How <em>Hacks</em> Redefined Greatness
· The Atlantic
The first time we ever see Deborah Vance, she’s onstage at her Vegas residency, delivering desultory jokes about an unappealing lover while wearing a jacket so bedazzled it seems to have its own energy field. The routine itself is much duller—Deborah (played by Jean Smart), when asked by her partner if she’s close to orgasm, screeches that the only thing she’s “close” to is late-onset lesbianism—but then we follow her offstage, majestic and unfussed, gliding serenely though chitchat with stagehands and showgirls. Only when she pauses in front of her illuminated mirror do we finally see her face, perfectly framed in the glow of the bulbs.
Late in her career of public flameouts and hard-fought comebacks, Deborah is as pampered as an empress and thoroughly numbed by complacency. When her manager, Jimmy (Paul W. Downs), suggests pairing her with Ava (Hannah Einbinder), a 25-year-old TV writer, to spark some fresher punch lines, the odd-couple setup ignites a question Hacks has been preoccupied with ever since: What does it mean to be a truly great artist? And can Deborah, a comedian who’s long excelled at making herself the punch line, kick-start her secret creative ambitions and secure her spot in comedy’s pantheon?
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This is by no means all that Hacks has considered. During its five seasons, the HBO comedy has veered joyfully between different modes: generational comedy, acute Hollywood satire, whatever encapsulates the double act of straitlaced Jimmy and his unhinged assistant, Kayla (Meg Stalter). In its third season, Hacks dug into the tortured history of women on late-night television, scratching to gain access to a world that never wanted them. Late in Season 4, Deborah quits her late-night-host job—the gig of a lifetime—only to be stymied by an 18-month noncompete contract that left her doing translated shows at a casino resort in Singapore, and falling into resigned dejection. But after a faulty TMZ report declares Deborah dead, and she finds her obituaries to be wholly unsatisfying, she resolves to return to the United States and finally do something to secure her legacy.
Hacks’ fifth and final season, which ends tonight, has danced around different visions of what that something might be, in ebullient and anarchic ways. Deborah becomes hell-bent on reaching EGOT status, recruiting her friend Tony Kushner (playing himself) to help write her memoir so she can record the audiobook. After she finds his process too slow, she determines through data analysis that the easiest path to win a Grammy is in the category of Regional Mexican Music Album (Including Tejano) category, then jumps into the studio with a rhinestone-studded hat, maracas, and boundless enthusiasm. She changes course again—“What is the biggest achievement for a comedian?” Ava asks her; “Beating a rape trial?” Deborah replies—and resolves to do a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden on the earliest date her noncompete expires, which happens to be September 11.
The paradox of Hacks, though, is that Deborah’s comedy has never really been the show’s selling point. Onstage, she can be riotous, irreverent, outrageous, but she’s rarely unguarded or unpredictable. Smart endows Deborah with all the force and presence of a lifelong performer, but saves the core of the character for her offstage scenes, when the emotional compromises of a life spent chasing a dream come to the fore. In the Season 2 episode “Retired,” Deborah and Ava head to a small gig at a county fair, where they encounter Susan, an old acquaintance and retired comedian whom Deborah thinks she drove out of the business after sabotaging her during a showcase. But Susan tells her it isn’t true—she retired after seeing Deborah neglect her daughter while out on tour. “You were completely devoted to your work. You had to be! You were like a shark,” Susan says. Facing someone else’s unmistakable pity, Deborah wilts, but doesn’t collapse. “I don’t want to stop,” she says to Ava later. “I like the work.” She’s spent her life with a single, relentless focus, and she isn’t sorry for it. How many others can say the same?
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Sacrifice can be its own legacy, but in this season, Hacks has become much more convinced that the real measure of a great artist isn’t how many tickets they sell, or how many vacation homes they can buy after selling out, or what kind of work they leave behind. Rather, it’s what attainments and ambitions they can manage to pass on and foster in other people. When Hacks began, Deborah was calcified by her own fame and isolation; her relationships were hierarchical, and her endeavors were fundamentally selfish. But by the Season 5 episode “The Garden,” everything has flipped. She’s helping Marcus, her former employee, with his business dream; she’s hiring Marty, a former nemesis, to help run the floor; she’s inspired Ava to come up with her own pilot, a reboot of Deborah’s ’70s sitcom based on their own relationship. Deborah is much too unsentimental to opine on what any of this means, so Hacks lets Jimmy say it, when he explains to Kayla why he’s sacrificing his dreams of running an agency to keep his clients on stable ground: “My talent is helping talent. When they win, I feel like I won.”
This kind of altruistic vision is daring for a comedy about comedy, particularly in a moment when entertainment companies are consolidating, technology is ruthlessly eliminating jobs, and AI is redefining the creative process. The show is arguing that the work itself is not that important, and perhaps even fundamentally meaningless, without all the people who go into making it. Maybe a robot can manage to write a good joke, but to what end? “All I’m trying to do is make your life easier,” the smarmy boss behind an AI company called Quikscribbl tells Deborah midway through Season 5, when he tries to license her work. “But it shouldn’t be,” she replies, adding, “Art is only art because of the humanity behind it.”
I want to emphasize that Hacks is not a dreary or didactic show. No series so intent on skewering all its characters can get away with unbridled sincerity. Both Deborah and Ava have been self-serving and even ruthless in the past as they try to finesse what combination of truth, self-deprecation, connection, and audacity goes into a really good joke. But in the end, that specific alchemy matters less than what it generates. In the penultimate episode, Deborah’s Madison Square Garden show flunks after another nemesis is revealed to have bought up the tickets in order to deprive her of an audience. She decides to put on a free performance in Central Park, and against all odds is able to swing it, not because of her clout, but because of her relationships. And right as she arrives onstage to begin her set—with a land acknowledgment, no less—right as we begin to wonder whether Deborah and Ava’s partnership has finally yielded the kind of punchy but meaningful satire both have always dreamed of pulling off for an audience, the episode ends.