‘Hello Tomorrow!’ wants to dream but makes you snore

LiLi Loofbourow THE WASHINGTON POST

Cross “Mad Men” with “The Jetsons,” remove the former’s depth and the latter’s world-building, and you end up with Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen’s new Apple TV Plus series, “Hello Tomorrow!”

The 10-episode series (pre miering Friday) is a gorgeous atomic-age confection set in a “retrofuturistic” version of the early 1960s – a Mayberry with jetpacks and hovering cars. Robots contoured like old Frigidaires walk the dogs and work the bars while Billy Crudup’s Jack Billings, a traveling salesman, spends his days talking the residents of this automated America into buying property on the moon.

It’s an exciting approach to an era that’s been pretty well picked over – or could be, if the thought experiment got developed. The 30-minute episodes (critics received all 10) have a comic slant, but the tone is confused, careening from antic – with bodily mutilation played for laughs - to meditative and even mournful. Jack should be a pleasingly absurd protagonist. The series, alas, takes him rather seriously.

And although Crudup is extremely charming, a character billed as a talented closer should, among other things, have a more compelling sales pitch.

“No one here is not a dreamer. Am I right?” Jack says to a group of prospective buyers. “Not in a world like this, where you can have it all. And that’s what I want for you and your families. You wake up to the earthrise out your bedroom window, your wife out in her lunar garden, your boy shagging flies in the zero-G diamond. That’s the dream you all deserve!”

If Don Draper articulated an anxiety or nostalgia specific to his exact moment and presented a product as a balm, Jack’s pitches are general, bordering on redundant. He draws no contrast between the hovercar world where robots take out the trash and the marvels of life on the moon. If anything, Jack equates them: You can have it all here, but you can also live the suburban dream up there. Then there’s some boilerplate about dreams and hope.

Salesmanship aside, this was the show’s opportunity to teach us how the universe of “Hello Tomorrow!” differs from (or parallels!) our own, and how jetpacks and the like modify both the characters’ lived reality and the consumer fantasies a salesman would need to understand. What has all that automation done to Americans in the decade that

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most fervidly fetishized the nuclear family and glorified the suburbs? Would robots everywhere deprive men returned from war of a sense of purpose? Create mass unemployment? Make marriages better? Accentuate the class divide? Change race relations?

“Hello Tomorrow!” addresses none of this. And although the cinematography foregrounds the fun technology, the plot never investigates its consequences. A company coyly named Amazing Personal Products (or APP) delivers stuff in trucks “manned” by cartoon storks, but a sinister malfunction in the pilot critics were asked not to describe –which seems to herald a deeper exploration of what all those gadgets might be doing to people – goes nowhere.

Basic stuff is puzzling, too: Does the businessman commuting to work via jetpack occupy a different social status (or follow a different traffic system) than the one driving a hover car? And what of the loving housewife seeing him off? The real “atomic age” featured major social retrenchment: Women, having joined the labor force in wartime, were shoved back inside the home and mollified with “labor-saving devices.” What happens if you populate that uneasy moment with even more technological so-called convenience?

An angry housewife named Myrtle Mayburn (Alison Pill) –a character ideally suited to show which specific hopes have been raised, then dashed by a world where even the cooking is automated – conforms so precisely and sometimes comically to type that her grievances, when she airs them, are neither more nor less than what a woman in the regular old robotfree ‘60s might say.

In fact, far from describing a “retrofuture” whose specific anomies a gifted salesman could exploit (and that contemporary viewers, plagued and blessed as we are by our own APPs, might find familiar), this alternate reality seems pretty similar. Jack’s pitch feels like typical timeshare patter, because it is: People want exactly the same things in this timeline. New parents want fun. Old people want golf and no taxes.

There are some differences: No one seems particularly racist in the hover-car ‘60s, for instance. Or sexist. These would be fascinating revisions if they didn’t seem random and undertheorized. Is the idea that the civil rights movement wouldn’t have happened if robots were around? Did APP eliminate redlining? The aesthetics of one historical moment are supercharged here, but they’re entirely stripped of the struggles that produced them.

Then there’s Jack, a winsome salesman, deadbeat dad and calculating liar who might also be a damaged dreamer.

That Jack is deceptive is clear from the pilot. The question, and it’s not a compelling one, is how deep his fraudulence (or idealism) goes. This might be textbook antihero stuff if a redemption story weren’t supplied to make him sympathetic: Jack is also suddenly trying to help the son he abandoned years earlier by hiring and mentoring him.

If Jack sounds baffling, he should; the series builds suspense by withholding his motivations, desires and real beliefs, and piecing these together feels like enervating moral algebra that neither Jack nor his son, Joey Shorter (Nicholas Podany), are interesting enough to make worthwhile. The effect – not helped by the flatness of most of these characters – isn’t nuance or complexity or even Coen-esque quirk. Haneefah Wood elevates her material, and both Hank Azaria and Jacki Weaver offer comic relief, but this series feels like satire in search of a target.

Word Sleuth

Crossword by Phillip Alder

Bridge

After South’s one-heart overcall, North might have bid three no-trump –an easy contract here – or taken things more slowly by starting with a two-diamond cue-bid. West led his lowest diamond. East won the first three tricks before shifting to a low club. Declarer finessed, drew trumps and cashed the club ace, but the king didn’t drop. Now South had to avoid losing a spade trick. How would you normally play that spade combination?

IN ESSENCE, A BACKWARD TECHNIQUE

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the White Queen said to Alice. If backward memory came from knowing the future, it would be helpful. Picking lottery and horse-race winners would prove lucrative. At the bridge table, usually one needs to think forward, but occasionally backward is the order of a deal – as in today’s.

Right – you would cash the king, just in case East had a singleton queen, and then finesse dummy’s jack. However, here that doesn’t work – and you should know it won’t. You are missing only 13 high-card points, but East opened the bidding. So should you cash the ace and king, hoping to drop the queen? It is better, but not best. As East is known to have started with two hearts and four diamonds, he is most unlikely to have begun with 2=2=4=5 distribution. He probably has three or four spades. You should take a backward finesse. Enter dummy with a trump and lead the spade jack, forcing East to cover with the queen. Then finesse dummy’s nine on the way back. A backward finesse, which requires two cards to be well placed, is usually worse than a simple finesse – but not always.

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Sudoku by Wayne Gould

Bridge

2/21/23

Difficulty level: SILVER

Yesterday’s solution:

IN ESSENCE, A BACKWARD TECHNIQUE

Fill in the grid so that every row, every column and every 3x3 grid contains the digits 1 through 9, with no repeats. That means that no number is repeated in any row, column or box. Solution, tips and computer program at www.sudoku.com

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the White Queen said to Alice. If backward memory came from knowing the future, it would be helpful. Picking lottery and horse-race winners would prove lucrative. At the bridge