Modernism Week may have wrapped up in Palm Springs, but the design movement is still currently thriving on the small screen thanks to Apple TV+’s “Hello Tomorrow!” Following the story of Jack Billings (Billy Crudup), a charlatan salesman peddling “fully furnished and value-priced” homes on the moon for the Brightside Lunar Residences Company, the new series takes place in a sort of futuristic yesteryear, complete with “Jetsons”-like gadgets (think robotic vacuums and hover cars), vibrant retro costumes and thoroughly cinematic midcentury-inspired scenery. As Amit Bhalla, who created the drama/comedy along with producing partner Lucas Jansen, told HeyUGuys, “The show is about dreamers and we wanted to set the show in a dream. And that dream is a collective consciousness. It’s imaginative landscaping we’re all kind of familiar with.”
To create that familiarized onscreen world, the look of which is primarily based upon the modernist aesthetic promoted in 1950s print advertisements, production designer Maya Sigel and her team mainly utilized sets, with some practical locations situated throughout New York and Long Island thrown in for good measure.
The series’ central locale, The Vista Motor Lodge, is a mash-up of both. To portray the roadside motel’s exterior, the crew re-dressed the former Sands Beach Club, now The Sands on Lido Beach events venue at 710 Lido Blvd. in Nassau County, outfitting it with a more elaborate porte-cochère and a rock-wall façade. The lodge’s sprawling interior, though, was entirely a studio build, created on a lot about 30 miles away in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The massive set, a circular-shaped space gloriously framed in teak and rock walls and outfitted with custom furnishings throughout, included the hotel’s lobby, diner, automat bar, conference room, hallway and multiple rooms, taking up a whole soundstage “from wall to wall,” as Sigel recently detailed on The Hollywood Podcast.
The red-carpeted 1962 Room at the iconic TWA Hotel at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens also pops up as the spot where Billings and his fellow salesmen pitch the Brightside moon residences to a group of eager buyers in episode one, titled “Your Brighter Tomorrow, Today.” King Kone in Pearl River plays Bernie’s Hoverhop, where Jack takes the Brightside team at the end of the same episode. (Fun fact – the ice cream shop also appears quite prominently on the third season of “Manifest.”) And Barney Greengrass, the famed restaurant/market on New York’s Upper West Side, masks as Hartoonian’s, the local Vistaville grocery store run by Mr. Hartoonian (Adam LeFevre), where Joey Shorter (Nicholas Podany) works prior to becoming a Brightside salesman.
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Image Credit: Courtesy of Billy Lyle, Awesome Travel Holidays A veritable New York institution, the eponymous eatery was initially established as an appetizing shop in 1908 by Russian transplant Barney Greengrass. Its first location was a small storefront at 113th St. and St. Nicholas Ave. in Harlem, with early advertisements declaring it “A food store for those who demand the best.” Stocked with specialty Jewish delicacies, the place became a hit with area denizens, famous for its smoked fish offerings, eventually earning Barney the nickname “The Sturgeon King.”
Greengrass relocated the market to its current home at 541 Amsterdam Ave. in 1929. He expanded into the storefront next door eight years later, adding a dining room to the premises, a charming wood-paneled space whimsically – and somewhat incongruously – lined with muted wallpapering depicting a New Orleans cityscape.
Virtually nothing on the premises has been altered since.
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Image Credit: Courtesy of Billy Lyle, Awesome Travel Holidays With its Art Deco deli case, Formica tables, chalkboard signage and metal shelving, the restaurant is a relic of old New York, one step across the threshold sending visitors straight back to a simpler time. As Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Remnick detailed in a 2008 piece for Bon Appétit, “How to describe the place? It is the past regained. The investment in interior decoration has been minimalist, and not in the Philippe Starck, skinny-assed chairs sense. More in the sense that I don’t think they have spent a dime on the nonessentials since the Truman Administration.”
The old-school charm is by design. As Barney’s grandson Gary Greengrass, who runs the eatery today, told the Daily News in 1990, “We live in a time capsule here. The restaurant is a little worn. But I’m afraid to change it. It’s a comfortable shoe.”
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Patrick McMullan Archives
Image Credit: Joe Schildhorn/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images Customers certainly agree. Despite the dated décor – or perhaps because of it – you’re hard-pressed to ever find the place not standing room only nor without a line of hungry patrons lining the sidewalk out front, patiently hankering for specialties like Nova Scotia Salmon Scrambled with Eggs and Onions, Famous Homemade Borscht (served cold) and the House Made Chipped Herring Sandwich.
The eatery even earned a prestigious America’s Classics award from James Beard in 2006 and is regularly rated by Zagat as New York’s #1 deli.
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Image Credit: Food Network Barney’s has enjoyed a massive celebrity following ever since its inception over a century ago. Just a few of the luminaries known to have noshed there include Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, Robert Wagner, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Alfred Hitchcock, Brad Pitt, Nora Ephron, Jerry Seinfeld, Eddie Cantor and Itzhak Perlman. Anthony Bourdain was such a fan, he brought cameras into the restaurant in 2002 to shoot a scene for a season one episode of his inaugural television show “A Cook’s Tour” dedicated to his most beloved New York eateries. Titled “My Hometown Favorites,” the segment sees the celebrated chef sitting down for his morning meal at Barney’s and declaring that the place serves “the best breakfast in the universe.”
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Image Credit: Apple TV+ The site has also become a big and small screen staple, its retro, thoroughly New York appeal proving the perfect fit for countless films and television shows, including “Hello Tomorrow!” Barney Greengrass pops up a handful of times on the series, initially appearing in episode two, “Great Salesmen Make Their Own Turf,” as the spot where Joey successfully closes his first Brightside sale. It is also there that disgruntled housewife Myrtle Mayburn (Alison Pill) suffers a breakdown over a burnt meal in the episode titled “From the Desk of Stanley Jenkins.”
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Image Credit: Apple TV+ Of the location, Sigel told The Hollywood Podcast, “Hartoonian’s was a really fun opportunity because we took over Barney Greengrass, which is, you know, a New York deli institution that’s been there forever and has beautiful bones.” Utilizing those bones as a blank slate, Maya and her team thoroughly overhauled the restaurant for the shoot, adding a grocery aisle to the center of the main room and swapping all of the regularly stocked items for fabricated fare. She explains, “I wanted to clear it out of everything that was real food. The deli case, we put graphics over and it’s kind of glowing with the strange-looking food. And everything is kind of like freeze-dried or frozen.” The set dressing brought Barney’s even further into the past, genuinely selling it as a holdover from those halcyon days following the invention of the microwave when, as Sigel notes, “everyone was into eating these instant foods and packaged foods.” (The real Barney Greengrass would never, by the way! Virtually everything on the premises is homemade – even the cream cheese!)
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Image Credit: First Line Features Other productions to showcase the eatery in all of its New York finery include the 1997 dark comedy “Deconstructing Harry.” It is outside of the deli that Dolly (Shifra Lerer) runs into Wolf Fishbein (Si Picker) and learns that her husband is not only a murderer but a cannibal.
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Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) dines at Barney’s with her employee/confidant Birdie Conrad (Jean Stapleton) and tries to put a positive spin on the fact that a Fox Books megastore is moving into the neighborhood in the beloved 1998 rom-com “You’ve Got Mail.”
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Image Credit: Dreamworks Pictures Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio) shares a terse meal with his co-workers on the premises in the 2008 drama “Revolutionary Road.”
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Image Credit: NBCUniversal Television It is at the fabled deli that Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) attempts to teach her new boyfriend, Dr. Drew Baird (Jon Hamm), how regular people – i.e. those without a “whole Disney prince thing” going on – experience life in the season three episode of “30 Rock” titled “The Bubble.”
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Image Credit: NBCUniversal Television In the season nine episode of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” titled “Three-in-One,” Detective Zack Nichols (Jeff Goldblum) meets with his father, Dr. Theodore Nichols (F. Murray Abraham), at Barney Greengrass following the closure of a case.
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Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) dines there several times with both his father, Thomas Schell (Tom Hanks), and The Renter (Max von Sydow) in the 2011 drama “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.”
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Image Credit: Paramount And Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) heads to Barney Greengrass in the hopes of currying favor with police commissioner Richie Sansome (Michael Rispoli) in the season four episode of “Billions” titled “Chucky Rhoades’s Greatest Game.”