8 hours ago
What to watch, from Mark Ruffalo and Lili Reinhart in Cooper Raiff's Hal and Harper to the Raygun doco
Hal and Harper is the kind of show that may just stay with you forever.
Written and directed by Sundance darling Cooper Raiff — who also stars as the titular Hal, alongside Riverdale's Lili Reinhart as Harper — the series considers grief and the realities of parentified children in a way that's real, weird, desperately sad and quietly funny.
If that wasn't enough, it feels like Mark Ruffalo was made to play their equal parts meek, sad and terrified dad.
But if a dramedy isn't your vibe this weekend, I've got you covered.
It's been a year since the Paris 2024 Olympics, and that means just enough time has passed for us to reflect on the Raygun debacle — which is why the latest episode of Australian Story is dedicated to the rise and fall of the polarising figure that is Rachael Gunn.
There's also an adaptation of Booker Prize-winning author Bernadine Evaristo's Mr Loverman, an eerie docuseries about a morally questionable mortician, and a thrilling British drama that looks at what one mother does after a close friend calls child services on her.
Hal (Cooper Raiff) can't shake the feeling there's something wrong with him. He's an awkward college senior who's easily overstimulated and emotionally dependent on his big sister Harper (Lili Reinhart), to the extent that he falls asleep in her bed whenever her girlfriend's out of town — and Harper's girlfriend is out of town a lot.
At the same time, Harper just cheated on said long-term girlfriend and feels just as hollow and decidedly not OK as Hal does. Neither of them know what to do about it.
The pair share a similarly complicated relationship with their dad (Mark Ruffalo), who tried his best to raise his kids as a single parent, but absolutely failed.
Now he has big news that will force the siblings to relive the tragedy of their childhoods.
It takes an age to get to the point of the suspense-filled, disparate flashbacks to 2004: the year the trio's lives changed forever and Hal and Harper started to grow up faster than they should have.
But the journey is glorious — particularly as it involves the adult Raiff and Reinhart playing their characters as seven and nine-year-olds respectively, in a turn reminiscent of the most recent season of Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal.
It works. As does every other part of this searing, nine-part dramedy.
For fans of: Girls, Dying for Sex, The Rehearsal
Macquarie University lecturer by day, b-girl by night, Raygun became famous for all the wrong reasons after her disastrous breaking routine feat. imitations of sprinklers and kangaroos at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
This 30-minute Australian Story special sees Olympic medallists, journalists, breaking experts and more consider Raygun's journey to the games. They look at what made her different to some of the other underdogs who've gone down in history as Australian Olympic icons — as well as what the cultural cringe we feel over her says about us.
This isn't a clear-cut story about a misunderstood Australian larrikin, but one that involves cultural and gender politics, and a behind-the-scenes legal stoush.
In December, comedian Steph Broadbridge received a letter from Gunn's lawyer over her Raygun-inspired show, then-titled Raygun: The Musical, prompting the return of Gunn's name to the headlines months after the Paris Olympics.
This time, public sentiment was less divided and more outright anti-Raygun.
Don't expect to hear from Gunn herself at any point in this episode — the b-girl declined Australian Story's interview request. But rest assured, there are compelling arguments on either side here.
For fans of: Harley & Katya, Freeman, The Australian Dream
A warning to anyone who has recently lost a loved one: this documentary may be too harrowing for you.
The three-part series follows the story of David Sconce who, in the early 1980s, took over the Lamb Funeral Home in Pasadena, California, that had been in his family for generations.
Sconce had the idea of wildly undercutting other local cremation firms on the cheap to maximise profits, and it worked. In 1981, his business cremated just 194 bodies; the following year, this number shot up to 1,675. By 1983, Sconce's funeral home was cremating 3,487 people a year.
The answer to the question of how he did this is more horrifying than you might imagine.
"You make the bodies fit any way they can," one of Sconce's former employees says simply in episode one.
Somehow, the revelations in The Mortician only get worse from here, from the grave robbing, to the gangsters, to the death of whistleblower Tim Waters, who wound up dead of a heart attack at just 24 years of age in 1985.
As is the case with many true-crime series, there's a sense of uneasiness that comes with watching The Mortician, which prominently features interviews with Sconce. Recently released from jail after 10 years behind bars, the charismatic 68-year-old does not find fault with many of his past actions.
At the same time, series director Joshua Rofé told The Guardian that, while filming, Sconce "clearly implied [more] crimes have been committed" than he had been charged for.
But The Mortician is still worth the watch for the questions it raises about how we've allowed funerals, as well as our relationship to death, of all things, to be consumed by capitalism.
For fans of: Ren Faire, The Jinx
Based on the novel of the same name by Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other), Mr Loverman tells the story of 74-year-old dandy Barrington (Lennie James), who's living a lie.
The first-generation Antiguan immigrant did everything society dictates after arriving in the UK decades ago — from marrying a respectable woman, to having children and building a home in the city's desirable inner north-west.
He's also had a secret lover for 50 years.
After his church-obsessed wife Carmel (Sharon D Clarke) accuses him of sleeping with another woman, Barrington decides enough is enough: he's leaving her for Morris De La Roux (Ariyon Bakare).
But, as Mr Loverman flits between the reggae-filled dance halls of present-day London to flashbacks of the gay, bucolic summers Barrington spent in the city in earlier years, it's revealed this isn't the first time he has made such a pledge.
At 74, is now finally the right time to make good on it?
This sort of story doesn't often get told about the Windrush generation — named after the ship Empire Windrush, which brought the first group of Caribbean immigrants to post-war Britain in 1948 to help with labour shortages. In this community, it's common for queerness to be treated as taboo, and certainly not something to be depicted on screen.
At the same time, Mr Loverman is a love letter to dapper dandies like Barrington, to the Windrush generation and its descendants, and Caribbean uncles in general.
While the aunties, including Carmel, are depicted as the two-dimensional villains of this story in earlier episodes, give it space and time. This is as much Carmel's story as it is Barrington's, and after an illness in the family forces her to travel back to Antigua alone, it's revealed just how much her character has to say.
For fans of: Queenie, White Teeth
When Jess (Diane Kruger) takes her 10-month-old baby to the emergency room in the middle of the night with a suspected skull fracture and significant bruising, there's only one doctor free — who just so happens to be her longtime friend, Liz Burgess (Jo Joyner).
Liz doesn't buy Jess's story that little Betsey took a tumble while crawling. Nor does she take the fact Jess took nearly five hours to present at the hospital lightly.
Making the call is tough; Liz has always thought of Jess as the picture-perfect mother, with a loving husband and an enviable inner-city London townhouse.
But with Jess still behaving suspiciously and her husband Nick (Ben Bailey Smith) nowhere to be seen, Liz knows she can't be Jess's friend when Betsey needs her to be her doctor.
This haunting story about the illusion of the perfect family and the complexities of friendship is British drama — borderline thriller — at its best. It moves quickly between the present-day fallout following Betsey's hospital admission and flashbacks to the night of her "tumble", as well as to Liz and Jess's pasts — starting when they met 11 years ago at their first mother's group.
At the same time, interviews conducted by child services with Liz, Jess and the rest of their circle consider how the fragility of reputation and past trauma could lead a mother to pretend she has no idea how her baby sustained a serious head injury.
For fans of: The Letdown, Big Little Lies, The Secrets She Keeps
