Drew Burnett Gregory is back at Sundance bringing daily updates on the best of LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond. Follow along for more coverage or read her review of Hal & Harper below. 

Charles Melton may have been the first Riverdale kid to achieve critical acclaim for a serious role, but we all knew Lili Reinhart was next. No matter what that show threw at her — and I never even got to the truly crazy stuff — Reinhart grounded the storyline with her performance. The good news is Reinhart has finally found another project that shows the breadth of her skill. The bad news is Cooper Raiff’s Hal & Harper is never quite as good as this performance or its potential.

Known for his breakout indie movies, this is writer/director/EP/star Raiff’s first foray into television. But, ideally, television isn’t just a long movie haphazardly split into parts. Each episode should work as an episode in addition to being a part of a whole. Hal & Harper is lacking in this structure.

The series is about codependent brother and sister Hal (Raiff) and Harper (Reinhart, also an EP on the series) navigating young adulthood and their childhood trauma as their father (Mark Ruffalo) prepares to have another baby with his new partner (Betty Gilpin). Hal is a senior in college, unsure what he wants next from life, and desperately clingy with his sister and with the girl he likes (Havana Rose Liu). Harper is the caretaker — of her brother, of her father, of her longtime girlfriend (Alyah Chanelle Scott), and at her shitty assistant job where she’s started crushing on her coworker (Addison Timlin, also an EP on the series).

The gimmick of the show — although it doesn’t really begin until episode three — is that Raiff and Reinhart also play their younger selves in childhood flashbacks. Both Raiff and Reinhart are wonderful in these sequences and it’s an effective use of the pen15 approach to show how these two kids were forced to grow up too quickly. But there’s no logic to when the show is in this timeline and the scenes often just sort of happen rather than telling specific stories from their past. There’s a difference between being artfully without structure and being without structure to appear artful.

It would be okay if Hal & Harper wanted to just be a slice-of-life character study, but its elliptical editing style suggests that it’s building toward a reveal. The problem is that reveal is abundantly clear from the very beginning. There is no mystery of “why Hal and Harper are like this” so I wish the show didn’t try to frame it as such.

In fact, again and again the show fails to trust its performances and strong scene writing. Reinhart, especially, is good enough that if she’s thinking about her mom, we’ll be able to tell. We don’t need dreamy flashes of memory to interrupt what’s happening on her face. The show has montage after montage after montage and these sequences are never as strong as when characters are talking or allowed a rare moment of silence.

Reinhart isn’t the only performer doing incredible work. The entire cast — including Raiff! — are excellent and it makes the ways the show doesn’t work deeply frustrating. With this exact same footage, there’s an excellent three hour indie film hidden in there, but instead we get an inconsistent eight episode season of television.

I don’t fundamentally believe one person shouldn’t write a TV show by themself, but I do find that often shows written by one person lack in perspective. Maybe that’s why Harper’s relationship with her partner feels so flat despite Reinhart and Alyah Chanelle Scott’s attempts to deepen it. Maybe that’s why a subplot about the baby potentially having down syndrome feels so crudely handled. The material here is often so rich and it makes the subplots that don’t work feel all the more glaring.

At a time when so many people watch TV while scrolling on their phones, this show might find an enthusiastic audience. Attention will be grabbed for the good moments and can be painlessly lost for the rest. But this isn’t some Netflix slop created to be half-watched. It’s a mostly well-made, personal show that’s so close to being truly excellent.

Lili Reinhart is an exceptional actor, and while we wait for her to find a project worthy of her talents, Hal & Harper will hold us over. When it’s good, it’s great. But when it’s not good, it’s just so disappointing.

Hal & Harper will be available to stream on the Sundance online platform January 30. 

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