Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Hello Tomorrow! S1E5, “From the Desk of Stanley Jenkins” (written by Jiehae Park and directed by Ryan McFaul)
I’ve seen some criticize Hello Tomorrow! as more style than substance, which, if you feel that way, I hope you at least appreciate the style! It’s smooth as hell, beautiful to look at and to listen to, and indeed the first thing I mentioned about this show was its overall aesthetic. So, perhaps there is something to the criticism, but I don’t think it is a criticism.
It’s a strength of Hello Tomorrow! that it approaches its deepest themes and questions obliquely, as this parallels how the peachy keen façade of 1950s Americana always glossed over a darkness underneath. It was always more of a lie people wanted to believe in than a reality.
And, to be clear, I don’t take the events of the series to be occurring in some alternate timeline where some technology was developed faster, so I’m not even sure we should be talking about America if we want to be pedantic, but the resonance is nonetheless central to what Hello Tomorrow! is doing. It is playing with that image, or perhaps I should even say imago, of idyllic post-war life.
That image—of white picket fences and pies in the window—has always been more of a fantasy than anything, some idealized version of a past that never existed. And this gets to the substance of Hello Tomorrow!—the interplay between our fantasies and reality, the truth and our hopes for the future, and the kind of feedback loop that can occur between these levels.
Could it be that a delusional aspiration of what tomorrow will bring can make today better? And is there harm in fostering such a delusion if you can also make sure tomorrow never comes to bring it crashing down?
With Episode 5, Hello Tomorrow! finally starts digging into that harm and how Jack (Billy Crudup) can’t just keep kicking the proverbial can down the road. We start with a family on their way to a Moon launch we know doesn’t exist, and S1E5 ends by returning to them, showing us their arrival and giving us something of a cliffhanger ending, as the man with a gun who greets them seems to click to who Jack Billings is. At least I think that’s the connection.
But throughout the episode, I was struck with just how heinous the things Jack does are if you think about them. Hello Tomorrow! keeps them off the screen, and again I think it’s to the benefit of the show to do so insofar as it needs to maintain a level where we’re seduced by Jack’s charm and rooting for him.
That’s part of what keeps the central question about the interplay of truth and fantasy bubbling, and we keep getting it in other forms at the margins of the series. Hello Tomorrow! S1E5 sees Herb (Dewshane Williams) and Betty (Susan Heyward) rekindling their romance, for example, but this seems meaningfully built on the back of her lying to him about her pregnancy. Will it all fall apart when he finds out she isn’t pregnant? I actually think maybe not.
But back to Jack. Let’s work through what he pulls in S1E5 because it’s pretty bad. When Shirley (Haneefah Wood) tells him that she and Ed (Hank Azaria) are going to move to the Moon on a plot they bought from Brightside, he first makes a remark to let her know he’s never been, insisting that he’d told her this in the previous episode (when all he actually told her was that he didn’t have a family on the Moon). Then he rushes off to send a fake Telex from Stanley Jenkins (who, you’ll recall, is a turtle), and successfully plays the whole thing to lead to Shirley’s discovery that Brightside is a scam in a way that makes her thoroughly convinced that Jack has also been duped.
It’s a desperation move: he knows that Shirley is on the brink of finding out one way or another, so he opts to deceive her in a sophisticated way in order to keep her on his side. This is really insidious.
At the same time, Joey (Nicholas Podany) gets arrested for making a sale without the right paperwork being on file, and we discover that Jack had the means to get them out of that mess the whole time. The way he grabs the file from his safe does have a real “break glass in case of emergency” feel about it, but I wonder how else he thought the issue was going to be resolved.
When it comes down to it, it seems clear that Jack’s big mistake was not leaving town as originally planned. He stayed to be with his son Joey, who couldn’t in good conscience leave his comatose mother behind, and who of course doesn’t know that he is Jack’s son. So what we’re seeing is how continuing to double down on delusion increases the peril Jack’s in because it becomes increasingly likely that the whole house of cards might come crashing down.
Or maybe Jack can avoid that and just keep getting further and further from the Earth until his lies take orbit. To the Moon! (?)
Mr. Costopoulos (Matthew Maher) continues to be a joy and I haven’t said enough about everyone’s favorite bureaucrat. Sincerely, though there is a way in which this is a worn trope, Matthew Maher is killing it with the deadpan earnestness of this character. We feel his guilt as he apologizes to his dead dog about retrieving the Brightside file he is supposed to destroy from the shredder, and if he does that from his feelings for Myrtle (Alison Pill), he also surely has the intuition that the file is fraudulent.
But bureaucrats aren’t supposed to work from intuition!
Speaking of Myrtle, her rant is just wonderful. She begins by railing against deceptive advertising. Products don’t do what they claim to do, or work as they are supposed to. She doesn’t want a refund; she wants the casserole to not be burnt in the first place. And then this spins into a diatribe about the lies that structure society (like the idea that being a good housewife will keep your husband from cheating on you). Everything about the world is, to some degree or another, phony. Everything is cut through by what’s meant to be a comforting element of delusion.
I’m with her. Print it out and put it on the wall: I want the truth or I’ll burn this whole place to the ground.
Myrtle is the flipside to this story because she’s actually already done that with regard to her own life. Even if she burned the house down in pursuit of the fantasy of going to the Moon, the impetus was to live in the truth—to finally break the confines of the polished and false image of her supposed happiness.
She’s not going to pretend anymore… at all. And Hello Tomorrow! is exploring how that is also excessive. You kind of can’t live this way.
So, I don’t know whose side I’m on, or if we’re supposed to be on a side. I think we’re not. I’m not even sure we should be on the side of the truth.
See you next week.
