Our fear of the old boys’ club must be unlearned. What reads like political sloganeering is merely a reality-based statement. If a system favoring one gender at every turn is the one that raises you, you either figure out how to game that system in your favor or become what’s expected of you and make do with the proffered scraps.
This is what Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) internalizes in “Hacks,” although the portions she carved from her Hollywood exile are anything but meager. All unwritten but commonly understood laws have loopholes, a lesson Deborah’s protégé Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) learns from Deborah before teaching her a few supplementary lessons. Deborah rolled the dice on Ava, a nobody who revives the veteran comedian’s stagnant career. Yet at every turn, Deborah finds some excuse to backstab Ava, allegedly out of some version of respect, and Ava retaliates by sabotaging herself and her boss.
Show business is fear-driven, and that fuels Deborah and Ava’s rashest decisions more than anything else.
The third season’s close is, therefore, equally shocking and inevitable. When Ava’s modern comedic instincts propel Deborah into the host chair of broadcast’s biggest legacy late-night show, the young writer assumes her boat will rise too. But fear and those unspoken rules push Deborah to deny Ava the job she deserves. It’s not her, Deborah flimsily claims; it’s just that audiences demand stability, and the man who was the previous host’s head writer can provide it.
So Ava pulls another time-honored Hollywood tactic, dangling Deborah’s dirty secret of having slept with the head of the network as leverage to secure the position that she deserves.
Truly, she has learned her greatest showbiz tricks from the master — Deborah is never above a little extortion to achieve her goals. But to what end? At some point, “Hacks” creators Paul W. Downs, Lucia Aniello and Jen Statsky are obligated to answer that question, and it looks like we’ve finally arrived there.
That may not be apparent in the opening moments of the fourth season. The action picks up from that double-cross, with the impossible-to-shock Deborah stunned and angry but playing along with Ava’s gambit while her overlords are watching. Otherwise, she hazes Ava in hilariously cruel ways.
Show business is fear-driven, and that fuels Deborah and Ava’s rashest decisions more than anything else. That the industry is also ruled by men isn’t a coincidence. Indeed, Deborah became a hard-driving force by mimicking the most ruthless of them. Those who love and know Deborah best are also mortally afraid of her. Making it into Deborah Vance’s inner circle is a mark of loyalty and one’s ability to survive her moods.
Hannah Einbinder and Jean Smart in “Hacks” (Courtesy of Max). Despite all this, somehow, she and Ava manage to assemble a writers’ room, but not before Deborah tests her old school Las Vegas habits on a new generation of comics unaccustomed to the sexist hedonism that informs her hard-boiled humor. Ava and Deborah are surrounded by men who expect them to fail (including Jimmy Kimmel, who takes a few jabs at Deborah in a cameo) and hounded by a woman, Helen Hunt’s network executive Winnie Landell, doing her male superiors’ bidding. After all, Deborah and Ava’s history-making hires are directly tied to her keeping her job.
“Hacks” retains its sharpness by defying reflexive expectations of cause and effect, especially when it comes to gendered considerations of power.
Eventually, their sniping forces the network to bring in an HR representative to babysit Ava and Deborah. Luckily for us, that monitor is played by Michaela Watkins, who is unmatched in the realm of manufactured cluelessness for stage and screen.
However hateful Ava and Deborah may behave toward each other, their scorn carries an underlayer of heartbreak, reminding us of the profound, twisted love beneath their venom. That emotional depth lifts each scene, even the darkest— just as the supergroup of talent flanking Smart and Einbinder does. Along with Watkins, the new season introduces the loopy Robby Hoffman into the oddball galaxy forming around Jimmy LuSaque Jr. (Downs) and his loyal barnacle, Kayla Schaefer (the always delightful Meg Stalter).
While Ava and Deborah are clawing at each other, Jimmy and Kayla strive to emerge from their fathers’ shadows. This is particularly challenging for Kayla since her daddy is still alive and heads the rival management firm she and Jimmy abandoned to hang out their own shingle. But in backing Deborah and Ava, they’ve hitched themselves to winners – and like their biggest clients, they too are scrambling to figure out what to do next.
“Hacks” retains its sharpness by defying reflexive expectations of cause and effect, especially when it comes to gendered considerations of power. Most of Deborah’s career is a defiant reaction to men who either precipitated her fall or reveled in it, barring her participation in all the insular friendship networks that could have eased her path back to the spotlight. At night, hungry coyotes yap and howl beyond the walls of Deborah’s ample, manicured yard. This recurring motif may or may not be an apt metaphor for her outlook on life – predators are always waiting to pounce on what’s hers.
But that’s Jimmy’s lot too, which he resists taking out on Kayla by shooting down her strange but often inspired ideas as they build a client base from scratch.
Megan Stalter and Paul W. Downs in “Hacks” (Courtesy of Max)Downs received his first Emmy nomination for his portrayal of Jimmy in 2024, and his scene partnership with Stalter should earn him another. Smart and Einbinder gain the most attention for their two-handers in this show, but this season, Downs shows us new layers of sensitivity and forbearance even as Kayla continues to test Jimmy’s boundaries. Stalter’s performance has also matured, but not enough to prevent Kayla from being one of the funniest things about TV’s best comedy.
The pointed humor and soulful asides that make “Hacks” addictive remain largely undiluted four seasons in. Viewers have come to expect the friend/foe interplay between Deborah and Ava – and Jimmy and Kayla, to a lesser degree—but the writers prevent it from becoming stale by mapping a way beyond this bitter cycle. For these two, success depends on finding the line between what the genre demands and what their artistic integrity will bear.
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Still, Hollywood and America are slow to change and quick to retreat from progress. Ava constantly gains fresh insights into what that means, as well as a new perspective on Deborah’s flintiness once she gets a bitter taste of what it takes to be in charge. Where past seasons favored Smart’s emotional dexterity, the fourth provides ample opportunities for Einbinder to travel new highs and lows as Ava balances the burden of a high-pressure job and a barely-existent life she’s never truly examined.
As other HBO titles show us, claiming the throne ends one battle and ignites the war to keep it. Moving its characters through that pain allows “Hacks” to theorize what can exist beyond fear, failure, or irrelevance without entirely divorcing the characters from the laws of show business gravity, the physics that held Deborah in place.
Appropriately, Deborah receives her best advice about overcoming fear from the iconic Carol Burnett, appearing in the latest season’s fourth episode: Pick one person in the audience, Burnett tells Deborah, and do the show just for them. That’s what made “Hacks” extraordinary in the first place. Before Deborah and Ava aided and betrayed each other in so many ways, they were each other’s audience of one – a pair of very different women reminding each other that the greatest laughter is as fearless and rule-breaking as this show can be in its best moments.
“Hacks” premieres with two episodes at 6 p.m. PT/ 9 p.m. ET Thursday, April 10 on Max.
