Apple TV+ show Hello Tomorrow! spirals toward infinity this week, as events move faster than ace salesman and born liar Jack Billings can possibly control.
The members of his sales team — Eddie, Joey, Shirley and Herb — are all desperate to know why their dreams of advancement and retirement aren’t any closer to fulfillment. And their customers are just as curious when they’re finally going to be able to live on the moon … if ever.
This terrific new show hits its groove in this week’s episode, entitled “From the Desk of Stanley Jenkins,” by finding one rut after another for its desperate heroes to fall into.
Hello Tomorrow! recap: ‘From the Desk of Stanley Jenkins’
Season 1, episode 5: As you may have been able to piece together from previous episodes, some families who bought moon timeshares from Jack Billings (played by Billy Crudup) and his team are finally ready to head up and start living the lunar dream. However, they are finding out there is no launch to the moon.
This includes Jack’s Brightside team members Shirley (Haneefah Wood) and Eddie (Hank Azaria), after a fashion. They’ve already been planning to spend their ill-gotten real estate moon money on a place of their own up in the wild white yonder. (This show thankfully always manages to give me flashbacks to golden age Simpsons: “No deal, McCutcheon. That moon money is mine.”).
Shirley tells Jack about their plans to get up there, and his response is exactly the kind of lie you tell when you’re caught off guard — but you’re too good and seasoned a liar to blow it. He drops casually that he’s never been up there, something Shirley must have heard before. But now that Jack is about eight lies deep this week, she starts thinking more seriously than usual that her boss might be completely full of it instead of just three-quarters full of it. Jack realizes he’s got to back up this lie with another one, pronto.
They’re not the only ones with dreams of course. Herb Porter (Dewshane Williams) is being doubly ambitious now that his pregnant wife Betty (Susan Heyward) is here. Except of course … she’s not really pregnant. Or anyway, that’s what the pretend vomiting while hiding in the bathroom says. (Boy, is anybody honest in this town? No.)
Jack’s still rehearsing the speech he must give, in which he plans to confess to his hottest new sales rep, Joey Shorter (Nicholas Podany), that he’s actually his father, not just an overly anxious father figure.
Joey screws up
Joey’s got his own trouble without Jack and his Oedipus complex in waiting. Lester Costopoulos (Matthew Maher), the government functionary who has made shutting down Jack’s company his pet project, caught Joey selling a timeshare to his prospective father-in-law Phil (Teddy Cañez), who has invited the Brightside sales team to the local country club for a mixer.
Joey’s really just trying to clear the runway to get friendly with Phil’s daughter, Phyllis (Dani Montalvo). But now Lester has proof that Brightside operated outside the law by peddling timeshares during a period when Lester had officially made them cease operations during his investigation of their obviously crooked enterprise. Herb sees Lester taking Joey in for questioning.
Then Herb tells Betty about Joey’s detainment (though he mistakenly thinks it’s an arrest, not an interrogation). And when he does, she suggests that maybe she should tell Jack about Joey. Maybe the hot new guy — who’s taking all of Herb’s thunder — getting fired would be best for all involved. Or, at any rate, it would momentarily deflect from the fact that she‘s lying about being pregnant. Herb tells Jack, who goes over and gets Joey out of peril with more lies and sleight of hand.
Pick up some of that nice green moon money for me!
Photo: Apple TV+
The person who happens to overhear Jack getting Joey off scot-free? Myrtle (Alison Pill), the woman who wants even more than Lester to bring down Jack’s company. If you recall, she torched her house to spite her philandering husband (Gabriel Ebert), and now has nowhere to go but can’t go to the moon.
Myrtle goes over to grill Lester about the paperwork, and he gives her the brush-off. If Jack’s paperwork is in order (and it appears to be), he’s got no leg to stand on. Smitten with her, Lester tries to get back on Myrtle’s good side. But nothing short of total satisfaction will appease her, so she storms off. As Myrtle suffers a full meltdown at the grocery store, Lester decides, against his better judgment, to go above and beyond to help her.
So does Betty, who, seeing Joey bounce back from his arrest, decides to sew discord between Joey and Jack. She tells him about the cease-and-desist order and how it’s Jack’s fault he got hounded by the feds. Jack’s fake telegram to Shirley from their “boss” hinted at even more discord, so she’s nervous about going to the moon and continuing to sell. She demands to talk to the boss. (Seeing as there is no boss, that’s gonna be tough.) As she goes to call the fake boss, Joey confronts Jack about the bogus arrest, so everybody’s gonna be mad at him.
Shirley tells Jack that the line was cut to the home office, which means that the “boss” played them. Jack doesn’t want to admit he’s been swindled (although he’s of course just staying in character by being so proud about it). But Shirley knows something is wrong. Jack is more concerned with the rich man’s widow (Dagmara Dominczyk), who gives him a serious going-over on the dance floor.
Here’s to the crooked ones
Photo: Apple TV+
What a whiz-bang 25 minutes. Hello Tomorrow! is dependably twisty and deliciously crooked.
I love how anxious I got watching Crudup and Dominczyk dancing. (Most of us with taste fell for Dominczyk at least as far back as James Gray’s unimpeachable 2013 film The Immigrant, but certainly no later than when she started appearing as a regular on Succession.) I loved their chemistry, along with the idea of Jack having to step up his lying game enough to charm someone on the lookout for a huckster.
I was actively bummed when Joey broke up their pas de deux. That’s how you know we’re cooking. I want the bad guys to keep getting away with it on Hello Tomorrow!
★★★★☆
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.
