The Complex Relationships in ‘Hacks’—and the Loneliness Deborah Still Finds at the Top
Season 3 of ‘Hacks’ ends with epiphanies, blackmail, and new layers to already challenging relationships. But while some characters are finally finding themselves, others are discovering just how much they’ve given up for success.
A few years ago, the creators of the buddy-comic project that would become Hacks called Kaitlin Olson to discuss a role they’d written with her in mind. “They basically described it as, like, a middle-aged angsty teenager, which I thought was so funny,” remembers Olson, speaking by phone last week. “Characters who are desperately trying to prove their worth when they don’t really have a lot of—there’s not a lot of substance there is just so funny.” She’s correct: Olson’s portrayal of DJ, the spoiled celeb’s kid (with a heart of gold!) she has played over three seasons of Hacks, is a riot—and also a rumination on all the ways hurt people hurt people.
Moving through her days with the earned weariness of an adult woman but also the messy energy of an adolescent, DJ peddles fugly jewelry, dines on buttered noodles like a bambino, stains crisp linens with self-tanner, and sits with a slump that strikes pure horror into her judgmental boomer mother. “She’s just forever stuck trying to get her mom’s attention,” says Olson, “and there’s something so tragic and sad and funny about that at the same time.” Of all of DJ’s issues, the biggest and most privileged one—the one that has warped her into a sort of frazzled, bedazzled faildaughter over the years—is that her mother is no ordinary judgmental boomer mother. She is Deborah Vance, the household-name stand-up legend and Hacks main character played with vicious vim by Jean Smart.
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A stone-cold celebrity who has made a fortune lifting spirits, Deborah has also trampled on many souls. She is wealthy beyond belief yet also bitter; narcissistic enough to name her daughter Deborah Vance Jr. yet also self-loathing enough to have mostly frozen the poor girl out. She traffics in belly laughs but transacts in gut punches. She is beloved by the people who don’t know her at all and is indifferent toward the ones who do. She has an entourage of beleaguered assistants, a penchant for banishing traitors (such as her little sister) from her life, and a superpower that is, like all good superpowers, both mighty and a real nexus of chaos: She can never turn off being on.
Deborah creates a scene wherever she goes. She butters up broadcasting bigwigs, charms QVC audiences, and fits right in at a frat party. She may be snobby about a lot of things, but venue isn’t one of them: Any grimy, small-town chuckle hut will do the trick, as will any tee box at a hoity-toity golf club. She can’t even resist cracking a few jokes during her own daughter’s Narcotics Anonymous five-year chip ceremony. Anything can become a functional performance space if you want it—“it” being attention—badly enough. And oh, does Deborah ever want it. She is a woman who can bring down the house, but she doesn’t always care to read the room.
“Well, that was fun!” Deborah says brightly to DJ in Season 3’s third episode, as they leave the support group meeting where she has just riffed on, among other things, her daughter’s history with roadside sobriety tests. “I should be coming to these things more often!”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” DJ fumes. “All you had to do was focus on me for two minutes, and you had to tell your shitty jokes.”
Deborah is taken aback: “Well, to be fair,” she says, “all the jokes were about you!”
With a love language like this, who needs haters? With a mom like this, who wouldn’t grow up to be an angsty, perpetual teen? “I think,” Olson says, being generous, “that, inadvertently, something Deborah has done is just focus so much on herself and her own success and her own growth and her own career that she forgot to give her own daughter any approval.”
Hacks is a series that celebrates and scrutinizes what it means—and what it takes, and whom it costs—to be professionally, successfully funny. It is a show about show business in which attention is traded like a currency, hoarded and dangled and withheld. And in Season 3, just as Deborah finally reaches the heights she always felt she deserved, Hacks explores the loneliness she’s created for herself at the top.
DJ is just one of the many people caught in Deborah’s orbit who are desperate to be appreciated, or even just noticed, by the magnetic star. Deborah’s hyper-competent manager, Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins), is frustrated that he’s never quite top of mind. Her estranged sister, Kathy (J. Smith-Cameron), has had enough of Deborah’s grudges and wants to be seen and heard. Marty Ghilain (Christopher McDonald), Deborah’s once-and-future paramour/frenemy/industry impresario/dance partner/golf pal, may have a lot of outward swagger (and a conveniently overseas fiancée), but you only need to watch his face fall when Deborah turns her attention to another man’s swing to know that he’s clearly a simp on the inside. “I think I’m Deborah’s biggest champion,” McDonald tells me over Zoom about his character. “She’s got veins of steel, and she can really bring it.” (Marty goes far back enough with Deborah that he probably knows her better than anyone save for Josefina, her domestic consigliere.)
And then there is Ava Daniels (played by Hannah Einbinder), the fresh, young writer whose tumultuous and ambitious comedic collaboration with Deborah has formed the beating, breaking heart of the show since its very first episode. The unlikely pair bicker and undermine, telling lies and—worse—threatening each other with the cold, hard truth. They share the close quarters of a tour bus and the same sense of humor. They quarrel like competitors and giggle like lovers and go shopping like a mom with a tween. In one episode, they send and receive surreptitious text messages with an almost torrid excitement. In another, they try to go on a power walk in the woods and wind up lost, hobbling, and ranting about mortality, as if they’re two crotchety old men at Del Boca Vista. (Ava asks whether Deborah ever gets lonely at one point as they wait to be rescued. “Maybe sometimes, when I open a bottle of Krug,” Deborah finally admits. “You know, can’t recork champagne.”)
They hyper-fixate on each other while ignoring or insulting their loved ones. They break up and bitch and reunite and get revenge. At the end of Season 1, an immature Ava leaks damaging information about Deborah; at the end of Season 2, a callous Deborah blindsides Ava by sending her packing just as their hard work is starting to pay off. “When [Deborah] was like, I want you to go get your freedom,” McDonald recalls about watching that season’s finale, “like, tears were shooting down my face.”
But early in Season 3, when Ava’s hot, professionally ascendant, and very patient Hollywood star girlfriend, Ruby, finds out that Ava and Deborah have been back in touch, she can’t believe what she’s hearing. “You’re canceling our plans to work with someone who was borderline abusive?!” Ruby screams. “She slapped you! She sued you! You said she was toxic, Ava!”
“The power in their relationship, or the friendship in their relationship—those things are constantly changing,” says Hacks cocreator and director Lucia Aniello over Zoom. “And so I think as it changes, we all can point to something to be like, that feels mother-daughter, or that feels mentor-mentee, or that feels more like a romantic thing.” Ultimately, though, what it comes down to is an inspiration thing.
Whether they like it or not, Deborah and Ava have the kind of peculiar, particular alchemy that many artists spend their entire lives looking for. Their repartee is so seamless that even their insults complement each other. Already, their work has yielded legit results and could write a new chapter in comedy history. That is, if it doesn’t drive them up the wall first—or tear them right apart. As in seasons past, this year’s Hacks finale, “Bulletproof,” finds discord in the jaws of happily ever after for Deborah and Ava. The episode ends with a snub, a threat, and a stare-down, plus a sense that perhaps there’s a new change at hand, that the student has become the master.
When Smart and Einbinder show up on my Zoom screen in April during the end of a long virtual Hacks press day, they are not only sitting in the same room, they are positively snuggling: their heads nested together and their arms and hands intertwined. (“They’re both really cold,” jokes Aniello when I describe this scene later. “They have low body temperature.”) It is a fitting sight, knowing the extent to which the two leads have leaned on each other over the years.
“We’ve been through a tremendous amount as a crew and cast,” says Jen Statsky, another of the show’s cocreators. When Einbinder signed on to Hacks, she had done stand-up—and had a famous comedian mom of her own—but had almost no acting experience. While Smart was shooting the first season of the show, her husband passed away unexpectedly. Production on Season 3 had to be delayed twice: once because Smart needed heart surgery (she felt strange after shooting a scene involving a keg stand, motivating her to see a doctor) and again because of the Writers Guild strike. “They’ve grown really close,” says Statsky of Smart and Einbinder. “When we started this show, we knew that it lived or died by the relationship between these two characters. And I think we knew, but we didn’t quite know, how much the relationship between the actors would only enhance it and bring it more to life.”
Over Zoom, the two talk about the surprise baby shower that Smart held for Poppy Liu, who plays Kiki, the only character in Deborah’s world who is skilled at drawing boundaries. They rave about Conan O’Brien, whom they recently hung out with at South by Southwest—“He’s a sweetie,” says Smart, “and he loves the show!”—and about the ad-lib work of Hacks guest star Jane Adams, who plays Ava’s widowed mother, Nina. “She just goes,” marvels Smart. “They can’t call cut,” Einbinder adds, “because they’re breathlessly laughing.” They talk about an episode from this season called “One Day,” the one with the forested ramble gone awry, which positions Deborah to “kind of let down her guard,” Smart says, “and say some really, really deeply personal things that she wouldn’t say probably to anyone else except Ava—about her own mortality and how she feels about getting older.”
Smart notes that on the day they filmed that episode, she thought it would be freezing cold. “So I dressed like I was going to the Arctic,” she says, “and I was sweltering.”
“You just can’t win,” Einbinder deadpans. I point out that it must not have helped matters that Deborah wears a thick pair of 50-plus-UPF gloves in the episode to ward off any sun damage.
Remembering the scene, Smart and Einbinder spontaneously trill a singsong line of Deborah’s— “There’s no such thing as a hand job!”—at the same time.
“Sorry,” Einbinder says. “We just kind of like to say things like that in unison whenever we can.”
I ask if they’ve learned any lessons from the other. “Like Deborah and Ava,” Smart begins, nodding toward Einbinder, “I have to admit that she’s a little bit of my work counselor. We’ve had some very interesting, interesting, long, deep conversations.”
“Yeah,” says Einbinder. “We’ve both enlightened each other.”
“I mean, I now understand redheads,” Smart says.
“That’s right.”
“I had a real deep prejudice against gingers, but now—“
“Well, we do prefer the term ‘redheads.’ The g-word is not—”
“Oh! Sorry, redheads. I slipped back into my hair-ist tendencies!”
“Look, it’s a work in progress. It’s a dialogue.”
This winking, rapid-fire funny-ha-ha stuff feels very Hacks-ian, for sure. But what differentiates Hacks is the way the series doesn’t focus on only the merry cadences of high comedy—it also examines the industry’s many costs. Which is why, when Smart tears up a few minutes later describing a scene from this season, that feels very Hacks-ian, too.
Of all the emotionally searing moments that have happened in Hacks—and there have been many, from Ava’s lament about not having spent more time watching baseball with her late father to Deborah’s recitation of the lyrics to “I Am a Rock”—one of the most devastating exchanges yet was delivered in Season 3’s third episode. DJ is tapped to perform at a big, dumb Deborah Vance roast. And despite everyone’s decently founded fears that she’ll be a bust, Sweet Dee style, DJ kills—it turns out that her trusty, recurring punch line about her mother, “What a cunt!,” is comedy gold.
Afterward, when Deborah congratulates her, a euphoric DJ says that, finally, she gets it: She understands why being onstage and drawing attention was “the most important part” of Deborah’s life for all these years.
“I spent my whole life thinking you were a narcissist, but turns out you’re actually an addict, like me!” DJ says. “You’re addicted to getting laughs! I mean, I can go to group to stay sober, but you can’t! Your addiction is the group! There’s no hope for you! Oh my God, I feel so much better!” Her tone is one of pity and also epiphany; she sounds like someone who has gotten the ick. “Incredible, and also heartbreaking” is how Smart describes Olson’s work in the scene.
“[It] made me so sad because—and she played it so perfectly because she played it not with any kind of sadness or anything,” Smart says. “And you see that there really is never going to be that proper relationship between a mother and a daughter. It’s been killed. And it was so chilling, and she delivered it just so sweetly and off-the-cuff. But the more sweet she was about it, the more chilling it was.”
As Smart starts imitating DJ’s chipper serenity toward Deborah—Mom, it’s OK! It doesn’t bother me anymore!—she trails off and dabs at her eyes.
“I could definitely feel that that was impacting her,” Olson says. “It was almost like DJ felt sorry for her, which is the worst feeling—that’s way worse than someone being mad at you. But I think it was just so delightful to DJ to figure out that it wasn’t her lacking, and it wasn’t her not being worthy. It was that her mom was broken, and she’d never really considered that before.”
When we first meet DJ in Season 1, she is a wild child whose handbag gets routinely searched by her mother. But by the end of Season 3, she is on her way to being an empowered grown woman, with a loving husband, a baby on the way, two designer cribs, and some sweet, sweet unconditional love from Aunt Kathy. “There’s something really beautiful about that,” Olson says. “And the fact that she’s pregnant now and has to sort of turn her attention to parenting rather than wanting to be parented, it just shifts their dynamic.”
Meanwhile, if there was anyone suffering from angsty teenager energy this season, it was Deborah, with her ill-advised sexual escapades and her perfume clouds of drama and her urgent need to always make a scene. “Deborah probably feels some guilt for why DJ is a fuckup,” says Paul W. Downs, one of the show’s cocreators, who also plays the neurotic nepo-baby manager Jimmy. But at the same time, DJ’s transformation into less of a fuckup messes with Deborah, too.
“I think there’s been also a little part of Deborah that has kind of liked having to be like, ‘Oh, I’ve got to take care of DJ. I’ve got to, like, figure this out for her and do that for her,’” says Aniello. “And the more that DJ grows up, the less Deborah has to do that or is obligated to. And in a way, it makes her a little less useful, which I think maybe makes her feel a bit adrift.”
Deborah isn’t the only one who had a family member gravitating toward more fulfilling relationships in Season 3. “She’s like the daughter I never had,” sighs Nina, Ava’s mother, about some mystery gal named Priya in Episode 7. Nina, in all her chaotic splendor, is visiting Vegas and telling Ava about renting out a spare bedroom for some extra income after “the vitamins class action suit didn’t go my way.” Nina and the tenant, Priya, go out to restaurants once a week, so long as Priya doesn’t have an a cappella show. They stream things together—Nina wonders whether Ava has ever heard of Slumdog Millionaire? And Ava is particularly caught off guard when she hears that the two watch On the Contrary, the highbrow-humor news-comedy show where she’d been thriving before Ava’s return to Vegas. “If I don’t think something’s funny,” Nina says crisply, “Priya tells me why it’s funny, and then I get it.”
Just as Ava speaks Deborah’s language in a way that DJ never could, Priya has apparently grown so fluent in Nina that she can translate between mother and daughter. Ava could try to explain her jokes to her mom forever, but even if she managed to do so without rolling her eyes or tightening her tone, would Nina even listen?
Nina tells Ava not to be jealous of the new daughter she never had. “You’re the daughter I did have, Ava!” she chirps a little too brightly.
All of this is sad because it’s relatable, and funny because it’s true. You go to war with the daughter you have, to slightly paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld. “I think that happens to everybody,” says Adams when I lament that even at age 40, I still find myself behaving like a petulant teen from time to time when I’m around my mom. “I mean, that used to happen to me. I think people forget that their mothers had mothers, and it was the same.”
Hacks is full of small, telling glimpses into the ways characters relate to their families. Jimmy rolls his eyes when he mentions his “always camera-ready” soap opera bombshell mother, the playing-herself Deidre Hall, but in her presence, he is a mama’s boy through and through. Kiki so fiercely protects her time with her daughter that she finagles private-school tuition money out of Deborah. (“I did set that boundary,” she tells Ava, “and now Luna can play the French horn.”) Jimmy’s sidekick, Kayla, draws on a lifetime of sweet-talking Daddy to siphon vital information out of him about the top contender for the late-night host job Deborah wants and directly helps Deborah land the gig. (Kayla is, as ever, the living embodiment of this TikTok.)
And the whole reason that Deborah is in the running for the host spot in the first place is because the terrifying executive Winnie Landell (played by a gloriously cutthroat, forthright Helen Hunt) saw her son watching a Deborah Vance makeup tutorial and decided “she might have wider appeal than I thought.” This is typical, notes Kayla: “Executives love listening to their kids,” she says, though you have to wonder whether said executives are overcompensating for all the times they tuned them out.
The Hacks showrunners have said that when they were first inspired to create a show about a female stand-up comic (during a road trip to shoot a sketch at a monster truck rally, of course), they envisioned the series lasting five seasons. Whether they’ll achieve that remains an open inquiry, as do other burning questions about how the plot may unfold. Like: Can Jimmy and Kayla model an actually healthy working partnership, or will Jimmy be unable to resist mothering Kayla? Will the fact that DJ is having a baby boy help break the cycle of generational mother-daughter meltdowns? Now that the underappreciated Marcus is calling it quits, how screwed is his poor replacement, Damien? And, most importantly, Marty and Deborah: Will they or won’t they? (Smart has said she wants Deborah to “stop being so pigheaded” and make up with Marty, and McDonald agrees. “They’re at a point in their lives where it’s the third act,” he tells me. “Let’s try happiness, you know?”)
For now, though, what we are sure of three seasons in is that Deborah has earned the late-night hosting desk at long last—and that Ava has seemingly learned a little something from all her proximity to greatness.
After promising Ava the head writer position on her new late-night show, Deborah, fearful of ruffling any network feathers, reneges and instead goes with the incumbent head writer, “the hockey jersey guy,” in a very nobody-ever-got-fired-for-buying-IBM move. It was out of her hands, Deborah fibs. The network insisted! Ava can still be on the staff as “the woman behind the man behind the woman!”
It’s a testament to Ava’s balls that she reacts to this news by marching up to scary Winnie on the street to advocate for herself. It’s a tough, tough beat when Winnie has no idea what she’s talking about. And it’s agonizing to watch Ava’s confidence peter into confusion and betrayal, in one of Einbinder’s many, many standout scenes this season. Confronting Deborah, Ava tries to appeal to their history together. “It’s not about our relationship, it’s about making the show work,” Deborah snaps. “Don’t you get it?” says Ava. “It’ll work better because of our relationship. What we make together is good because of it.”
Just as DJ’s sparkling performance at her mother’s roast opens her eyes to Deborah’s true nature, Ava’s humiliating run-in with Winnie strikes a new tone in the comics’ relationship. Rather than slink away in shame, the way she did last time Deborah tried to brush her aside, Ava digs in her heels and sharpens her claws. Showing up at the writers room, matching her employer’s sharklike menace, she reminds Deborah that it probably wouldn’t be a good look if, say, the world knew that the historic late-night hostess boned the married chairman of the broadcast conglomerate at a golf tournament not long before landing the gig. And she assures Deborah that she’ll spill the secret if she has to.
“Wouldn’t you?” Ava says, and the punch line is that she isn’t really asking.
The joke’s on Deborah: She ought to be on top of the world, yet she’s been brought low by her own act. Both the daughter she never had and the daughter she did have are seeing her for who she really is—a charismatic coward, a liar, a performer—and adjusting their behavior accordingly. As Season 3 ends, Deborah ought to be popping champagne with friends or family and celebrating her achievements. Instead, she’s alienated herself from just about everyone around her. Ava, meanwhile, sits resolute in the head writer’s chair, angry and eager to begin. She has achieved the near impossible: She now has Deborah Vance’s full attention. Cheers to that.
