By Jordan Crucchiola

The last time writer and director Cooper Raiff brought something to Park City, he left the 2022 Sundance Film Festival with the Audience Award: U.S. Dramatic for Cha Cha Real Smooth. At the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, Raiff returns with a whole TV show in hand for the Episodic section, called Hal & Harper.

“When we started this section eight years ago now, the goal was to create a market for independently produced series work, much in the same way we already have a market for independent film,” says Senior Manager of programming Adam Montgomery. “It was rough going at first, but now it’s kind of come full circle, because this year we have an alumni director who had the audacity to create an entire season of a series.”

While only two of the eight total episodes are playing to in-person audiences for this series premiere, Raiff parlayed all the knowledge he didn’t have about making television when he independently began creating an entire eight-episode season, soon to be available for streaming via Sundance Film Festival’s online platform. “Everyone around me wanted it to be a movie, because that’s what I’ve done two times, and I don’t know how to make a TV show at all,” Raiff explains in the post-premiere Q&A. “It was just such a TV show, and I didn’t want to develop it in the normal TV way. I wanted to make it the same way that I make my movies, and we tried to do exactly that. We shot like a 300-page movie independently, and it killed all of us. It was really hard!”

Just as Raiff has done on his two features, he wore various hats by starring, writing, and directing simultaneously to make his indie “300-page movie.” When asked what the creation process is like doing so many jobs at once, Raiff says the question is probably best answered by his cast and crew. “It kind of makes everybody else’s job on set to try and play a guessing game with Cooper, trying to fill the holes that he maybe can’t see,” says executive producer Daniel Lewis, who is on stage for the post-screening conversation. “It makes it fun, and it’s really hard, and I think maybe sometimes Cooper wanted to kill us because we were reminding him of things that he didn’t want to think about, cause he was doing so many things. But even though it was really a really chaotic process, everyone definitely learned too much about each other and how to make movies and TV.”  

The original idea for Hal & Harper came seven years ago, which Raiff turned into a kind of first-draft web series about two children who were thrown into adulthood too quickly, and who are played by grown up actors. “It was two people in beds talking about what their dad said to them that day that was awful and made them grow up too fast, and it was not funny to any of my friends, but I wanted to explore why I thought it was funny,” says Raiff. Cut to five years later, and the series creator started writing out scenes that would eventually become Hal & Harper. Moving beyond the original bedtime talks, it’s now a show about two siblings in their twenties trying to reconcile their troubled relationships with their father (Mark Ruffalo), after his decision to sell their childhood home digs up years of mostly painful memories. 

The most distinctive feature of Hal & Harper is that both actors, Lili Reinhart as Harper and Raiff as Hal, play themselves at almost every age in the episodes screened at the premiere, with the exception of ages four and two. That was the year in their lives when their mother left the family (under unknown circumstances) and everything started to fall apart. Besides a few brief scenes of the mysterious catalyzing incident involving the mom, all other flashbacks feature Hal and Harper as elementary schoolers played by Raiff and Reinhart — even when they’re sitting at their classroom desks surrounded by real seven- and nine-year-olds. 

“The whole show, to me, feels like reliving things to understand them better and to heal,” says Raiff. He says he wanted the timelines to feel blurry for viewers, like they could be in either era at any time, because the pain stretches like a thread through whole lives. Sometimes it plays like a fun gag, with Reinhart dressed like a child while smoking cigarettes and reading 100 Years of Solitude. “Putting us around actual seven- and nine-year-olds was really fun, and I felt like such a bitch around them,” says Reinhart, who didn’t cover any of her tattoos while playing young Harper. Neither her nor Raiff bothered to change their voices at all to sound any younger. 

While it can be good for a laugh, the tactic serves as a visual reminder of what these two characters have carried into adulthood, from all the way back when they were small. “It just kind of made sense to me. Nine-year-old Harper is basically 25-year-old Harper’s point of view of that time. It’s a jaded, twisted view of what her nine-year-old self was, and what she was feeling and carrying,” Reinhart tells the audience. “It’s a 25-year-old woman who is looking back at her past and feeling some resentment towards how fast she had to grow up.”

When asked by an audience member if Hal and Harper’s family troubles were more general storylines or if they were rooted in his own personal familial experience, Raiff at first demures and then says, “Next question. My parents are in the audience.” He laughs along with the audience, but then decides to share more about how these characters came to life. “I really felt like Hal, Harper, and Dad dropped into my lap a long time ago, and they feel like they came out of thin air,” Raiff tells the room. “Maybe I knew them in a past life.”