Like the Perfect Dark Joke, the Hacks Finale Landed Just Right
· Time
Hacks was a show about legacy. That wasn’t its only subject; comedy and power and misogyny and creativity and intergenerational conflict and work ethic and, especially in its last few seasons, the debased state of the entertainment industry were all richly explored through lines. But when we met the septuagenarian comedian at its center, Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance, the most compelling problem facing her was that, for all the millions of dollars she’d earned and all the thousands of sets she’d performed, she had yet to receive the recognition she deserved as a pioneer of her art form. Decades into a Vegas residency where she recycled moldy jokes and a staple of QVC, this workhorse was seen by just about everyone besides her obsessive fans, the Little Debbies, as a hack. It seemed inevitable that this was how she would be remembered.
Visit tr-sport.click for more information.
Then she met Ava Daniels, a newly canceled young comedy writer played by then-unknown, now-indispensible comedian Hannah Einbinder. For all her zillennial naïveté and sanctimony, Ava had the creative ambition to reinvigorate Deborah’s career. From the bracingly honest special My Bad to a brief but historic late-night stint to last week’s free Central Park show, Hacks creators Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky have told the story of a groundbreaking legacy reclaimed through a collaboration between unlikely (and, despite the final season’s hilarious episode in which they pretended to be lovers so Deb could endear herself to a lesbian comic, platonic) soulmates. Thursday’s series finale—one of the best comedy finales in recent memory—not only gave this relationship a wonderful sendoff, but also confronted Deborah’s legacy with a bittersweet immediacy that challenged viewers even as it satisfied us.
If a good finale ties up a show’s plot and answers crucial questions, then a great one completes character arcs and deepens themes developed across multiple seasons, revealing the intricacy of narrative architecture too subtle to perceive from one week to the next. As the creators have said, Deborah and Ava’s ending was part of their initial pitch to HBO Max for Hacks. And so the callbacks in this episode aren’t just Easter eggs. They’re threads—or maybe, since we’re talking about Deborah Vance here, sequins—stitched together to finish the garment.
Ava as a newly minted showrunner, exuding a well-earned sense of accomplishment —Courtesy of HBO MaxThe finale opens with Ava making her pilot for an intergenerational sitcom, a reboot of Deborah’s seminal show that’s inspired by the pair’s relationship, but that is also her own, independent creation. The camera follows her from behind as she traverses the set issuing directions, giving compliments, and generally behaving like the qualified showrunner she has finally become. Aniello, who directed both bookend episodes, replicates her own long, dynamic shot from the series premiere, which tracks Deborah from the closing joke of her zillionth Vegas set, through a backstage warren of minions and admirers, to her dressing room. Both scenes close with a glimpse of their respective character’s face as a self-satisfied smile crosses her lips; these women share the supreme pleasure they take in the work of making people laugh. Ava is no mini Deb, but she is inheriting the satisfaction of finally getting to (quite literally, in her case) run her own show.
Ava has found success by helping Deborah secure her legacy as a comedian. But Ava’s flourishing is also part of Deborah’s legacy, as a boss who has (mostly) stopped exploiting her employees and started supporting them—going so far, at the end of Season 4, as to choose her writing partner over her talk show. To their credit, the Hacks creators aren’t sentimental enough to put these words in any character’s mouth, but the implication that older, wealthier, more accomplished employers have an obligation to elevate the younger, less secure people around them is there. It was gratifying to see her not only invest in Marcus’ (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) casino, but also, in the finale, give him credit at its opening for all he has done for her.
Deborah’s influence extends to Jimmy (Downs) and Kayla (Megan Stalter), too. In defending their outspoken client at great cost to their own wallets and reputations, they have evolved into two of the town’s boldest managers. Did the finale twist that had this good-guy odd couple blackmailing their corrupt nemesis, Kayla’s father (W. Earl Brown), into turning over his company to them come dangerously close to fan service? Maybe. But it also completed Hacks’ season-long argument that A.I. in entertainment is the ultimate in hackery—a tool of theft and greed for grifters that is antithetical to the hard, human work of making art. And one thing Deb, who spent decades prioritizing the accumulation of money over the refinement of her craft, has learned from collaborating with Ava is that, in the end, art matters more to her than business. (The Comeback, which also ended this spring, made some similar points about the technology and its use in Hollywood, though I’ve found Hacks to be slightly more focused in its critique.)
Megan Stalter and Paul W. Downs as a triumphant Kayla and Jimmy —Courtesy of HBO MaxThe relationship between these two women has been thoroughly, perhaps redundantly, strained and tested over the course of five seasons. Hacks has often followed the beats of a romantic comedy, sometimes to its detriment. When the show has felt stagnant, it’s been because Ava and Deborah seemed trapped in an eternal will-they-or-won’t-they, repeatedly betraying one another to advance their own careers, then reconciling because they understand each other better than anyone else ever has and need each other to do their best work. (And, of course, it is the work that matters more than anything to them.) Yet it’s through their deployment of—and divergence from—romance tropes that the creators have crafted an ideal finale.
They give us the swooning high of Deborah whisking Ava away to Paris. The trip isn’t just a rom-com cliché; it’s a callback to Ava’s confession, in the brilliant Season 3 episode “One Day,” that she’s never traveled out of the country, let alone eaten the life-changing Parisian bread that carb-cautious Deb raves about. There are some great jokes in this sequence. “Why am I in the rough draft of a car?” Ava demands, driving erratically through city traffic in a stick-shift that barely fits the two of them. She’s the comic relief at the Louvre, too, musing on the Mona Lisa: “I don’t get how she became that girl.” Deborah is more reverent in the museum, whether because, despite all her vulgar nouveau riche tastes, she’s more cultured or because she’s coming to the art from a more philosophical place.
The European romp does, after all, happen for a reason that is impossible to accept—for viewers as well as for Ava. Supposedly vanquished earlier in the season, Deborah’s cancer has returned. (My shock at this twist, predictable though it should have been in retrospect, probably says something about how effectively the creators made us root for the characters’ happiness.) Instead of subjecting herself to the horrors of late-stage treatment, Deborah has made plans to end their vacation with an assisted suicide in Zurich. Fittingly, her mortality first came to the fore in “One Day,” an episode situated at the precise midpoint of Hacks’ five-season run, when she injured herself on a disastrous hiking trip in which she and Ava got lost in the woods. “The magic of one day,” she reflected, “is that it’s all ahead of you. But for me, one day is now. Anything I wanna do, I have to do now, or else I’ll never do it. That’s the worst part of being old.”
Deborah and Ava at the Louvre —Courtesy of HBO MaxWith Ava’s help, she has checked off item after item on her list of dreams. Now, it’s those same accomplishments—particularly the ones she has amassed in a final season that opened with a shot of the Little Debbies’ shrine to an idol whose death had been erroneously reported, and that keeps returning to Deborah’s obsession with her obituary—that have prepared her to die. Having liberated herself from the silencing clutches of evil media mogul Bob Lipka (Tony Goldwyn), she would go out with full control of her legacy. But Ava won’t hear of it. So she makes her case, using everything Deborah has taught her over the years. “The opening offer is never final,” she parrots, presenting reams of medical research in a desperate effort to negotiate her mentor into committing to any amount of treatment. It doesn’t work. Deborah doesn’t want sickness to tarnish her legacy. Ava breaks down. One last time, their relationship fractures.
This time, the reconciliation is quick. Ava isn’t really angry; she’s sad and terrified to lose the most important person in her life. So they go together to the train station—a location second only to the airport in rom-com-climax resonance. Over croissants that Deborah would never touch if she planned on ever being seen in public again, they trade dark quips about her impending death. Ava: “The best part of dying is realizing how pissed people are going to be when they realize how much money you left your dogs.” Deb: “But the worst part of dying is that I don’t get to see how my corgis decide to spend that $550,000!” This makes them both cackle.
The Eiffel Tower, Vegas-style —Courtesy of HBO MaxBut when Ava makes a bathroom trip, Deb hastily scribbles something in her notepad. Why would a woman counting down the hours until her suicide still be writing down joke ideas? When Ava returns to hustle their luggage onto the train, her companion remains lost in thought. Then Deborah chases Ava down—like, yes, a rom-com boyfriend having the epiphany that he can’t get on that plane and leave this woman. But for her, the breakthrough is actually a stroke of inspiration: “The worst part of dying is, I can’t even enjoy being bone-thin. That’s the better joke!” Once again, Hacks is bringing us full circle. In the series premiere, Ava drives away from Deborah’s mansion in a rage, only to be cut off at the gate by her future boss, who has workshopped an improved version of the joke that got her canceled. “Now that’s a better joke,” Deborah proclaims. They’ve been elevating insult battles to comedy gold ever since.
“I may not have 30 years,” Deborah finally tells Ava. “But I think I have an hour.” She is not the kind of person who would put herself through the pain of cancer treatment for anyone else’s benefit, not even Ava’s. One of my favorite things about this finale is what it leaves unspoken and unfixed in two leads defined, in part, by their irreparable flaws. Neither woman has found a perfect romantic partner or made peace with her family. We’ve gotten no inkling that they ever will. Has Deborah so much as told her daughter (Kaitlin Olson) or sister (J. Smith-Cameron) about this death trip? But now that it’s occurred to her that she might get some great material out of it, she’s all in; there is nothing she wouldn’t suffer for the ecstasy of delivering a killer one-liner, of adding to her legacy a special that gets the last laugh on mortality. And she trusts Ava to help her do it. They love each other, but the work they do together will always be a third presence in their relationship. So of course it’s present in Hacks’ very last scene, as Deborah and Ava approach that lovers’ landmark, the Eiffel Tower—and then there’s a cut to the women together under its replica in Deborah’s beloved Vegas—cracking each other up about cancer.