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ONE OF THE smartest comedies on our screens over the past few years has been Hacks, which returns this weekend for its fifth and final season.
It stars Jean Smart as the acerbic Deborah Vance, a groundbreaking comedian in her 70s who’s akin to the likes of Joan Rivers. In season one, she wanted to refresh her career and so hired a sardonic Gen Z writer Ava Daniels, played by Hannah Einbinder, to help her.
This odd-couple comedy is droll and very clued-in to contemporary culture. It pokes fun at Deborah and Ava as they spar with each other, yet allows them to be as ambitious and messy as they want.
But after five seasons is Hacks still worthy of our attention, or has it lost its spark?
A comedy with bite
Thankfully in season five Hacks – which was created by married couple Paul W Downs and Lucia Aniello alongside Jen Statsky, and first aired in 2021 – continues to be a comedy with a lot of bite.
Deborah and Ava’s lives are still utterly entwined, and they’re in a better place than in season four, when Deborah had a breakdown in Singapore. When the fifth season opens, fans are convinced by a TMZ article that Deborah is dead. From then on, Deborah is on a one-woman mission to rescue her reputation, while being reminded at many turns that people see her as damaged or mentally ill.
Where other shows might have made one of the women a sympathetic type, both Deborah and Ava have many moments where they are seriously dislikeable. They’re both self-absorbed and butt up against each other constantly. Deborah makes rush decisions based on what works best for her, while Ava sees herself as a woke, climate-conscious queer young person but is prone to not practising what she preaches.
But they clearly care for each other, and they feel like real, flawed people, so you end up rooting for them. As an audience member you realise that they have more in common than they want to acknowledge, which is why the sparks fly. While they’ve both certainly evolved as people over the past few seasons, by season five they are more mature, but just as capable of saying or doing something stupid.
The main thrust of this season is Deborah trying to make big career moves, but being stymied by contractual obligations. Still, if you tell her no she’ll find a way around it, which is very fun to watch. Ava, meanwhile, is trying to focus on her own writing career, which blesses us with some really funny scenes that poke fun at the bewildering entertainment business.
Ensemble comedy
But Hacks is not just a two-player show. At its heart it’s an ensemble comedy, with a solid crew who gather around Deborah and Ava and help boost the laughs.
Hacks co-creator Paul W Downs plays Jimmy LuSaque Jr, who is Deborah and Ava’s manager. He spends most of his time absolutely exasperated over their behaviour and trying to fix problems they have created. In season five his business is losing money and so his decisions are infected with a layer of specific desperation.
Megan Stalter returns as Kayla Schaefer, Jimmy’s assistant. Stalter came to major attention online during Covid, and her ditzy, surreal comedy continues to work well, even if her away-with-the-fairies approach can run a little too hot on absurdity on occasions. In a mirror of Deborah and Ava, she and Jimmy are constantly fighting, but they always manage to make up in the end.
Rounding the trio out is Randy, played by another comedian, Robby Hoffman. Randy’s nerdy, deadpan jokes are amped up this season to a delightful degree.
The series is stuffed with cameos too, but they all feel earned. Ann Downs is a standout as a disillusioned sci-fi star who imparts some advice to Deborah when a fan convention turns into a face-off with her biggest supporters.
Facing her past
The series has always made space for Deborah bumping up against her past. In season five, focused on moving forward with an intense ambition. But when she’s reminded of her early days and particularly her marriage to her late husband Frank (who took credit for her breakout show), her facade cracks.
Deborah’s wisecracking intensity is a finely honed cover for the hurts that she suffered in a sexist industry. As she ages, she’s still coming up against new iterations of old pressures.
Midway through the series, a retrospective event flashes her back to the early days of her career, and the injustices meted out by both Frank and the industry. It’s poignant to see the hurt in her eyes as old memories bring her back to those days, and it reminds us that Hacks makes us giggle while tugging on the ol’ heartstrings too.
Delicious awkwardness
Hacks makes a meal of awkward situations, and this season its characters are made to squirm in the most delicious of ways. It’s notable that many of the funniest situations in this season are based around flirtations or relationships which are either misunderstood or go wrong.
This links in with how the show explores the obsequiousness and plámásing required to make it in the entertainment business. Everyone’s trying to negotiate how they’re seen, and if the attention they’re getting is from someone who’s trying to get something out of them. They’re also keen to be seen in the best light, most of all Deborah.
Deborah’s selfishness has been an important thread throughout all of Hacks’ five series. In other hands, she could look purely like a narcissist. And yes, there might be some narcissism there, which is why she is a woman who thrives in the spotlight (a joke literally made in the series). But it’s also a shield of self-protection created by a woman who came up during comedy’s most sexist era.
Deborah is a survivor. Sometimes she wants to forget this, but at other times she uses her hurts to propel her forward. Revenge continues to be a motivating force for her in this season.
It’s sad to see Hacks come to an end, but it’s a relief that it doesn’t try to change its zingy formula. We know that the season will encompass a series of big and small events that test Deborah and Ava, but that things will generally return to some form of – albeit shaky – centre.
Hacks certainly tests the gang this time around, but it also plays to its strengths. We are thrown zippy one-liners that show us exactly why Deborah Vance became a comedy sensation. We get relationships that are difficult but ultimately have a lot of deep feeling to them, and characters who are extremely flawed but who we really want to see succeed. For all of its acidity, Hacks is a comedy that goes down sweetly.
As Hacks comes to a close, we learn that Deborah and Ava are a pair that have grown, learned and blossomed together, even if they’ve found that experience exruciating at times. We can’t expect them to change too much in season five. And ultimately, why would we want them to?
Hacks is going out on its own terms, which gives it the space to bring Ava and Deborah’s stories to a close in a way that makes emotional sense. We got them at their best, we got them at their worst, but we also got a comedy show that even in its final stage feels like a modern classic. Is Hacks worth a watch? Absolutely, and always.
Hacks is streaming on NOW now and airing on Sky Atlantic weekly
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