With Emmy nominations soon to be out, the teams at Comic Book Clique and Dirt Sheet Radio has been exploring the past year in television ahead of the July announcement. During the eligibility window, cultural phenomenons such as Stranger Things and award staples such as Hacks aired their final episode, The Comeback made its comeback after a 12 year absence, Abbott Elementary taught students in an abandoned mall, and multiple Academy Award winners decided to pop into the Arconia. Apple TV continued to prove itself as the modern HBO in the prestige TV game, Paramount expanded its Sheridan universe after a Skydance merger kickstarted the process of a Warner Bros merger, and over at Netflix, Ted Danson infiltrated a college. It’s been an eventful year for television, and you’d be remiss if you haven’t heard of a familial miniseries from arthouse film distributor MUBI.
Hal & Harper, which had originally been set for FX prior to creative differences between the studio and creator/star Cooper Raiff, aired an eight episode, standalone television show from October to November stateside. The show, which stars Raiff opposite Riverdale’s Lili Reinhart, independent cinematic legend Mark Ruffalo, and Tuner actress Havana Rose Liu, follows codependent brother and sister Hal and Harper as they explore their own troubled love lives as young adults after dealing with the news that their father, who they didn’t always have the best relationship with as children, is expecting to be a father again. With his father getting married, he requests they move their stuff out the family home as he moves elsewhere with his future wife, portrayed by Betty Gilpin. This forces them to process childhood trauma that they had never processed. More interestingly, the show explores memories of the past with them as their adult beings, as if they had always been that age, to symbolize how they had to grow up so fast following the untimely passing of their mother.
It’s there within the concept that the actors are truly allowed to shine, with Reinhart particularly as the standout. Much like other actors such as Charles Melton, who stunned everybody with his incredible performance in 2023’s May December, Reinhart’s post-Riverdale career needed that one role to wash the CW shark jump stink off of her. For Reinhart, to be able to evoke such tenderness within Harper’s humanity opposite an established actor the caliber of Mark Ruffalo, who just recently scored his fourth Academy Award nomination a few years ago for his career-performance in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, should at least solidify her within the industry. Harper herself is flawed and often brings her struggles and drama upon herself, but it also comes from the struggles that she faced while trying to raise herself and her brother as their father grieved their mother. Reinhart’s ability to be unapologetically human is matched with the difficult task of playing a number of ages opposite a number of actors who are actually that age. The ability to behave like a child as an adult acting opposite another child without it coming across cartoonishly outlandish is an exercise in acting ability, and one Reinhart not only meets, but actively exceeds. While Raiff also faces similar opportunites, the prowess isn’t nearly as impressive when you consider that Raiff wrote and directed it to his own vision in the first place. Unfortunately, while Raiff does an excellent job writing and directing, he always feels like he’s acting here while everybody around him disappears into their roles. Raiff is fine, but definitely outshined.
Meanwhile, Hal himself has his own struggles, specifically in relationships and how he deals with people. The pain that is found within Harper that causes her problems at 24 isn’t found in Hal at 22 as much as much as his childlike innocence still is. Essentially, one child used their traumatic childhood as an excuse to grow up too quickly, and the other used it as an excuse to not grow up at all. This leads to many issues with Hal, particularly when communicating with people, most of all his girlfriend, portrayed by Liu, who’s terrific as always. With that dynamic in mind, the message is essentially that Harper grew up early so that Hal never had to, and that’s part of how she protected him, leading into the finale…which opens with a flylead that reads ‘for the parents, and the parentified.’
Hal & Harper shines because it doesn’t rely on showing anything horrific as much as it relies on fleshing out its characters over the course of each half hour episode (an hour for the finale, which was originally split into two episodes when it aired first in Autstralia) and showing how they remember the day-to-day process of living ahead of the new change for their family. It doesn’t go into what forced them to go there, rather how they got themselves there.
The finale takes place around Thanksgiving as Hal and Harper determine their new dynamic with their father, soon-to-be stepmother as they navigate college and potential careers. The finale is just as much about being a parent and understanding that mistakes will be made as it is about being a child who had to deal with the consequences of those mistakes, and understanding that they did the best dealing with the situation that they had. The codependency boils over as in an overdue fight between the siblings when Harper decides to leave for Europe to get away from her brother so that she can figure out who she is. It’s just as much about the bonds shared by overbearing siblings that lean on each other. There is no finality for these characters, just gradual dynamic shifts ahead of their new lives. They’re damaged, they’re human, and they’re family.
The finale drives home this idea that the show is “about this family where everyone’s super lonely but then it gets even worse because they withdraw and they just become selfish and so miserable…but maybe it gets better,” to quote nine year old Harper describing One Hundred Years of Solitude.
For anybody who has gone through a traumatic experience with a parent a young age, or has dealt with a sibling who forces a codependent relationship on you, this is a show that’s well worth the four and a half hours it takes to binge on MUBI. To editorialize for a moment, I know for me, I see a lot of myself in both of the characters from moments in my childhood I decided to push to the back of my mind rather than process, and the argument in the finale between Hal and Harper is an argument I myself have had with certain members of my own family.
How it’ll do as an awards play remains to be seen. While it could be a sneaky contender, specifically for Reinhart, MUBI itself isn’t a strong enough distributor to be backing it. Outside of The Substance, which shocked everybody and had Demi Moore win-competitive for Best Actress while the film also picked up above-the-line nominations for Coralie Fargeat’s direction and writing at the Academy Awards with a Best Picture nomination to boot, they haven’t even scored anything major at the Oscars despite being primarily a film distributor. While their films are really good, DSR would highly recommend Die My Love, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Five Devils, The Girl with the Needle, and Fallen Leaves, they primarily do under-the-radar festival plays for arthouse and international cinema. They’ve rarely ventured into television before Hal & Harper. Obviously, with them ramping up their television slate as well licensing Lynch’s Twin Peaks, there seems to be a plan to diversify their service, but if they can’t adequately campaign on a regular basis in their bread and butter, it’s hard to determine whether or not they have the proper television connections to campaign for Hal & Harper.
Regardless, this is certainly a show DSR/CBC would love to see pop up this season, and MUBI is a service any cinephile should be eager to sign up for.
Photo credit: MUBI.
Jameus Mooney is an entertainment writer and editor for Comic Book Clique, having covered the entertainment industry for years. You can follow him on Twitter here, and Letterboxd here. You can also listen to his horror podcast, The 2:17 Horror Podcast, at the DeathArts XIII YouTube channel.