'Hello Tomorrow!' review: Fascinating, but cumbersome

WHAT IT'S ABOUT To best understand the "Hello Tomorrow!" aesthetic, imagine a touch of "Glengarry Glen Ross," a pinch of the Maysles Brothers' "Salesman" documentary, a little bit of "The Office" and a heavy dose of '60s sci-fi, unfolding on sets that resemble Eero Saarinen's TWA Flight Center at Kennedy Airport (which is now a hotel).

There's an exceedingly small niche of viewers likely to be enthused by the prospect of this half-hour, 10-episode retro-futurist Apple TV+ series in which salespeople hawk timeshares on the moon.

But even as it combines familiar elements from all these pop cultural touchstones, the mixture results in something that looks like nothing else out there.

Billy Crudup headlines the ensemble as Jack Billings, the leader of the sales outfit. He's joined by Haneefah Wood's Shirley Stedman, Hank Azaria's Eddie and Dewshane Williams' Herb Porter.

The story finds the Earth-based team competing to find clients interested in moving to a lunar residential community, while working for a shadowy business, and confronting interpersonal problems of various stripes. 

Other co-stars include Alison Pill as a prospective client, Nicholas Podany as the son Billings once abandoned, and Jacki Weaver as his grumpy mother. The series creators are Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen.

MY SAY The great film critic Gene Siskel was said to have a litmus test for whether a movie succeeded, asking whether the film itself was better than a documentary of the cast members having lunch.

In the case of "Hello Tomorrow!" a tweak to this quandary seems relevant: is this show more interesting than a behind-the-scenes look at the production design? The answer, based on a viewing of the first four episodes, unequivocally seems to be "no."

It takes place in a fascinating visual universe, in which midcentury American staples such as glowing neon signs, long-bodied cars and wood-paneled cocktail bars combine with high-tech gadgets such as flying vehicles, robotic bartenders and hologram projections. The characters use typewriters and make black-and-white video calls on tube TVs.

The most popular sport seems to be an offshoot of baseball, where "home zone" replaces home plate, the characters throw what appear to be electronic darts, and fans attend the games with popcorn that pops automatically in little take-away cups.

An episode devoted to this strange pastime would likely have more dramatic staying power than the actual fourth episode of "Hello Tomorrow!," which has the sleep-inducing title of "Forms, Appropriately Filled and Filed."

The show has grandiose conceptual ambitions but the plotting gets bogged down in pedestrian touches. These include bureaucratic minutiae — an entire subplot has to do with corporate compliance — and other one-dimensional storylines. That list includes: Eddie, an addicted gambler, running afoul of mobsters; Jack hiring his son and training him in the ways of the salesperson without revealing his true identity; Herb's wife becoming convinced he's cheated on her.

It'd be unfair to expect the same level of creativity to have been applied to the storytelling and the world building, but so little of dramatic interest happens below the surface of "Hello Tomorrow!" that the scenery's about all that's left.

BOTTOM LINE Fascinating and cumbersome, all at once.