In a retro-futuristic world a group of salesmen attempt to sell timeshares on the moon.

Our short time in this world is full of great mysteries. Where is Lord Lucan? What happened to the stolen racehorse Shergar? What is the answer to life, the universe and everything?

Well, of course the solution to that last one is 42 – which is a relief, because this week I spent over an hour of my life wondering what on earth kind of show, Hello Tomorrow! is supposed to be. I’ve seen it billed as a comedy, which it isn’t. It is not funny in any way whatsoever. Elsewhere it’s more helpfully described as a ‘dramedy’ – which is usually code for a something that wants to be a comedy but where none of the jokes actually work.

Perhaps creators Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen are trying to do something else altogether, but it’s presented in 30-minute episodes, which is normally a comedy format. There’s a wacky retro titles sequence, wacky music, wacky retro-futuristic robots. Oh yes, did I mention that it was ‘retro-futuristic’? I did, as did all the promo material, and that seemed to make sense because it’s apparently about selling timeshares on the moon in a re-imagined 1950s America… but after watching two whole episodes of Hello Tomorrow! I had no idea why they’re bothering with wacky incompetent robots and hover cars at all.

An hour in, the story, such as it is, seems to be about a salesman, Jack Billings (Billy Crudup) and his relationship with a son who, for some reason, doesn’t know that Billings is his father. To this end, what we’re left with is a sort of bubblegum sci-fi version of Mad Men or Death of a Salesman or David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross exploring lost fatherhood and the hollowness of the American Dream. The problem is that the sci-fi doesn’t add to the drama. It’s a distraction, because you keep waiting for it to connect in some way. The ‘timeshares on the moon’ thing seems to be some kind of metaphor for empty consumerism, but it might as well be about widgets. After a while, it becomes annoying because the world the show is trying to build doesn’t make sense; it just makes all the characters look stupid.

Verdict: Hello Tomorrow! is so baffling I was left wondering whether I was missing something crucial, which is why I gave it two whole episodes to prove itself. At the end of a painful hour I was none the wiser. It’s a clunky mess that misfires in every scene, and I’m afraid that after a brief ‘hello’, I’m saying ‘goodbye’. 3/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com