Hacks is back for its final season, and so is its presumed-dead protagonist, Deborah Vance, who’s just risen from a champagne and caviar-fueled spiral in Singapore post-Late Night fallout. The circumstances around her “death”, once unclear in the Season 4 finale (yes, a staffer can sometimes accidentally hit the “Publish” button on a banked obituary. It happens), are laid out in the first episode of Season 5. Apparently, reports said they carried her body off a boat, and she “didn’t make it.” “No, no, no. I didn’t make it to the hospital! I had them reroute me to my hotel,” Deborah tells her fans mourning in front of her Las Vegas address.
While she is alive, what is unrevivable now is her public reputation. Media CEO and Deborah’s former paramour, Bob Lipka, has razed her image to the ground, exhausting every platform he owns to paint a picture of the septugenarian comedian as a “crazy lady,” who went cuckoo after “setting Late Night on fire” — as she did with her ex-husband’s house. Allegedly. And Lipka doesn’t stop here. It gets worse. Let’s just say, consolidating media into one (white) man’s hands is always bad news.
Even Deborah’s home agency inevitably took a blow from Lipka’s vendetta. “All our meetings go well, and then they find out we can’t do business with Bob Lipka‘s companies and ghost us,” Paul W. Downs’ Jimmy LuSaque Jr. tells his business partner, Kayla Schaefer, and their assistant, Randi, who’s surprisingly good at thinking on her feet.
The fix the disgraced former Late Night host comes up with is even crazier than the news of her death. “I need a win,” Deborah wakes Ava up with her brilliant idea. “A legacy-defining win that they cannot spin. I refuse to be remembered in other people’s terms: as a quitter, or the person who killed Late Night, or some hysterical woman. I have worked far too long. I will be remembered for my accomplishments. So I have decided… to EGOT.”
And it turns out, she’s halfway there: she’s already got a Daytime Emmy for an obscure game show she once hosted in the ‘90s and a Tony for producing Spamalot. Now, a Grammy and an Oscar are mountains to climb — even for a figure of her caliber — but what’s harder now, as Jimmy realizes, is whether she can even work on anything given the airtight contract she got into hosting and eventually leaving Late Night.
A ‘No-Woman’ to Ignore
Eventually, after Jimmy and Kayla’s best efforts to get her closer to an O, and personally hiring (and then firing) Pulitzer-, Tony-, and Emmy-winning playwright Tony Kushner to write her memoir that will then be turned into an audiobook, and recording a feature on an acclaimed Regional Mexican album to get her a G, Deborah decides to drop the EGOT bid.
If there’s one characteristic plot point in a Hacks premiere, it’s the lingering tension (non-sexual and sometimes sexual) between Deborah and Ava that sets the tone for the rest of the season. Whether that’s a down-on-her-luck millennial looking down on a has-been comedian in Season 1 or a blackmailing bitch who comes back to work with her lying, manipulative boss in Season 4, Hacks have always thrived in creating and resolving frictions between these two characters in a span of a season. And perhaps for the first time, Deborah and Ava are beginning a season amicably. Perhaps too amicably.
“Ava is really trying to be supportive of Deborah because Singapore is like a very dark moment, and she watches Deborah give up her Late Night Show and spiral from there, and I think, she’s just trying to affirm everything that excites her,” Hannah Einbinder says of her character in a post-premiere look into the episode.
Hacks co-creator and showrunner Jen Stastky echoes this. “I think Ava felt scared to push Deborah… so she held back, and that’s what she’s doing in the first half of this episode.”
Thank god that lasted only as soon as Deborah calls Ava out (“Okay. That’s it! What is wrong with you? You don’t challenge me in your normal ‘Why don’t you consider…’ Ava way. I don’t need a yes-man! I need a no-woman to ignore.”). And surprisingly, the spat, if you can even call it that, went smoothly with the two even peacefully arriving at the same conclusion that they are helpless against an iron-clad contract. Maybe it’s maturity? Or maybe that’s last season syndrome, a bid to tie loose ends. Or! As the rest of the episode plays out, to signal a move to a bigger theme that would necessitate them being on the same page.
Hacks, in its final season, proves it’s still one of the best comedies out there while mirroring the current landscape of film and television. If last season was about the rat race to create a hit against shrinking attention spans, this season might just be a swan song to take down the final boss, the true villain of Hollywood: the tech media mogul. And Ava and Deborah are more than up for a challenge. Because if there’s anything better than a sapphic Ava and Deborah, it’s scheming Ava and Deborah. And baby, the women are conspiring.
Hacks is currently streaming its final season on HBO Max.
