The Creators of Hello Tomorrow! Invented a Futuristic Version of Baseball for the Apple TV+ Series

Series creators Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen offered a peak behind the curtain at ‘jetball,’ the favorite future pastime of Vistaville residents.

What Harry Potter did for Quidditch, the new Apple TV+ series Hello Tomorrow! is doing for the sport “jetball,” a baseball-like game set in the retro-future utopia of Vistaville. Although it may take a few seasons before you start seeing this one reenacted across college campuses.

The creators of Hello Tomorrow!, Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen, recently spoke to IndieWire about the origins of their fictional sport:

“We wrote the pilot and there’s a ballgame in the background. And we knew it shouldn’t be baseball. So we made jetball, just in the background. When they had us write an Episode 2, we said, ‘You know what was cool? Jetball.’ It’s an organic process. We didn’t know what jetball was, but now we invented more of it and now there’s more of it still to be there to be invented.”

While the show exists somewhere “between The Jetsons and Mad Men” — according to showrunner Stephen Falk — in an idealistic future when cars fly and timeshares on the moon are a purchasable commodity, the series’ developers took extra painstaking care to think through the logistics of what a Jetsonian baseball game would look like on screen. According to Bhalla:

“That was something crazy and fun with this show. You can’t just say, ‘Oh, that’s the baseball stadium the Yankees play in.’ They repainted all the different lines on the field and did it practically. You also have to think, ‘What’s the scoreboard like?’ I remember having to draw out what the scoring is, even though it’s only in the background for a second.”

Even the game personnel are Hanna-Barbarian; jetball features robot umpires called “umpbots”:

“We thought it was a really funny little wink to throw in there. If they make the wrong call, everybody’s pissed at them. You’re like, ‘Oh my god. This is right out of our near future.”

Jansen added:

“The costume department came up to us one day, and they’re like, ‘Well, if the umpire is a robot, he’s going to need a hat.’ And they showed us an ump’s hat that was so wide! It’s such a joy for everybody to be imagining, and working at this level. This is the kind of show that tells you, ‘Oh no, you can’t just show up at a baseball stadium. You’ve got to imagine every single aspect of it and get it right.’”

Related: Exclusive: The Stars of Hello Tomorrow! Dish About Their Retro-Futuristic Show

Future Days for Hello Tomorrow!

Balla said the screenwriting duo hopes to expand upon their space-age cartoon-inspired world, which also includes famous cartoon dad and former fictional baseball announcer Hank Azaria, in a supporting role in future seasons of the show:

“The hope was that the whole show feels familiar and uncanny at the same time. So it’s very important to us that there’s that slight ‘off’ quality to it. If we’re lucky enough to have a Season 2 maybe get to see a little more of its workings and more about the world because there’s a lot there. One thing about this imaginative landscape like this is that the roots go so deep. There’s so much more of the iceberg.”