Review: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc on ”Hacks”

Deborah Vance and Ava Daniels each feels she is doing the other a favor in “Hacks,” a rare show that begins to consider the pleasures women experience in their own minds

Photograph by Jake Giles Netter/Max

Hacks, the much-gushed-about and awarded comedy series, is flying down the LA freeway into its fourth season. If chiffon scarves ever existed for its original drivers, they were tossed into the desert on the way from Las Vegas. But Vegas is the hometown here—this is one of the show’s many pleasures—and what happened in Vegas does not get left behind.

When we first meet Deborah Vance (played by Jean Smart, who received two Emmys for the role), she is coasting along in a situation much like Joan Rivers’—once a pioneer, now a legend; a workaholic joke-machine approaching the 2500th performance of her Las Vegas residency while plugging every next product that will keep expanding her QVC brand. Private jet, flashy clothes, antiques in the staffed mansion. No man, with a grown daughter who is no longer an active addict. Deborah’s neither lonely nor unhappy, but she’s about to become a cartoon.

Ava Daniels (played by the stand-up Hannah Einbinder), a talented Gen X comedy writer, has been dispatched by their shared agent to help upgrade Deborah: it’s a blind date neither knows they are on. Ava has been fired from her LA writing job for an offending tweet she doubled down on, one of the few early indicators of which Deborah would approve—if the tweet had been funny. Deborah and Ava each feels she is doing the other a favor, which is to say, both have their blind spots. Luckily, because they are comedians, blind spots are their stock in trade.

The intergenerational creative work partnership holds much that such a romance could contain. Ava is translucent, her face and body registering all the substance that Deborah has discarded on her way to the bank—moral observation, for example. Self-interrogation. Political anxiety. There’s plenty more that Deborah never knew—namely, about Ava’s generation—and plenty Ava must encounter, and we get to watch as each grows, resists, and learns. This is more than a little bit exciting to witness, especially as a woman who has spent more years than she can justify in the dark spaces of comedy clubs.

Ava will help Deborah reclaim her most vital asset as a comic: her voice, and the confidence that it can contain more of her complex experience. Since we are in the world of show business, the partnership has a product. Since we are watching a more honest show about show business, the friendships that Hollywood grants are fraught. Are they all in the family? Questions abound.

What Hacks does artfully, through the active and renegade minds of these women, hacks only pretend to do.

The show largely dispenses with the problem of audience. For the most part—aside from those of us streaming it on HBO Max, of course—Deborah and Ava’s audience is each other. It could hardly be an oversight in a show this tight that the Deborah Vance’s nominal audience comes to us in the form of fans.

Hack comics appeal to the lowest common denominator. Point of view is broadened for comfort or convenience. The audience is let off the hook. Hack jokes are designed to make the audience feel smarter than they are, more inside. Quality comedy, in my experience, feels more dynamic. It surprises the audience (what is laughter but surprise?), which requires the comedian to have looked inward as much as outward in finding their funny, then to search for ways to share that connection with a crowd. Fans for stand-ups can become problematic—they know too much, or at least think they do. They come with an expectation that, as Deborah’s twelve-stepping daughter DJ, played by the fabulous Kaitlin Olson, might say, “is a resentment waiting to happen.” How can a comedian stay the course of their own delight, and continue to unearth it, rather than respond to what the audience demands? Deborah’s fans make the performance scenes in Hacks less funny than the off-stage conversations. It’s wonderfully tricky business that those conversations are about all that goes into creating that material.

The first conversation, when Deborah and Ava meet in the pilot, becomes a smackdown. Politeness turns into insult, and they are quick and dirty. Their preliminary courtesy is the extent of the small talk between them until season three, when we rejoin them in Los Angeles, both back in the major leagues of the game. The power of the sparks between them has fueled their luck. Each is about to get picked up for her second act: Deborah, who is in the running as host for The Late Show, a dream that was stolen from her by a jealous husband, and Ava, who is writing for a prestige comedy news show, making jokes about “things that matter.”

Someday, perhaps, there will be shows that reveal the pleasures women experience in the company of their own minds. Hacks is not a bridge to that. It’s much too good, but it’s still a stepping stone. I don’t watch enough TV so, maybe, there’s already a cobblestone road of shows about women’s joy in solitude. But I caught a glimpse of that future in the “New Eyes” episode of season one, when Deborah goes to The Seven Graces Surgical Center and Luxury Aftercare for her fourth or fifth—she can’t recall—“refresh” of her face. (The detail isn’t something Deborah would forget. She is a comedian, after all, even if she is a fictional one. The number matters. Asses in seats, and calendar dates, of course, but also, when it becomes a bit, which number is funnier is as important as a consonant.)

Post-op qualifies as a vacation for Deborah. As she recovers, Ava nurses her, and in their downtime, she learns about a major misperception about Deborah’s past. The revelation reframes Ava’s understanding of life’s how lemons become lemonade. Stand-up is the art of such constant reckonings.

Then Ava suddenly becomes ill, and their roles reverse. The reciprocity is the gasoline in the car they are driving. By placing creative collaboration at its center, Hacks right-sizes the TV conversation about women’s experience by relegating well-trodden topics to the service road. The requirements and damages of patriarchy aren’t treated as plot points, or as revelations, but rather as the context in which we survive, and bang around in, and, sometimes, thrive. Deborah has pushed through the unfairness of the misogyny and sexism she’s experienced, but it has changed her relationship to her own truth, and Ava reconfigures her arrangement with the story. The final episode of season three puts the gas pedal down on this dynamic and it will be fun to see who makes it home!

Being able to speak freely and fully, to one other person, is a rare thing—on screen or off.

I am relieved to watch a show about women who don’t obsess about whether or not they are likable, who dress for what’s required of the work, and may or may not enjoy it, but get a kick out of others’ assumptions. I also like that Deborah’s love for Ava isn’t selfless. It’s part of her practicality. She is unstoppable, but her curiosity, not just her ambition, drives her. Work, too, is a blind spot, and one that has a particularly American hue.

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Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is a journalist who is finishing a book for Random House about death and comedy.

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