Hello morning! Review: Apple TV sci-fi crypto critique

A man is at the end of his strength. His life has gone haywire. The world these days is full of incredible technology, science fiction marvels, but it’s not like he’s benefiting from it. He lost his job; His family wants nothing to do with him. All this work, a life’s work, brought nothing. He cries into a beer his robotic bartender can’t even pour properly.

But then a man sneaks up next to him. A younger man. A man in a suit. He’s telling this crying man that he understands. The world is cruel, ruthless and unjust. But there is a way he can make the world work for him. There is a way to take advantage of this bizarre technological future they are in and actually become happy. Even get his daughter to start talking to him again. And it moves to the moon.

This is the opening scene of Hello morning!, a new Apple TV Plus show starring Billy Crudup. While Hello morning! adorns itself in a brightly shining retro future”,The World If“Mem brought to life, similar scenes had been playing out in America for years until recently. They took place in Discord chats and YouTube streams, mainstream publications, and countless commercial breaks filled with celebrities at every sporting event imaginable. Until the real-life crypto dream collapsed.

The similarities between Jack (Crudup) and his plan to sell lunar timeshares in a development called Brightside and Crypto become increasingly apparent as he weaves his way through each person he meets: his sales associates (Hank Azaria, Haneefah Wood and Dewshane Williams). ), the retired actor who stars in his pitches (Frankie Faison), and at the end of the first episode his own son Joey (Nicholas Podany).

There are elements of swindlers and crooks of yesteryear in Crudup’s performance, reminiscent of everything from Robert Preston’s legendary Harold Hill the music man to the determined badger-like sales pitches captured in Albert and David Maysle and Charlotte Zwerin’s 1969 documentary Salesperson. At first glance, the last person he resembles is a crypto scammer like Sam Bankman-Fried. After all, crypto isn’t the first major scam in history and sadly won’t be the last.

And yet the simple comparison between Jack and Bankman-Fried, that they both had uniforms that gave them credibility, is just mirror images of each other. Bankman-Fried, who is currently charged with wire fraud, commodity fraud, securities fraud, money laundering and violations of the Campaign Finance Act, has made it his mission to be the countercharge. Like Mark Zuckerberg before him, Bankman-Fried made a bold statement about not caring what he looked like. Jack’s sense of fashion contrasts with that of the crypto brother: he is the rise-and-grind brother. He makes such a show of being on top of the world — and beyond with his fake lunar family — that it’s easy to imagine him offering sales tips on TikTok.

But the real genius of Hello morning!, along with the strong cast and great outfits, it’s how Jack spreads his gospel with the investment of a true believer. Crudup’s face is a marvel as he adjusts to each new step in the reality of his own invention. The only thing that throws him off track is the sudden appearance of his son in his life, who spends him madly trying to win over a child who still doesn’t know who his father is.

That and screwed up clients working with regulators. Lester Costopoulos (Matthew Maher) and Myrtle Mayburn (Alison Pill) have the makings of a charming odd couple who want to win for customers’ rights everywhere. Costopoulos has all the makings of another sucker, but his focus on forms and regulations keeps him on track. His best friend seems to be his floating briefcase, which is almost a pet. He’s like a less sexy, clumsy Paul Giamatti billion.

Featuring cute sci-fi aesthetics that hide darker realities, Hello found a clever way into a topic that was debated to death. There is already several shows “Snatched from the headlines” about Bankman-Fried in the pipeline, all of which will stem from salacious tales of child prodigies and polycules. But despite all their research, they will have a hard time getting the feel of crypto Hello does. The show challenges viewers to believe in a world where technology is indistinguishable from magic, then asks how easy it would be to trick people in such a place. Doesn’t sound very strange, does it?

The show has a strong understanding of how romantic cheating can get, which makes the way it pulls its punches all the more confusing, according to executive producer and writer Stephen Falk The Hollywood Reporter that in keeping with the utopian sci-fi nature of the setting, “we wanted to live in a world where” neither racism nor sexism existed. “The politics on the show is more about capitalism and the American dream than things like racism and sexism,” Falk said.

But the problem with this is that you can’t separate things like ‘capitalism’, ‘the American dream’ and ‘racism’. Sure you could do that, but you end up with an extremely limited vision of the capitalist American Dream. Ground zero of this dream after World War II was the suburbs. These suburbs started with Levittown, Pennsylvania, and had white supremacy baked right into the leases; Levitt & Sons specifically did not sell homes to black families, and when a black family moved into a home in Levittown in 1957, they were routinely harassed. Not all suburbs had racism built in the same way, but Levittown cemented the vision of the American dream as lily white.

And suburban dreams are gone Hello, including a particularly gruesome package drop in the first episode, “Your Brighter Tomorrow, Today.” The interesting thing about Falk’s quote is that Hello morning! feels like it’s working towards a comment on racism anyway. Nobody does more work for Brightside than Shirley (Wood), who runs the entire operation on a day-to-day basis. Like the others, she firmly believes in life on the moon, but works with Jack to ensure her operation is indeed successful. She takes his selling points to heart and works day and night to find the right audience for her can’t-be-so-good offers. In other words, it’s easy to imagine Shirley falling for Jack’s swindle. And whatever Jack’s personal feelings toward Shirley, it’s hard to ignore the visuals of the situation.

The racism is implicit on Hello, and knowing that the show is actively cutting that reading it feels like wasting a fantastic storytelling opportunity. It’s not like capitalism stopped being racist after Levittown. The crypto industry supported white supremacists, tokenized its black employeesAnd oversold his “digital rebellion” with the help of celebrities like Spike Lee And Stephen Curry. crypto was seek Black wallets to prop up a house of cards just like Jack Shirley was looking for. The comparisons are right there.

None of this should detract from Crudup and Wood’s performances — they’re the show’s most dynamic pairing. One is a walking bullshitter and the other has a great bullshit detector blinded by lunar interference. The show is still a fascinating look at how a scam like crypto can feel as real as the moon in the sky and just as unreachable. If they get another season maybe they’ll start to really sell how the big American scams are all related.

The first five episodes of Hello morning! stream now on Apple TV Plus. New episodes appear every Friday.