‘Hello Tomorrow’ Boss on Creating a World Between ‘Mad Men’ and ‘The Jetsons’

Welcome to the 202nd episode of TV’s Top 5, The Hollywood Reporter’s TV podcast.

Every week, hosts Lesley Goldberg (West Coast TV editor) and Daniel Fienberg (chief TV critic) break down the latest TV news with context from the business and critical sides, welcome showrunners, executives and other guests, and provide a critical guide of what to watch (or skip, as the case may be).

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You’re the Worst creator Stephen Falk joins the podcast this week for a conversation about showrunners for hire and his new show, Apple’s Billy Crudup starrer Hello Tomorrow, on which he does just that. Falk also opens up about the larger themes at play in the retro-futuristic comedy and the issues that are front and center as the Writers Guild prepares to hammer down a new deal with the studios. Falk also shares an update on his WeWork TV series with Succession’s Nicholas Braun and teases a few other things in the works.

Other topics during this week’s TV’s Top 5 include headlines of the week (featuring J.J. Abrams), Showtime’s layoffs and Paramount Global’s rate hikes. Plus, Dan reviews ABC’s The Company You Keep, Showtime’s The 12^th Victim, Netflix’s Full Swing, Fox’s Animal Control and Apple’s Hello Tomorrow in the Critic’s Corner segment.

But first, read on for a condensed portion of our interview with Falk.

With Hello Tomorrow, the original script was written by Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen. What attracted you to the property?
I came on board around June 2021. They brought this fully realized, retro-future world that lives in our imagination. It was just such a captivating, amazing world. Billy Crudup was also a big drawing point and I had not worked with Apple.

One of the first shows you created, NBC’s Dane Cook comedy Next Caller, was canceled before it premiered. You wrote an incredibly candid post about the entire experience that was perhaps one of the most forthcoming things I’ve read from a showrunner. How do you contend with what happened now that it’s happening to more creators?

Now that you say that, it does strike me that these things are happening in real time: people are learning that their show is being pulled out of the library of a streamer, or that their $90 million movie they made is never going to be seen because it’s more valuable as a tax write-off. At that moment, there was a real sense of social media being in its infancy and gaining its power as a direct mouthpiece from the artist, if you will, to the viewer. … For me, it solidified my desire to not try to play too cute and adopt a voice that isn’t mine. When talking to people like you, or discussing a show, there’s a there’s a level of transparency and candor that is effective that one wants to listen to about the industry. Hopefully, I can provide that without getting in too much trouble.

Did that post impact your career?

Not that I know of. I’m sure there’s a lot that has been said outside of my ear range. But around the same time, it did give rise to rules [on social media] when you’re on a show: “Please don’t write about this.” “You can’t tweet from set.” Pretty soon, I had my own show; and no one really can tell the showrunner what to do that much. I have rules and talking points in front of me that, God bless the streamer who gave them to me, I’m not going look at. But I understand why they do that — because they’re spending a lot of money and they want to control the narrative.

Hello Tomorrow is a hard show to summarize. What’s your elevator pitch for the series?

It’s such a visual show. It exists in a in an imagination we all sort of share. It’s an unholy marriage between The Jetsons and Mad Men. It’s a throwback show about hope, imagination and what happened to optimism in the face of late capitalism. It’s about the ways in which technology lets us down. At the heart, it’s a show about a group of traveling salesman at a time when being a salesman represented the American dream and people didn’t close their doors on them immediately.

What are the larger themes that you hope viewers take away from the show?

There’s something lovely about the idea of blind optimism. I was talking to Jenji Kohan recently and she was telling me why she wants to work in optimistic realms and put things out there that have a sense of optimism and why she wouldn’t do Station Eleven or The Last of Us because of this notion that when you depict a world, it ends up becoming reality to the viewer and it ends up infecting the future in a way. Hello Tomorrow fit so nicely with that. Yes, Jack [Crudup’s character] may or may not be shady. But he actually believes that what he’s selling, whether it’s true or not, will better the lives of those who buy it. That just the act of saying yes — opening yourself up to another possibility — there’s something powerful in that. I tend to agree, even though I’m a pretty cynical person. Even You’re the Worst, at the heart of it, there was a belief in in trying, even if only for one day. I hope viewers hold on to that because if we depict a different endpoint, we can start to reach for that — or at least think that there’s a possibility.

Was there an inflection point in 1954 at which point the world of the show went one way and our world went another way? How did the show end up in this point between Mad Men and The Jetsons?

As much as people tried to pin it down — is this Man in the High Castle with an alternate universe? — it’s not. It’s a purely imagined world where Cadillacs hover and people Jetpack off to work after kissing their wife goodbye. The ask is for the audience to accept that this is the world and instead of baseball, we have jetball and we have a robot umpire to kick dirt at rather than some guy that I’m still mad at. It’s an imagined world that still somehow resonates and feels familiar because retro-futurism was such a popular thing back in the ’50s. There was this desire to imagine a world that was like ours, but also better and different in the post-war world. We wanted to imagine something that would take us away and make cooking dinner easy.

What was your approach to how much or how little you wanted to use the backdrop to address the actual -isms of the 1950s, be it racism or sexism, in a contemporary or forward-looking way?

We wanted to live in a world where those isms didn’t exist. We don’t spend episode seven tackling racism. Two of the main four salesmen are Black and we don’t address it. That’s an effort to create this alternate world that hopefully the audience can just buy into it. The politics in the show are more about capitalism and the American dream than about things like racism and sexism.

Most of the characters in the series are either lying to themselves or lying to everybody else pretty much all the time. How important is it for you guys to know when you’re writing the characters, even if it isn’t appearing actually on the screen, what these characters are feeling genuinely underneath the dialogue?

It’s really hard when you’re writing characters who are either lying or lying to themselves or being lied to or lying about a lie or making up a new lie while defending a lie. As writers, we had to navigate a lot of different layers of complexity. For the actors, it was hard to be able to play, “OK, I am telling a lie. But I think they think a different lie, so I have to cover both lies at the same time.”

So much of the spine of the show is based around the idea of salesmen as liars and salesmen as storytellers. How much of your job these days would you say is being a good salesman?

I feel fake saying this but I also think it’s true: we are at a time of high uncertainty in the industry. You could probably find an article in every single month of your publication in the last 10 years about what an uncertain time we’re in. So many of my projects have been affected just by the fact that one person bought it, and then they leave. And then someone else comes in and needs to make it their thing. Or, as we’re seeing now, there was a lot of overspending in the arms race, and now they’re pulling back or saying they’re pulling back. A lot of times you are having to educate a new executive or seduce a new executive. Or really try to drill down to that executive what they actually like or don’t like about a script. So there is a lot of salesmanship. I don’t hate that part of the job. I’ve been pitching and selling projects for 20 years. I don’t mind trying to make something sound like the best version of what I think it can be because I’m not lying.

Speaking of executive changes, you were developing Spoonbenders for Showtime with Greg Berlanti. What’s going on there?

If you think “Paramount+ With Showtime” isn’t a fantastic moniker and that doesn’t carry on the golden days of David Nevins and Bob Greenblatt, you’re crazy. [Laughing.] Gary Levine is so happy to be a senior adviser. But I don’t think we ever cracked it. I wrote about 20 versions. There were a lot of different cooks in the in the kitchen and ultimately, I don’t think I made a version that every cook liked. So it got thrown out.

You also signed on as showrunner for a WeWork TV series with Succession breakout Nicholas Braun set to star. What’s the status of that?
I wrote the pilot and Bible with Nick. We were always neck and neck with the other project and they cast and Anne Hathaway and Jared Leto one day and ours was dead.

You’re the Worst streams alongside the rest of the FX library on Hulu. What have you heard about the show’s future there given the uncertainty around the future of Hulu?

I have not heard anything. I keep looking for clarification of what’s going to happen to Hulu between Comcast and Disney. John Landgraf is one of the smartest people in this town and I think he has positioned himself in a way that keeps the FX brand integrity in a smart way.

We’re asking all showrunners who come on the podcast about the threat of a writers’ strike come May when the guild’s deal with the studios expires. What’s the most important issue for you in a new deal?

Streaming residuals and things like that. It’s a completely new ecosystem. These short-order rooms and stuff like that. But waking up to the reality of what TV looks like now and compensating writers, directors, actors and crew people with math that actually resembles what we were promised. That’s pretty important.

What kind of challenges does the industry’s consolidation wave have on writers?

When I pitched You’re the Worst to FX, I knew what an FX show was and what holes they had in their development slate and I could tailor that pitch and it worked. Now, when I go to pitch something, I don’t know what Hulu is or what it’s going to be. I don’t necessarily know what Peacock is. I don’t know what Apple is and I worked for them! It’s always been hard for traditional linear channels — and now streamers — to forge a strong identity. You can be like Paramount+ With Showtime and say, “Our identity is these three things and we’re going to do these shows.” That’s not really identity. Those are just three things you like and three buckets you put everything into and throw everything else that didn’t neatly fit into that bullshit away. It’s hard knowing where something might best exist.

Should Hello Tomorrow come back for a second season, would you stay on as showrunner or would you pass that torch to the creators?

I would pass it on. I’m doing a bunch of movie projects and I’m developing for a lot of different streamers and traditional networks.

Listen to the full interview with Falk for more on showrunners for hire, Crudup’s personal connection to the role, getting the tone right so the show didn’t turn into a farce and what’s next after Hello Tomorrow.

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