Hello Tomorrow! Trailer: Billy Crudup Stars In The Intro Sequence From Fallout 4

People have been dreaming of living on the moon for as long as we've been able to see it in the night sky, but what if that was actually a possibility? In the new Apple TV+ series, "Hello Tomorrow!", a traveling salesman named Jack, played by Billy Crudup, offers families in a retro-futuristic world their own little piece of lunar real estate, but all is not as it seems. Jack and his fellow salesmen seem intent on selling suburbanites a vision of the future, with upbeat sales tactics, flashy graphics, and cute little pamphlets. 

Retrofuturism is a fun subgenre within science fiction, creating a version of the future as it was imagined by people in the past. (Steampunk, for example, is technically a kind of retrofuturism!) Generally, when people refer to the term, though, they're talking about science fiction with a distinctly 1950s Americana feel. There are shades of retrofuturism in the dreamy pastel world of Olivia Wilde's "Don't Worry Darling," but nothing quite like this. Instead, "Hello Tomorrow!" reminds me of a franchise from a different medium — the video game series "Fallout." In fact, the trailer for "Hello Tomorrow!" has a lot in common with the opening sequence of "Fallout 4" ... check it out below and see if you agree.

The trailer shows Jack and his fellow salesmen going around selling homes on the moon. The retrofuturistic world around them looks like something straight out of "Pleasantville," with pastel colors, big boat-like cars, and lots of cocktail swing dresses. The ensemble cast, which includes Alison Pill, Haneefah Wood, Dewshane Williams, Nicholas Podany, Matthew Maher, Hank Azaria, and Jacki Weaver all look stunning in their tailored suits and pleated skirts, living a life of luxury with the help of all manner of robotic helpers. The series was co-created by Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen and will center around Jack's life as he becomes lost in his own idealistic vision of the future. 

Here's the official synopsis: 

Set in a retro-future world, "Hello Tomorrow!" centers around a group of traveling salesmen hawking lunar timeshares. Crudup stars as Jack, a salesman of great talent and ambition, whose unshakeable faith in a brighter tomorrow inspires his coworkers, revitalizes his desperate customers, but threatens to leave him dangerously lost in the very dream that sustains him.

The series boasts Ryan Kalil, Blake Griffin, and Noah Weinstein as executive producers for Mortal Media. "Hello Tomorrow!" looks gorgeous, like they spared no expense in making the retro-futuristic world look as shiny and pretty as possible, but it's also kind of strange just how much it reminds me of the beginning of "Fallout 4." It's genuinely a little eerie. 

The trailer for "Hello Tomorrow!" is reminiscent of the opening scene of the 2015 video game "Fallout 4," with door-to-door salesmen selling space in underground nuclear shelters to their more affluent neighbors. Trade "fallout shelter" for "the moon" and there are some pretty big similarities there, especially considering they both seem to have the same tongue-in-cheek tone and retrofuturist sensibilities. The similarities will probably end there, however, as a global apocalypse happens at the end of the opening game sequence, sending the world into the ghoul-laden wasteland that fans have come to know and love. Meanwhile, "Hello Tomorrow!" looks more like it's about the rockets to the moon not working, or people being swindled outright instead of convinced to join horrifying underground experiments. 

There is a "Fallout" TV series in the works from Prime Video, but it's still a little ways off. "Hello Tomorrow!," on the other hand, will premiere on Apple TV+ on February 17, 2023. Get ready to fly to the moon!