One of today’s most beloved shows returns for its fourth season, with new episodes of Hacks arriving imminently. Eliza Janssen takes a look at what makes this inside-comedy comedy so compelling.
Oh, how the writers’ room tables have turned. If you—or a lesbian close to you—is a returning fan of Hacks, you’ll be aware that season three’s finale shockingly switched up the power dynamic between legendary stand-up Deborah (Jean Smart) and her harried underling Ava (Hannah Einbinder) for good.
Over three hilarious seasons, the ball has typically been in Deb’s court. This even extends into the show’s glittering awards season reception, with Smart racking up armfuls of Emmys and Golden Globes for her grande dame performance. Einbinder, arguably playing the tougher role of the whiny millennial battling for Deborah’s jokes to skew more woke, has enjoyed nominations but not many wins in Best Supporting Actress categories.
Could everything change, after that juicy cliffhanger saw Ava manipulating and blackmailing her way back onto Deborah’s team? Just as Deborah’s lifelong dream of hosting her own late night show is finally coming to fruition?! I’ve never been so excited for Hacks to return to my streaming screen—for the playing field to be wickedly evened, for the stakes to rocket ever higher, and for TV’s most compelling love-hate relationship to explode into peak hilarity.
Back in the celebrated comedy’s first episode, a very un-booked and un-blessed Ava had a job interview with the great Deborah Vance, a reliable Las Vegas stand-up and shopping TV host whose empire was on shaky ground after she got dropped as a casino headline act. The meeting was a disaster, ending with Ava yelling that the last thing she would want to do is “move to the desert to write lame jokes for an old hack!” One terrific debut season later, that frisson of creative and moral conflict between the women had blossomed into a nourishing mentor-mentee relationship.
Season two didn’t captivate me quite so much, starting off with Ava in Deborah’s bad books after a spot of industry betrayal. Again, by the end of this batch of road-trip-buddy-comedy-odd-couple episodes, they’d made up and made bank, Deborah lovingly sending Ava off on her own after they’d filmed a successful stand-up special together. Despite loving these characters to death, concern prickled within me. Was every season of Hacks going to follow this arc, of betrayal and bitching giving way to bonding and another big notch in Deb’s evolving renaissance?
Thank goodness, then, that season three shook everything up. With Deborah and Ava starting off on good terms for once, their inevitable reunion looked an awful lot like infidelity, with each woman cheekily texting the other and losing interest in their other friends, their romances, their routines. “You come along, and you make me want more for myself,” Deborah wailed in one angry, adorable exchange at Ava: “and it’s just fucking annoying!”
The season’s last two episodes sold just how far this cantankerous couple have come, with Ava practically sealing the deal for Deborah’s late night dreams, revisiting her insult for the older woman from that very first day that they met. “A hack is someone who does the same thing over and over,” she told a reporter: “Deborah is the opposite. She keeps evolving and getting better.”
Returning to this titular concept so late in the game felt like blissful catharsis. It was sweet. Almost… too sweet. We weren’t ready for the show to stab us in the back with a stunning finale twist—with Deborah set to cruelly cut Ava off from their talk show ambitions for the sake of keeping studio bigwigs happy, Ava countered the betrayal with a bit of blackmail, finally hitting her hero (and maternal figure of sorts?!) where it hurts.
The terrific team behind Hacks are now entering 30 Rock territory, with season four focusing on the glamour and backstage chaos of creating live TV (Writer Jen Statsky used to work on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, handily enough). Creator and writer Paul W. Downs has said that Hacks was always planned out as a five-season arc, and that the final scene of the entire shebang was pitched along with the series.
We’ll finally get to see Ava taking charge of a writers’ room, and probably having to play nicely with others after she’s been toiling as Deborah’s right-hand funnywoman for years. We’ll get more of Jimmy (Downs again) and Kayla (scene-stealer Megan Stalter), the hapless managers of our protagonists, who are in the midst of hectically setting up their own agency. We’ll get more Kaitlin Olsen as Deb’s desperado daughter DJ.
All of it makes me feel unreasonably confident in where Hacks is headed: like Ms Vance herself, this brilliantly characterised and scripted series is anything but hacky, only getting better and more complex with each new instalment. It feels only fair for Deborah and Ava (ship name: Devora) to set their traitorous back-and-forth aside by the end of season four, ready for a celebratory fifth and final chapter. I wouldn’t put money on it, though: true comedy comes from the element of surprise.
