Hello Tomorrow!, the new Apple TV+ show about a depressed Space Age huckster and his team of dreamer lackeys who are selling the moon as fast as they can, heads into stormy weather this week.
Slick salesman Jack must agree to a big little lie to cover up an even bigger lie, while his colleagues Joey and Herb face romantic crises (and Shirley’s at her wit’s end). Disgruntled customer Myrtle and fraud-buster Lester chase a big lead they must follow to achieve satisfaction.
In the episode, entitled “Forms, Appropriately Filled and Filed,” this retro-futuristic wonder is off and running to the moon.
Hello Tomorrow! recap: ‘Forms, Appropriately Filled and Filed’
Season 1, episode 4: So in my recap of the first three episodes of Hello Tomorrow!, I didn’t have much space for Myrtle (played by Alison Pill). When Herb (Dewshane Williams) went to sell Myrtle a lunar timeshare, he found her husband and his mistress. Herb took a big risk and came back to find Myrtle. Pitying her and finding her alluring, he let slip that her husband was running around on her. Her response was to burn down her house and leave with her baggage, believing that Herb could get her on the next flight to the moon.
This was not true. So Myrtle is filing a complaint with a government functionary named Lester Costopoulos (Matthew Maher). Lester is onto the fact that Brightside, Jack’s (Billy Crudup) business selling lunar timeshares, is a fraudulent operation. All Lester needed was Myrtle’s testimony — and now he has it. He shuts Brightside down.
Then, Lester and Myrtle find themselves in a precarious position as well, with Lester assuming Myrtle has feelings for him and Myrtle trying to outrun a bad relationship. Herb’s troubles don’t stop there, either. When Myrtle left her husband, she had nowhere to go, so Herb let her sleep in his motel room. His wife Betty (Susan Heyward) found out, and now won’t speak to him.
Big trouble at Brightside
Shirley (Haneefah Wood) tries to tell Jack, Herb and Eddie (Hank Azaria) about their being shut down, but Jack doesn’t let her. He frames it like she messed up. (Shirley bought an ad during a baseball game without proper clearance from the bureau, inadvertently landing Brightside in hot water.) But she knows Jack’s hiding something.
New guy Joey Shorter (Nicholas Podany) has some more awkward news for Jack, too. He got caught necking in his car with a girl named Phyllis (Dani Montalvo). Now her father (Teddy Cañez) wants to meet Joey’s parents. Trouble is, his mom’s in a coma and his dad is Jack (except Joey doesn’t know that second part). Jack offers to pretend to be Joey’s dad for the old man. Joey fears this is crossing a line, but he doesn’t have a better idea.
Meanwhile, Eddie’s back on decent terms with his bookie’s legbreaker, Big Fred (W. Earl Brown). So he decides to arrange another enormous bet. Fred warns Eddie that if he loses, he’ll break something bigger than his pinky finger this time, but Eddie can’t help himself. He does it anyway.
Secrets, lies and big, dumb luck
Shirley makes her own gamble by lying to Lester about tradewinds knocking out her communication with the home office. But he doesn’t buy it, so she’s back to square one. She goes to tell Jack but runs into Phyllis, who lets it slip that Jack is Joey’s father, which is news to Shirley. Jack gets a chance to tell Joey the truth about his parentage, but Joey thinks its part of the lie they’re still selling to Phyllis and her dad. No clarification there, then.
Eventually, Shirley confronts Jack and he comes clean about his being Joey’s actual father. She warns him that this is no way to live, but she knows it ain’t gonna be easy to tell Joey after so many lies. He tees himself up, but can’t bring himself to tell the truth.
Eddie miraculously wins his bet just as Betty shows up to confront Herb — and happens to spy Myrtle hiding out, trying to entrap the sales team into more fraud so she can have them arrested. She finally catches Joey selling a timeshare to Phyllis’ father, and phones Lester to narc. Eddie proposes that he and Shirley finally invest in a moon property for themselves. She seems amenable, but won’t commit just yet.
Scared money don’t make money
Boy oh boy, this is a good show. It’s basically Ray Bradbury meets Death of a Salesman, with Billy Crudup at the center spinning uncontrollably toward damnation. Man, it’s something else. The thing where the creative team names the episodes after quotes from the episode is an old Deadwood technique. And it’s very satisfying to see a show aiming for that kind of packaging, all while focusing its ambitions on its own texture and writing.
The head writers/creators worked for a bit on David Milch’s TV show Luck, which explains why Eddie and his gambling throughline is as good as anything else on the show. This week, Hank Azaria gets to utter some grade A Milchisms: “Get the fuck hence, harpy!” “Who, Herb? Who let these lobotomized puddles of shame take the field? What genius?”
What a dream to once again hear verbosity like this on TV. What a great little slice of retro-futuristic hell Hello Tomorrow! is.
★★★★☆
Watch Hello Tomorrow! on Apple TV+
New episodes of Hello Tomorrow! arrive each Friday on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
