How ‘Hello Tomorrow!’ Creators Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen Pulled Off a Storytelling Triple Lutz

Set in a retro-future world, Hello Tomorrow! centers around a group of traveling salesmen hawking lunar timeshares. Billy 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.

There's something really satisfying about being completely transported to a retro mid-century futuristic world - robots included. It has a familiarity to it - maybe because of the films and television shows of yesteryear, but I think there's more to that. And with Hello Tomorrow!, you are delivered that clean-cut, picturesque world - expertly crafted by the production design team behind the scenes - but at the core of this show,  it's really all about the characters and the complicated and complex lives that they live. And there's something about that rings true for audiences. And within that core is one lie built upon another and how those characters live with the lie or challenge the lie they had been led to believe by their fearless leader, Jack Billings.

Creators and co-showrunners Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen spoke with Script about world-building, tapping into character voices, the work ethos that they learned under the tutelage of David Milch, and how their writing partnership is like playing jazz. 

This interview was conducted in March 2023 and has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: This story and this world is like a Walt Disney fever dream of a beautiful tomorrow. What came first? Was it this idea of sending people to the moon? Was it this character, Jack and how he's going to navigate this world that his lie is built upon?

Lucas Jansen: There is hope tomorrow. I think the jury's still out on that one. But if there is hope tomorrow, it doesn't look like the extravagant promises we were made by consumer capitalism. You know, more on that to come. [laughs] But the premise, it's no bleaker to us than the human spirit as it engages with modernity, or as it engages with the promises made to it by entities that may or may not understand it as it's made the promises made to it by the abstractions of the automated life, or the perfected life. None of which strike us is in any way human or perhaps in any way useful to the human spirit engaging with life on its own terms.

Amit Bhalla: We get this question, sometimes, did the world come first or Jack the character or the story, or the moon stuff? And it's unclear, obviously. A producer did come to us, our good friend Ryan Kalil, and was like, ‘You guys like salesmen? What do you think about retro-futurism?’ And we were in New York, and we realize that there are deep thematic resonances with the psychological nature of our age, that is to say, hey, there's a bunch of us that say, if we just went back and for some of us, you know, in this country was the 50s, some of us it's the 90s, for some it's the 1890s, or in some idyllic time. And then there's the obvious, ‘Oh, don't worry, once there's an app for your enlightenment, we'll all be enlightened. There's a future on the horizon, that’s gonna save us.’ And we're like, ‘This is the most beautiful aesthetic embodiment of this deep psychological problem.’

We wanted to set the world in a dream. There was something to us fundamental - this sounds ridiculous to say, and maybe we're dealing with some of that reaction to it - but realism wasn't the basic premise. And once we get back in hover cars, we were interested in playing with real human emotions. 

But in, like you said, at the top kind of this weird fever dream that was formed, mid-century advertising and futurism existed in many cultures, and many ideologies and politics around the world in the first half of the 20th century, and all sorts of interesting ways. In America, it manifested as a corporate aesthetic that was used to kind of sell us basically, wartime technologies as post-war consumer technologies. What happens when the world is brought real, and the robot doesn't really work, or more importantly, the people in the world aren't excited about the fact that a car is hovering? And I think that that to us, was really important, because no matter what we invent, we still find ourselves at this baseline of --

Lucas: Grief! Sorrow! Alienation!

Amit: We used to get made fun of by Stephen Falk, our co-showunner, that for all of our deep, you may call it cynicism about the world or whatever, there was a deep, warm, gooey center at the core which was not a phrase that we particularly cared for. We love our characters, and in their ways, they love each other very much. And they're all reaching out from their hearts to find another person in this kind of, desert or whatever, you know, I don't know what we're living in. We're living in definitely a desert. What they're living in, I don't know what that is yet.

Sadie: How did you approach navigating these characters, their lives, and their point of view?

Lucas: Yeah, well, a couple of things. I mean, first, when we were in the room writing, we would talk a lot about how to create stories that were driven by our characters, not their motivations, but by their delusions; by what they buy, what mistaken impressions they had about themselves, or about the world around them, or what more or less false promises they were making to themselves or to the people around them to get through the day.

We were always fascinated with a story where someone could be saying something that was simultaneously false and deeply true. We got really into Billy Wilder and Capra to an extent and Preston Sturges as we were starting to think about plot, because while they were so brilliant in crafting these sort of elaborate constructions where there was an ambivalence, things were both false and true at once, people were both alienated and deeply connected. And hopefully, that's playing out in the Jack-Joey storyline, where lying is an engine of reconciliation, even as it is the worm at the core of the apple.

And finding ways to craft narratives that embody that, was part of the fun.

And I would also say, as we approached breaking things, we had the great luck to come up under David Milch. And we can talk about him as long as you'd like. It's one of our favorite pastimes. But the approach to story with him was, ‘it starts with the voice.’ And so much of our process is, as you're just batting things around, you can feel a character's voice saying a few things, and that comes down on the page. And that becomes the foundation of the house. That if it proceeds from the particular as opposed to from the abstract.

Amit: Just to fill in on that, a lot of people talk a lot, as an example of a Milch - they're like, ‘How did you come up with jetball? You've invented this crazy new sport and this whole universe, and you planted it so well in the background of Episode One.’ And it was like, ‘No, we were writing a scene where we needed a sports game on, baseball was it.’ We wanted everything to be familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. So, we said, ‘Fuck it, let's do some jetball from the home zone.’ And then we had to write Episode Two. And we really liked that little part of the world that we developed. So maybe Joey had a thing for the Volts? Well, where does that take the domain? We get to go to a stadium; how do we go build it organically out of something versus attempt to kind of work backwards? You know, Dave refused to use outlines. We do use outlines, but ---

Lucas: -- but with great, great shame and ambivalence. [laughs] Even if you have an outline, you got to get lucky. And I think the short answer to your question is everything was by accident, with help from forces far beyond our control or understanding.

Amit: To give you another sense of it, we wrote the pilot five years ago, maybe more than that. We are two nobodies, who nobody knew. We needed to write something very kind of bold and exciting to grab people's attention. But it also meant we had to tell them everything it was about. On one level, there's a lot of faith in us, but we also had to prove ourselves. And that meant by the time we got to the writing room, we thought a lot about the first season, and about the kind of things, we thought we could get done in there and that we really hoped to get done. Now, it's obviously significantly different than that, but it was a long time coming.

Sadie: Going back to character voice, you get a very clear picture of who they are just by a simple mannerism, whatever it is, and I see a lot of that in the character Herb. Once your cast was in place, how much were you guys refining those voices on the page?

Amit: We're so grateful for our cast. We feel so lucky. And I think that whatever conscious attempts you make, to say, ‘Oh, now we have this, let's do this with it.’ And that could have been from Hank Azaria playing Eddie, could give him a crazy voice, but you don't end up doing that because while you're writing it, now you're seeing them and now you're hearing them. 

There are some instances like seeing Billy's [Crudup] profound talent, I think, maybe we would have been less ambitious with his character had another person been playing the role, but we were ready. He's so deeply involved, and so beautiful, a craftsman and a spirit and a talent. And I was like, ‘Oh, man. Let's make this guy do a triple lutz.’ Let's make a scene where there's two people and he's lying to one about one thing and the other about another and that's an attempted triple lutz for us, that hopefully we land sometimes. Billy is doing amazing stuff. And it was one of those moments where you could say, ‘Let's challenge him as best we can and see what he's capable of.’

Lucas: And your faith in each other grows as the process goes so that by the time you're in the back half of the season, everybody is running, operating in high gear. And Billy has an uncanny ability to add layers to dialogue to play like Amit was saying, the different changes out of a line at the same time the need to deceive with the desperate need not to deceive. The shiny reality with the human fragility underneath it's virtuosic with it.

We knew by the time we got to Episode Six if you see the way that opens, then you can just find levels of depth in his character that come out of nowhere and pull the rug for the audience, which is a great and exciting thing to be able to do to have something established for a few episodes - a rhythm and then knowing you have it in the actor and knowing you have it in the story that just completely changed the stakes and engagement and the depth of engagement with the character. Which in Jack's case happens multiple times throughout the season. I think hopefully with the other characters that it happens as well. What you thought was a superficial reality is in fact the very rawest nerve of their being by the time you get through the back half of the rug.

Sadie: Yeah, totally. There's like this shell that you guys are chiseling down for each of these characters - especially Shirley. I just love her.

Amit: Aw, she's so good! You wanna talk about fucking casting! Haneefah Wood - we'd seen so many Shirley's, they were great actors. But they were playing her all wrong. They were playing her like, ‘Oh, Eddie, you bad man.’ Which is not the same person that is sleeping with Eddie. We used to call her ‘one take Haneefah’ - she was incredible and then obviously blew our minds down the back half of the show too.

Sadie: Yeah, she is a talent to be reckoned with. She is like this foundation to what Jack has built and then when his world starts crumbling around him…oh boy.

Lucas: She kept asking us even as we were writing, she's like, ‘Don't forget to make me bad. Don't forget, I'm fucked up.’ And we're like, ‘No, no –

Amit: Don't worry, they all are! [laughs]

Lucas: But the understanding with her all along was, this is someone who has the ability to hold everything together at a price and at a cost. And even the scene that opens Episode Eight, between her and Jack in the car to us is probably the heart and soul of the season, and maybe the most virtuosic thing that actors do on screen in our show - she is both furious and devastated. She is both so aggressive and so fragile at the same time, and to see an actress who can embody that and who reaches for that, who wants to always play the underside at the same time, I mean, there's no greater thrill. There's no greater gift.

Sadie: Yeah, each slap resonates on a different frequency in that scene.

Amit: Oh man. I remember shooting that scene. It was those days where it's like a pin can drop on set. And you look over and the guy holding the boom is weeping. [laughs] Billy and Haneefah would go sit after and they were deep and both cried - something real was happening that day. That is obviously the reason why you do this.

Sadie: When building out your writers’ room, what were you guys looking for in a writer's voice?

Lucas: We always looked for a deep specificity of perspective and voice. When we were reading for the room, it was like, who was trying to pull off something incredibly specific and unique and then had the chops to back it up? And it didn't matter if it was the thing we were trying to pull off or not, but a boldness and a willingness to engage with anything beyond yourself. And also, I think, importantly, to not see the boundaries between the ridiculous and the heartbreaking, because there is a need in the culture right now to sort and to categorize both; to sort our ridiculous inanities from our heartbreaking meaningful moments and to sort our bad people from are good people, and to make sure everything is in its right Tupperware container and is clearly labeled. But writers who were ready to muck it up with all of those categories and embrace the fact that they intermix as we lead our messy lives. And we were phenomenally lucky to encounter the ones that we did.

Amit: We had never done it. So, we never read a bunch of scripts and didn't know what the marketplace of writers looks like or that development execs spend all their time grooming and taking generals that they have people to put on these lists, etcetera. One thing that came very clear, very quickly, was interesting to both of us - was that some people write with a lot of contempt for their own characters. There was, to us, cynicism or nihilism about people that is easy to write stories about.

It's easy to throw somebody bad through the grinder, and everybody likes watching that. But we were really interested in, ‘Well under that, how much does this writer or the voice of the particular script at least accept and love their characters for all of their flaws or all of it, and kind of uplift them versus rip them apart or put them in a box?’

Lucas: Without sitting over them and judging them.

Sadie: How did you connect and know that you could and should be writing partners?

Lucas: We met both working for David Milch. And Dave's process is one that is deeply collaborative and involves very little time spent in isolation tearing your hair out over the blank page. And lots of time spent in community trying to do jazz and seeing who can find something deeper, something beyond their own egos as they approach the material in concert with others. Dave would tell us the writer's first job is to get out of his own fucking way or out of their own fucking way. And so, you learn under him to rely on the people around you.

So, Amit and I had years and years of that in direct collaboration with each other and Dave. And when it became time for us to put our own shingle up, it was clear that we needed each other, that we had developed that rhythm under him. And now, it's just so natural.

Amit: That's why it and how it kind of happened. But the more we do it, the more it's brutal out here. It's a terribly difficult thing to do. To hold your aim or whatever, I don't really like the word vision but like to hold your stories, authenticity, or honesty - it takes keeping each other honest. You go in all these meetings, and you're pitching, and there's so much demoralization on the way up, as you sell something; having somebody to laugh about it with really makes it bearable. I mean, I don't know how you do it and how these people do it alone. They must have some other kind of partner, some producer or some director, whatever it is, who's a friend who's able to keep them standing with all the hits that you take along the way. It's not easy.

Sadie: It’s not easy. I like that metaphor that you're playing jazz. And I feel like the two of you guys have like this really tight rhythm section that plays off of each other. And it allows space for other people to come in and do their thing while you're keeping it all locked down.

Amit: That metaphor, I keep coming back to it also.

Lucas: But it's also so liberating, because you're not thinking you have to do it all.

Amit: Yeah, I'm gonna throw the solo to you!

Lucas: There's nothing more deadly than thinking that you have to roll the whole boulder up the hill because you cannot. You'll die, and you'll kill your collaborators trying. This art is about listening and responding. And it's such a gift to be able to do that every minute of every day while you're working. Stop trying to convince yourself that you need to make it happen, because goodness...

Hello Tomorrow! is available to watch on AppleTV+.