Hal & Harper TV Review: Cooper Raiff delivers a touching family portrait

PLOT: Hal and Harper have built their adult lives side by side in Los Angeles, tethered by a lifetime of inside jokes and shared pain. When their father announces he’s having a baby with his girlfriend, Kate, it forces the siblings to reexamine their past and reckon with the versions of themselves they’ve carried into adulthood.

REVIEW: The era of streaming has meant we have gotten countless big-screen franchises continued in the form of small-screen series. But streaming has also afforded the chance for independent filmmakers to explore stories that would otherwise not have gotten the opportunity to be realized twenty years ago. Cooper Raiff has become one of the most intriguing filmmakers to watch after his festival darlings Shithouse and Cha Cha Real Smooth. With Mubi moving into the space occupied by A24 and Neon as a niche destination for filmmakers, Raiff’s series Hal & Harper was picked up out of Sundance with the hopes of garnering the same critical response as his featue films. The eight-episode series is easily Raiff’s strongest project to date and a beautiful drama about the love between siblings and parents navigating the pitfalls of everyday life. With a unique approach to handling flashbacks, Hal & Harper is a poignant series that ranks as one of the best of 2025.

Hal & Harper follows the titular siblings as they learn that their Dad (Mark Ruffalo) and his girlfriend Kate (Betty Gilpin) are going to have a baby. Hal (Cooper Raiff) is a college senior who has a strong bond with his older sister Harper (Lili Reinhart) who lives just a few miles away. Harper is struggling with her relationship with her girlfriend, Jesse (Alyah Chanelle Scott), while feeling a spark with her co-worker, Audrey (Addison Timlin). Hal is a chronic procrastinator who has an on-again, off-again relationship with classmate Abby (Havana Rose Liu). Both brother and sister have boundary issues with each other stemming from the childhood trauma of their mother abandoning the family, leaving Dad to parent solo while also deaing with his own emotional issues. The struggles that the three endure do not involve anything outside of what real people experience every day and it is that element that makes Hal & Harper incredibly easy to get lost in.

There is also something a bit different about the structure of Hal & Harper. I noticed very early that the twenty-eight-year-old Raiff seemed a bit old to be portraying a college senior while twenty-nine-year-old Lili Reinhart was younger than I would have thought in playing the older sibling. In most flashbacks to their elementary school days, we see the adult actors playing their child-like selves. Dressed as kindergartners and first-graders, Raiff and Reinhart interact with the age-appropriate actors playing classmates and friends. While this quirk could have been played for laughs as we see Cooper Raiff with a scruffy beard playing basketball with eight-year-olds, it works as a representation of Hal and Harper trapped in a statis in their lives that stems from not having a maternal presence in their lives. Mark Ruffalo does dye his hair and beard in these sequences to appear younger, but acts opposite Raiff and Reinhart as if they were children and not adults. At no point does the series feel like a joke because of thi,s nor does it detract from the dramatic moments in the flashbacks.

Four phenomenal performances anchor the series. Mark Ruffalo follows up his fantastic turn in HBO’s Task with this exceptional turn as a man getting a second chance to do right by a child while also trying to make amends for the mistakes he caused with his adult kids. Betty Gilpin is great as his girlfriend, navigating a difficult pregnancy while forging a bond with both Harper and Hal. Each character is given a strong narrative that alone could have served as the focus of this story with the rest of the cast serving as supporting players. Still, the construction of Hal & Harper interconnects each person as a fully realized story and allows each actor to take the lead as much as they help build the rest of the ensemble. Lili Reinhart receives the bulk of the stellar scenes as she portrays Harper, a surrogate parent to her brother, as well as a woman trying to learn about her past and build her future. For his part, Cooper Raiff echoes elements of his character from Cha Cha Real Smooth and has fun playing another average guy with the imagined weight of the world on his shoulders.

Consisting of seven half-hour episodes with an hour-long final chapter, Hal & Harper could have worked as a condensed feature film and cut out many of the subplots incorporated into the long-form series. Still, there is a charm to watching this tale unfold across multiple hours. Cooper Raiff creates effortless dialogue that shifts between natural and realistic banter to eloquent and poetic lines that punctuate the dramatic moments. This is also a hilarious story with the sibling dynamic shared between Raiff and Reinhart serving as one of the most charismatic pairing of actors on film. Whether it is Harper and Hal as children or adults, anyone with a sibling will recognize the natural connection shown on screen which makes their laughs brighter and their fights even more tangible. The production quality of the series keeps everything looking and feeling like an independent production and verges on almost documentarian in its authenticity.

Cooper Raiff has created an astoundingly good series with Hal & Harper that blends the emotional depths of real sibling and family relationships with the conceits of drama, comedy, and all of the feelings in between. With an eclectic soundtrack of songs and the quirky choice to have the main characters play their single-digit selves in flashback, Hal & Harper could have turned into a mockery of itself and lost the connection it forges with the audience in the first episode. This is a story that will connect with everyone who watches it and proves once again that Cooper Raiff is one of the top filmmakers to watch in the years to come. From Mark Ruffalo and Betty Gilpin to Lili Reinhart and Raiff himself, the cast of Hal & Harper represent one of the best casts of the year in a series that will end up in the top ten of everyone’s lists for best of 2025.

Harper & Hal premiered on October 19th on Mubi.