When Season Three of Hacks begins, legendary comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) is at an improbable professional apex. Now in her 70s, she has become more popular and revered than ever, thanks to the acclaimed, deeply personal comedy special she and her writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) put together in the Max comedy’s second season. Where once, Deborah had to worry about being yesterday’s news, now she is in constant demand, her every appearance an event.
There is, she soon discovers, a downside to being bigger than ever: Her reputation has grown to such an absurd degree that her material barely seems to matter anymore. When she does a surprise appearance at a friend’s comedy show so she can try out new material, she finds the audience laughs at everything she does or says — often most loudly for things not even intended as jokes — to the point where she gives up and just lets the crowd chant her name for a while.
While Hacks has perhaps not conjured up that overwhelming level of good will, it’s among the most beloved comedies in recent years. Smart has two Emmys for the role already. Critics love it. Regular viewers tend to light up when you mention its name. The series, unlike its heroine, can’t generate laughs just by doing nothing — especially because, despite its setting in the comedy world, it’s always been more of a vibes show than a relentless gut buster. But if the Hacks creators wanted to coast for a year and replay the same story and character beats over and over, knowing how much residual affection the audience had for Deborah, Ava, and the rest of the gang, they could.
Instead, Deborah spends the new season trying something very ambitious, by pursuing the same late night talk show host job she was denied at the start of her career. And in chronicling Deborah’s quest for her professional holy grail, Hacks finds some interesting and entertaining new dynamics between the duo at the heart of the series.
As you might recall — but probably not, because this is yet another streaming show returning after a multi-year break — the second season concluded with Deborah firing Ava, not as a punishment, but to encourage her sidekick to explore other opportunities and establish an identity away from her. As Season Three begins, Ava has found a successful niche as a writer on a Last Week Tonight-esque topical comedy show, and things are going well with actress girlfriend Ruby (Lorenza Izzo) now that Ava has grown up ever so slightly, and no longer has to be at Deborah’s beck and call. But she still feels wounded by how abruptly Deborah cut her loose, and the two haven’t even exchanged texts in months when they run into each other at an event in the first episode.
That period of estrangement, plus the integral role Ava played in Deborah’s huge professional reinvention, shifts the power balance between the two women in ways that feel necessary by this point. Yes, Deborah is infinitely richer, more famous, more polished, and more self-confident, but she also can’t dismiss Ava as a talking monkey anymore. They’re not exactly friends, because Deborah is incapable of opening herself up to that degree. But they know one another better than anyone else in the world does, and they have helped each other through some major issues. So when the late night job opens up, of course Ava is the person Deborah trusts most to help, and of course Ava desperately wants to see her get it.
But the friction between them hasn’t so much evaporated as evolved. The two still regularly swap insults — Ava mocks a yellow gown Deborah wants to wear to an awards ceremony as “giving Big Bird,” prompting Deborah to reply, “You dress like you’re about to have lunch on a steel girder” — but it no longer feels like Deborah is punching down at Ava. As Ava puts it, while insisting that Deborah stop making jokes about the size of Ava’s hands, “This isn’t the same as before.” (Deborah, of course, agrees to this demand and then immediately finds a loophole.)
We also see the ways in which each has been changed for the better through their relationship. In one episode, a college campus visit(*) threatens to go awry when a supercut of racist jokes in Deborah’s old act goes viral. But rather than playing out as some tired screed against cancel culture, we instead see that Deborah has unwittingly learned a thing or three from being around her more progressive partner in comedy(**). And Ava has been around Deborah long enough that she’s less of an exposed nerve than before — which means she only makes an ass of herself about half the time, rather than most of the time.
(*) The timing of doing a story about a campus protest — even a relatively mild one like this — is unfortunate, given what’s playing out at Columbia and elsewhere. There’s also a scene in another episode where Deborah begins doing comedy at an AA meeting where she’s meant to be celebrating the five year sobriety anniversary of her daughter DJ (Kaitlin Olson), which now plays as ripping off the recent Curb Your Enthusiasm subplot about Richard Lewis using his own 12-step meetings to workshop his act.
(**) The writers are smart to frequently present Ava as being high on her own supply. When she sees, for instance, that Tom Cruise has sent Deborah one of his famous coconut cakes, Ava claims that she doesn’t like Cruise and thinks that “leading man culture is toxic,” then suggests she wants to find out what the cake tastes like “strictly from an anthropological standpoint.”
The interplay between the characters, and between Smart and Einbinder, remains so strong that it casts a huge shadow over everyone else. The supporting cast — including co-creator Paul W. Downs as Deborah and Ava’s manager Jimmy, Megan Stalter as Jimmy’s dangerously unqualified assistant Kayla, and Carl Clemons-Hopkins as the long-suffering CEO of Deborah’s merchandising empire — continues to be appealing(*), but it’s hard not to want the action to return to the leads as soon as possible. Lots of promising guest stars cycle through the season — Stephen Tobolowsky as a comedian from Deborah’s generation, Helen Hunt and Tony Goldwyn as network executives considering Deborah for the hosting job, Christina Hendricks as a power lesbian intrigued by Ava — but tend to get less to do than you’d hope. (Hendricks gets the single funniest scene of any of them, but is only in one episode.) As Deborah’s long-estranged sister Kathy, J. Smith-Cameron (replacing Linda Purl, who played Kathy in Season One) has the meatiest role, though it’s more on the dramatic side, rather than exploiting the comedy chops she displayed so often on Succession.
(*) Downs has a particularly amusing running gag where Jimmy keeps telling Ava about all the IP-driven projects she should try to get hired to write, like a bisexual reboot of Gumby. “He bends both ways,” Jimmy explains. The working title: Gumbi.
Would a septuagenarian actually get a shot at hosting a talk show like this? Well, the broadcast networks’ audience is aging rapidly, and as Jimmy points out to a skeptical executive, Deborah is “the queen of people who can’t figure out their Internet.” Yet the real series about her has been thriving on a streaming service, and it continues to do so, without resting on its laurels like it so easily could.
The first two episodes of Hacks Season Three are now streaming on Max, with two episodes apiece debuting each Thursday, before the finale on May 30. I’ve seen all nine episodes.
