Hello Tomorrow! sells retro-futuristic dream but takes one giant leap too many

After the Apollo missions, Rockwellian families were supposed to be flying Buicks to the Sea of Tranquility every other weekend; mum, dad, Jimmy and Judy, even Fido, bubbled safely behind plexiglass, bounding across fairways, grilling hotdogs over craters.

But like so many American dreams, that one turned out to be spurious, too.

You get the sense the fading taillights of the Eagle lander have signalled loss and longing as much as they have achievement and NASA is surely hoping to rekindle that sense of galactic pride by returning mankind to its nearest neighbour in a couple of years through its Artemis program.

One more moonshot for the home of the brave.

The creators of New Apple TV+ series Hello Tomorrow! - a mix between Leave it to Beaver, The Jetsons and Glengarry Glen Ross - must be feeling a little fatigued by all those unrealised promises, infusing their meticulously stylised creation with the vague awareness that betrayal is never far away.

Billy Crudup stars as Jack Billings, a travelling salesman thriving in a 1950s retro-tech utopia; it's a place where chrome-tipped sedans hover through white-picket suburbs, robots walk dogs, driverless vans deliver the latest time-saving gadgets to your door (just don't stand behind one).

Jack, a cold-call expert, could sell ice to the Eskimos, instead he sells restless earthlings real estate on the moon.

"You can have it all," he enthuses to potential investors with religious zeal.

"You wake up to the earthrise out your bedroom window; your wife out on her lunar garden, your boy shaggin flies on the zero-g diamond ... that's the dream you all deserve. I mean, c'mon, why should the rich and the famous get our moon all to themselves?"

Chameleonesque Crudup has always been at his best with a touch of the evangelical. He was perfect as the "guitarist with mystique" in Cameron's Crowe's Almost Famous, a character with unflinching resolve for the art of rock and roll.

Like any good revivalist preacher, Billings also knows when to pack up the tent and skip town before the latest flock realises it's been fleeced. Obviously, he's not to be trusted, yet we still can't quite get a bead on whether he believes in his product or not.

And even though "selling condos on the moon" (the American version of our own "selling shares in the Harbour Bridge") is an idea riddled with red flags, we're still rooting for Billings and his rag-tag team of likely grifters.

Which begs the question, who owns the American dream, anyway?

Is it the innocent mark, the everyman slob, the credulous client?

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Or is it the suave shark in the suit with a pocket full of leads?

We want selfish Billings to win the same way we wanted the awful Jay Gatsby to win, to reclaim his girl, to ill-get even more ill-gotten gains.

Billings' religion - capitalism - remains king in this flawed but easily digestible dramedy (the ubiquitous Jacki Weaver continues her quiet Hollywood domination) even though we know it's the devil in disguise.

We know the door-to-door salesmen of this askew place are as predatory as the social media scammers of our own universe; we know the eerily subservient robots are as untrustworthy as our own ChatGPT, we know it's wrong to hoodwink our way to the top - yet we still want the American dream to prevail, and it's fitting this latest rumination on the ineffable concept should revolve around the moon itself.

The conflicted rock so coveted by those grounded in Hello Tomorrow! serves as a pretty good metaphor for the country which claimed the moon on behalf of all mankind more than half a century ago - waxing/waning, light side/dark side, replete/bereft, alluring/baleful.

And now America is racing with its competitors to do so again.

But unlike the (almost) universal awe and wonder with which Neil Armstrong's epochal constitutional was received in 1969, the world will react very differently the next time a superpower takes a cadastral stroll on our resources-rich and strategically supreme satellite.

Less awe, more uncertainty; less wonder, more fear.

A giant leap indeed.