>There’s a terrific article that ran earlier this year on the “enshittification” of TikTok specifically, and of the Internet writ large. It would be hard to summarize succinctly here, but the gist is that sites like TikTok or Facebook start by being good to their users, then screwing them to benefit business customers, then screwing business customers to benefit themselves, and then dying. If you accept that as true—and it’s hard to argue against the evidence—Apple TV+ is very much in the “being good to its users” phase of things, while streaming services like Netflix have moved on to the next stage of evolution. From Slow Horses to Severance to Physical to Black Bird, they’ve proved that they put quality at the top of the priority list, they aren’t afraid to take stylistic risks, and more than occasionally, those risks are paying off. How long it lasts is anybody’s guess—enshittification seems to come for them all—but there’s no denying that we’re living in the Apple TV+ golden age.

>Into that framework steps Hello Tomorrow!, the new drama set in a time and place that is accurately described in its own literature as “retro-future.” In practice, that means the most idealized, catalogue-perfect version of the ‘50s, plus robots and other gadgets that are technologically advanced, but only as imagined by someone living in that age (picture The Jetsons, but on Earth and not animated). The dresses and the cars are vintage, but the ennui and desperation of the people is modern. The man to cure that dread, we learn in the first episode, is Jack Billings, a salesman (played by Billy Crudup) who is hawking literal condos on the moon.

>The myth of escape is the prevailing impulse of the suckers in this show, and though Jack can be heard to admit in a candid moment that our problems will be waiting for us on the lunar surface, for the most part he’s a smiling paragon of the fervent hope that maybe, just maybe, they won’t be. Crudup is spectacular in the role, and while there are surface similarities to the executive Cory Ellison he plays in The Morning Show, what’s hiding behind Ellison is a menacing readiness to kill, while here, what lies beneath the facade of Billings is something sadder, and more hopeless. Nevertheless, we only see the barest glimpses of that, and where Crudup really shines in his thorough embodiment of a man who truly, truly sells the dream. Even though we the viewers understand that he’s full of shit, his performance is so unflinching we want to believe him—we want to believe that the world of promise he prophesies actually exists, and we want to believe that we can seize it and possess some of his unshakeable optimism. We want our place on the moon, yes, but we also want to be him.

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