Hacks Celebrates Itself

Over its five-season run, Hacks has won a slew of Emmys and a Peabody; accumulated acclaim from critics and a devoted fan base; propelled Jean Smart, Hannah Einbinder, and Megan Stalter to new levels of fame; and, like The Studio, been the kind of industry satire that the industry loves for how much validation it provides alongside its light critique. It has also gotten more earnest as it’s progressed, leading to a final season that still has the intergenerational-friendship, feminism-supporting elements of its original formula, but also more self-congratulation and sincerity than ever. Storytelling is heralded as a noble pursuit; the client-manager relationship is portrayed as nearly holy; fans are the normies just grateful to be in the orbit of someone more famous than they are; and Deb and Ava are still fighting back against men and, newly, the Man. Those are the notes Hacks loves to hit, and this season — even as it wraps itself in a defense of free speech and wages an attack on media consolidation — is yet another earworm of a melody, a new spin on the same old jingle.

Hacks has moved through different phases over its run, from its initially prickly face-off between legendary turned washed-up stand-up Deborah Vance (Smart) and down-on-her-luck comedy writer Ava Daniels (Einbinder), to its women-teaming-up middle seasons, to its sobering depiction of what “success” means in its fourth installment, when Deb hosts late night’s top-rated show and then quits in protest of her free-speech-suppressing billionaire boss, Bob Lipka (Tony Goldwyn). Through those iterations, Hacks’s viciousness as a Hollywood-aimed satire has receded like waves on the California shore, as if the show’s popularity has made its creators less willing to poke at those it considers colleagues. Comedians, actors, writers, and directors are safer from critique in Hacks’s fifth season, which instead takes aim at the rulers: Bob and his ilk, the executives whose top-down mismanagement and ballooning salaries might make you wonder whether merit matters in Hollywood at all.

Hacks has long prodded at the concept of “fairness” in an entertainment industry that’s fickle, image-obsessed, and fundamentally nonsensical, at whether someone like Deborah — an older female comedian whose ideas and achievements were mistakenly attributed to men for decades — could ever go from scrappy underdog to mainstream icon. Now, with Bob as the sorta-Ellison, sorta-Iger, sorta-Murdoch, sorta-Trump boogeyman, Hacks makes Deborah’s resilience not just individually laudable but morally correct: She’s a champion of free speech, womanhood, and independence that won’t let a man, a corporation, or the march of time hold her down. During its swan song, Hacks makes a case for comedy as our greatest defense from repression. Do you buy that a character who has Bob Mackie on speed dial and a mansion the size of a community college can be a flash point for rebellion against our corporate overlords? Well, just ask Jimmy Kimmel.

At the end of the fourth season, Deb walked away from late night to protect Ava, who had accidentally leaked the news that Bob forced Deb to edit her joke about an actor’s history of sexual misconduct from an episode of her show. The network wanted to protect their investment in Ethan Sommers’s (Eric Balfour) movie career, so they first restricted Deb’s questions, then made her delete the moment from the interview; Ava complained about the erasure to her old boss, a journalist who broke the story; and Bob told Deb to fire Ava. When she doesn’t comply, Bob reminds Deb of her incredibly constricting contract terms — after leaving, she won’t be able to perform live or do any comedy for 18 months — and when season five begins, Deb is determined to reclaim the narrative. Bob has spent months smearing her through his various media companies, so Deb plans to stage a comeback show at Madison Square Garden, one that will focus on how she was silenced by Bob. 

While she writes new stand-up material with Ava, Deb is also working on a hotel renovation in Las Vegas with her longtime adviser, Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins). Back in California, business and non-romantic life partners Jimmy LuSaque (series co-creator Paul W. Downs) and Kayla Schaeffer (Stalter) struggle to build their agency and compete with Kayla’s father, Michael (W. Earl Brown), another Big Bad who, like Bob, mocks the idea that his detractors could achieve anything. This is a David-versus-Goliath season, but David is dressed in a towering beehive wig (Deb), name-dropping “the proletariat” more than once (Ava), and screaming about how the best way to deal with an enemy is to “Luigi his ass” (Kayla).

Hacks’s scenarios have always had a mix of absurdism and superiority, a nudging can you believe this? chumminess with the audience when its characters behave ridiculously, immediately followed by a straight-backed but stories are important, and therefore, this work is important! defense of its protagonists. In the season-five premiere, “EGOT,” Jimmy and Kayla’s assistant, Randi (Robby Hoffman), voices the series’ closest attempt at a mission statement, one that will shape the season to come: “Once I started learning about Hollywood, I couldn’t stop. Such a fascinating mix of culture and business and art and history. It’s America.” That approach is of a piece with how Hacks defends free speech this season, too: by primarily advocating for comedy rather than attacking those attempting to infringe on it. Bob is rarely onscreen. The AI bro (Alex Moffat) who wants to feed all of Deb and Ava’s work into his LLM app is constrained to a single episode. Bob’s decision to erase all of Deb’s content, including her stand-up special, from the streaming services he owns is only discussed by Deb and Ava for a few minutes. Hacks is more interested in modeling how to progress against injustice than harping on the pettiness of it, and that tweak to the series’ previous formula — and the decision to have Deb and Ava united when the season begins, rather than again pulling them apart just to eventually reconcile them down the line — allows each episode to explore another route forward.

The best way to show people who you are, Hacks says, is by reminding them of what you’ve done, and in typical Hacks fashion, these methods are gently mocked and then sincerely embraced. (This is fractal TV-making — Hacks’s defining ideas scaled down to its episodic conceits.) Much-lauded playwright Tony Kushner stops by to kindly scoff at Deb’s suggestion that he write her memoir in two weeks. Later, his insights about Deb’s accomplishments inspire her and Ava to reevaluate the empowering impact of Deb’s breakout role on the sitcom Who’s Making Dinner?. Deb’s idea to place a giant sculpture of herself outside the Diva, the Vegas hotel she’s buying with Marcus, makes for some bawdy banter: “How are people supposed to make an entrance if not between my legs?” The renovation also results in the creation of a comedy club that will nurture young talent. All of this is in line with how Hacks has moved away from roasting the industry toward celebrating the people still soldiering on within it, the Avas writing scripts for producers whose long list of demands for new series require them to be passionate, diverse, queer, and “not too political, not too poor”; the Jimmys willing to sleep in bedbug-infested hotels to discover new talent. In the world of Hacks, the ends always justify the means. Even a stand-up act can be praxis.

How compelling you find that suggestion will depend on how much you jibe with Hacks’s combination of teasing and endorsement, and how quickly you might tire of how heroic everyone has become. (By now, the characters’ edges have been so sanded down that it’s shocking when it’s revealed that Deb once made a slightly homophobic joke about a lesbian comedian.) But the series throws itself into portraying how Deb’s galvanization activates those around her, and into positioning their transformations as persuasive devices. Nearly all of the season’s scene-stealing guest stars (in particular, standouts Cherry Jones and Leslie Bibb) form ranks around Deb’s mission and embolden her further, a maneuver that feels like Hacks putting its thumb on the scale. Deb’s material about being at the top of a woman-only “persecution pyramid,” above Joan of Arc and Malala Yousafzai, isn’t always funny, but Hacks insists that she should be able to try the jokes out anyway — that it’s our right to speak truth to power, even if it sometimes bombs, and that if it encourages others to do the same, it’s successful regardless.

The series still over-relies on predictable gags, like Deb’s brief foray into an age-gap-relationship PR stunt, Jimmy and Kayla dressing themselves in garish clothes from a Forever 21 knockoff, and Ava’s virtue signaling on voting. And in a way, Deb striving to reclaim her reputation and her relevance is predictable too; it’s the mode the series has constantly returned to before propelling Deb and Ava, against all odds, to the top of the industry. But it’s hard to get too upset about this repetition when Hacks’s ensemble still pulls off moments as ludicrous as Kayla solemnly telling a potential client that Las Vegas’s raw bars and strip clubs are “the promised land for guys like us,” or Deb, in full clown makeup, doing a silly dance dozens of times to make a relative happy. (There’s also a long-clamored-for kiss between two characters that will make shippers euphoric.)

And it’s hard to get upset about Hacks’s newfound hashtag-resistance mode when we live in a time where the dangers of media consolidation are very real, entertainers and journalists are seemingly pulled off the air for what they say, and every person — no matter their level of fame — feels in danger of retribution for deviating from the party line. In speaking to the current political moment, at least Hacks is sticking its neck out before patting itself on the back. Could the end of this series ever be anything but a celebration of itself? Probably not, and that’s because by its own definition of merit triumphing above cynicism, Hacks, with all that critical and commercial acclaim, has won.