for some, so based around achievement and reach and everything that you don’t have so much so that when you when you actually have something beautiful in front of you, when you actually have a home and a family or a partner or something good right there in front of you, that dream is keeping you going ‘Oh, but there could be more’ and that is the very thing that tortures everyone in this show consistently,” Podany said. “Everybody just needs a little bit more and it’s what leads to such a downfall and such a betrayal and such a good show is that pursuit constantly. There’s never any settling.“
He describes Joey Shorter as a “sympathetic character with such a surprisingly hard edge to him.”
“When you meet him, he hasn’t bought into [the American dream]. He just wants a family, he just wants his dad and he doesn’t want a better car, he doesn’t want a better house until Jack convinces him that he does,” Podany said. “And then suddenly the show is, at least for me, going in and out of that dream-like state, feeling how good it feels to sell someone something and believe that you were altruistic because of it. Meanwhile, knowing the whole time that hope is so fickle when it comes to physical things and the real stuff. That’s what Joey is chasing after and it’s so ephemeral, whereas the physical is so available.”
At the core of “Hello Tomorrow!” is the relationship between Crudup’s Jack and Podany’s Joey.
“We had several weeks of rehearsal, which is a sort of rare thing in the television industry and that was where we exploited our common language and got a real head start on what kinds of interactions would best articulate that relationship,” Crudup said. “There’s just no question though, at the bottom of it was a beautifully crafted script that did the work for us. [Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen] knew that they were going to try to track an entire parenting journey within this space of like three episodes and they did it in metaphor and that’s a very shrewd piece of writing.”
During the rehearsal process, Podany said that he had the opportunity to go out to drinks with Crudup as well as meet and spend some time with his son William.
“We would just inform each other of my relationship to my dad, his relationship to his father,” he said. “An interesting dynamic was formed between the two of us…I was very happy to have him as a scene partner for a lot of it.”
One of the major lessons Podany took from working with Crudup was “acting a lie.”
“I have to lie quite a bit in this show, as does [Billy Crudup] and his whole thing was if you don’t believe the lie, the camera will pick it up and [the audience] is going to think I’m an idiot for believing you,” he said. “So just thinking everything and showing nothing was such a helpful little tip because so much of this show is based around such nuance. You have to communicate an entire storyline shift while playing to the person opposite you that the storyline shift is not happening and take the audience with you. It’s so harrowing and thrilling and I think we did it, I think we nailed it, so I’m very happy about that.”
Bhalla hopes that audiences who tune into “Hello, Tomorrow!” will see the show’s characters as “full, complicated, flawed people worthy of paying attention to, worthy of understanding [and] worthy of coming back to.”
“I do think that if an audience can connect at a human level with these characters and see themselves and their family and then their tragedies and their hopes in these characters, obviously that’s wildly gratifying as a writer and also delusional hope, which brings us back to the themes of the show,” he said.
“I think what the show does wonderfully is it puts so much heart into every character. Even a character you see for one or two scenes, you will remember that person because they have such a specific amount of soul just kind of laying out on their deli counter and you just want to know who that person is,” Podany said. “Jack has done some of the worst things in his past life and the show challenges you to watch him try to remedy them and root for that effort, root for him to get a second chance. And I think every character kind of encompasses that as well. You root for everybody, even when they’re at odds.”
Crudup hopes audiences are “wildly entertained and intrigued by the incredible writing and the absolutely grade A professional craftsmanship” in the show, including its production design, costume design, cinematography, scoring and CGI.
“There is not a single professional that didn’t work on this that didn’t give an inspired effort,” he said. “So I hope that audiences will appreciate that.”
The first three episodes of “Hello Tomorrow!” are available to stream now. New episodes premiere every Friday on AppleTV+
