Emmy-winning comedy Hacks looks to make a mark in its final season
The fifth and final season of Hacks is underway, closing the book on the story of veteran standup comic Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her partner/protégé Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) — and, to paraphrase the Grateful Dead, what a long, strange trip it’s been. Throughout the course of their relationship, the two women have endured lawsuits, extortion and betrayal — and that’s just the damage they’ve inflicted on each other.
As viewers will recall, Deborah finally landed her dream job, hosting her own late-night show, only to be blackmailed by Ava into giving her the head writer position. That set up a fierce power struggle between the two women that ended with Deborah refusing the network’s ultimatum to fire Ava, instead blowing it all up in a scorched-earth on-air resignation. “I was worried that people would hate me,” Smart says of Deborah’s nastiness toward Ava in season four, “but I think because they cared so much about the relationship, it was like they were willing to go anywhere with us, which was really wonderful. But season five, we get to get back to being profoundly silly, which is really, really fun.”
That silliness permeates the season, which includes AI, an autograph convention, The Amazing Race, a sex worker who aspires to be a magician, a very weird weekend in Montecito, and a plan to reboot the 1970s-era sitcom that made Deborah a star, Who’s Making Dinner.
“It’s also nice that we were able to kind of be on the same team,” adds Einbinder, referencing Ava and Deborah finally burying their respective hatchets in the swan-song season. “I think that that’s so fun for us. And of course, we have our sparring throughout, which we also enjoy just as much. It’s so nice for us to be working towards the same goal. And personally, I’m always just so excited about the opportunities and challenges that they present me with dramatically and comedically, like I always know that I’m going to be pushed to, like, a new height in terms of performance and it is so invigorating and exciting and just the best feeling you can have as a performer.”
When the season begins, Deborah has just returned from performing in Asia (thanks to her inability to perform in North America due to her talk show contract’s non-compete clause), amid false reports that she’s dead. Not surprisingly, reading the obituaries written about her — and the misinformation contained within — jars her considerably. “I think it really puts into focus, like, ‘OK, if this is what they’re saying abut me, what do I want this to say about me? And how do I want to be presented to the world next time this happens?” says Hacks co-creator Lucia Aniello. “And so, it really puts the kind of idea of legacy and how to live a life and how you want to live a life really into focus for her. And at first, she might have certain ideas about it, but I think as the season progresses, we kind of, like, explore a lot of different ways that she wants to have the relationships she wants to have, the lasting legacy she wants to have for Las Vegas, and for her work as well. And so, I think that’s something that evolves as the season goes on.”
Meanwhile, the new agency launched by Jimmy (Paul W. Downs, who is also the series’ co-creator) and Kayla (Megan Stalter), aided by quirky assistant Randi (Robby Hoffman), experiences growing pains, while Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) teams up with Deborah for an intriguing — albeit costly — new business venture, with the assistance of her personal assistant Damien (Mark Indelicato) and estate manager Josefina (Rose Abdoo).
Expect to see plenty of familiar faces from past seasons, including cutthroat studio exec Bob Lipka (Tony Goldwyn), Palmetto Casino CEO Marty (Christopher McDonald), blackjack dealer Kiki (Poppy Liu), unhinged Las Vegas mayor Jo Pezzimenti (Lauren Weedman) and Deborah’s troubled daughter DJ Vance (Kaitlin Olson), who drags her mom into the wild world of reality TV. Also appearing as guest stars in the fifth season are Ann Dowd (The Handmaid’s Tale), Cherry Jones (Succession) and Leslie Bibb (The White Lotus).
When the series finale rolls around, Smart promises that viewers will be just as surprised by how Hacks wraps up as she was when she found out. “And just to be extra mysterious, I have never asked them how the series was going to end from the day we met until the finale. And I didn’t really have an idea of how it would end,” Smart says. “I wanted to be surprised. I’ve loved being surprised every episode for all these years. But when they first talked to me about how it was going to end I was not sure I was real happy about it. But I said, ‘Hey, you know, I trust you guys, I always have, it always turns out great,’ and it did. And now I think it’s kind of perfect. It’s really great, it’s truly great.”
Hacks, streaming Thursdays on Crave