“Desperation is a salesman’s greatest asset,” says Eddie, a traveling salesman peddling condos and time-shares on the moon in the new Apple TV+ series Hello Tomorrow!. As Eddie, who is also a gambling addict, Hank Azaria brings a wonderfully cynical self-loathing to everything he says. Seeming to leak soul-toxins from his very pores, Eddie is the salesman manifesting most clearly that Brightside Lunar Residences are a sad scam reflecting desperation on every side, taking in sellers as well as buyers.

The brilliant Billy Crudup plays Jack Billings, a relentlessly smiling true believer who’s head of the sales team. His upbeat patter rings ever hollower as we’re let in on his rationalizing self-deceptions — including sincere sales-pitch paeans to the family, though he deserted his wife and infant son almost twenty years earlier. At a routine sales event in the town of Vistaville, he encounters his son Joey (Nicholas Podany), now a wistful young man taking care of his mother, Jack’s former wife, who’s lapsed into a coma after being hit by a self-driving delivery vehicle. Jack’s solution is to hire Joey as a Brightside salesman trainee without telling him he’s his father.

Rounding out the Brightside team are the uptight, anxiously grinning Herb (Dewshane Williams), a new father expecting twins and obsessed with beefing up his sales numbers, and Shirley (Haneefah Wood), the unflappably practical business manager who seems too smart to be cheating on her husband with Eddie. Alison Pill plays as a desperate housewife who breaks out of a sterile home by literally setting it on fire and purchasing a condo on the moon, only to discover that she’s gone from a small domestic trap to a larger existential one.