Greenhill Alum Debuts TV Series

‘Hal & Harper’ filmmaker seeking distribution after Sundance premiere

The anxiety and trepidation that plagued Cooper Raiff during his college years continues to be a healthy source of creative inspiration.

For his first television series, the independently produced comedy-drama “Hal & Harper,” the 28-year-old Dallas native and Greenhill School alum chronicles two siblings forced to mature before their time in a grieving and slightly dysfunctional family.

He conceived the idea around the same time as his award-winning 2020 feature debut Shithouse — when he was dealing with emptiness and uncertainty after leaving home for the first time and coping with life at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

“Seven years ago, I had what I thought was a funny idea about two kids who grew up too fast and they’re played by adults,” Raiff said at the recent Sundance Film Festival in Utah. “It was not funny to any of my friends, but I wanted to explore why I thought it was funny.”

At the time, Raiff mapped it out as a low-budget web series with two children in their beds, discussing the awful things their father had said to them. Revisiting the concept, he thought about setting it in the present day and finding ways to connect it to his own life.

It became his ambitious follow-up to his acclaimed 2022 feature Cha Cha Real Smooth, with Raiff retaining the idea of adults playing themselves as small children.

Raiff plays Hal and Lili Reinhart (“Riverdale”) plays his sardonic older sister — both in their preteen years, when coping with their mother’s suicide and a father (Mark Ruffalo) who is unable to handle single parenthood, and in their 20s, when trying to shed their codependency and resentment while starting other relationships as adults.

Reinhart said she met Raiff about a year before shooting began, and since they were both dealing with some emotional turmoil in their personal lives at the time, it became a means of connection. She even invited Raiff on a pre-planned “healing trip” to California’s Mount Shasta.

“We were just able to spend more time together,” Reinhart said. “That was paramount in building the chemistry and creating more of a sibling dynamic. That’s a privilege not a lot of people get.”

Raiff and the cast shot all eight episodes as though they were making a five-hour movie. Since it’s an independent project, whether it airs outside the festival circuit will depend upon which network or streamer acquires it for broadcast.

“I don’t know how to make a TV show at all,” Raiff said. “But I didn’t want to develop it in the normal TV way. I wanted to make it the same way I made my movies. That’s what we did.”