Billy Crudup leads a futuristic sales team in ‘Hello Tomorrow!’

“For him, it wasn’t selling,” the Emmy-winning actor explains. “It was meeting people. He wanted to find out what would make them feel a little better and he had an angle on how to find it.”

In “Hello Tomorrow!,” Crudup borrows that optimism to play Jack, a man selling lunar timeshares in a futuristic world (that looks a lot like the 1950s).

“Jack is a character who has the audacity to think he’s entitled to live the American dream and so are the people who work with him and the people around him,” says co-creator Lucas Jansen. “He has the innocence of spirit and good faith to think consumer capitalism is the vessel that will deliver that for them.”

To provide a look at the kind of optimism the show promotes, Producer Ryan Kalil collected training videos used to recruit car salesmen in the 1950s. When he showed them to the writers, they realized those salesmen were the first ones to be duped. “Jack is the one who buys his own line completely,” Jansen says.

When Crudup read the script he told the producers, “This guy isn’t a salesman. He’s a preacher.”

Had the series come earlier in his career, Crudup doubts he could have managed it. “It is an absolute thrill,” he says.

Part of the fun comes from the show’s look. “There’s something that’s familiar to all of us in a weird way,” says co-creator Amit Bhalla. “We wanted the world to feel lived in, which is unlike some of the retro futures we’ve seen in the past. We wanted the robots to have some rust and be a little tranky. We wanted it to feel like it was a place we’d all actually inhabited at some point.”

In the initial script there were pages of descriptions about the world’s gadgets and designs. Characters, according to co-star Alison Pill, had their own color palettes. “They changed elements enough to say, ‘This is the ‘50s in a way you haven’t seen.’ It definitely puts you into the world.”

The costume details, Dewshane Williams says, helped inform the characters – how they walked, talked and stood.

Something as simple as a tie pin brought plenty of discussions, Crudup says. “Is the rocket going up or is it going down?”

Sets were tweaked enough to suggest another time.

Jack’s take: “He wants to have people imagine a world that’s better,” Crudup says. “If you pay a nominal feel for a kitchen device, it might be enough to make your day a little bit brighter. Every transaction he makes is in a hopeful way.”

Crudup says there could be an analogy made with actors. “I spend every day of work putting on somebody else’s clothes and inhabiting their feelings in the hope to fool you all,” he says. “You feel a little smarmy doing that sometimes. But it is a natural reaction for actors to know that what they’re doing is trying to pull a hoax in the hopes that we can transport you for a moment for a small fee, maybe $10 at the theater.”

To sell it, Pill says, Crudup used an earnestness and openness for the character. Adds co-star Haneefah Wood, “He set such a high standard we had nowhere else to go but up with him.”

“Hello Tomorrow!” airs on AppleTV+.