Hacks ★★★★★
The always brilliant Jean Smart has so fully inhabited her character of veteran Las Vegas stand-up Deborah Vance over four seasons of Hacks, that I’ve come to think of her as more Vance than Smart. But now the final season is here, and the character of Vance, along with the best TV portrayal of co-dependent friendship, is about to come to an end.
This fifth season picks up shortly after the fallout at the end of season four, after Deborah sensationally quit her dream job as late-night TV host, and headed to Singapore where a loophole meant she could perform despite her 18-month “non-compete” clause. That, in turn, led to her and Ava (Hannah Einbinder) falling out (again), before reconciling after TMZ wrongly reported Deborah’s death.
Determined to ensure her legacy won’t be that of her late-show experience, Deborah and Ava are back in Vegas (greeted by a shrine to Deborah at the gates of her estate, where her appearance shocks her hardcore fans, the “little Debbies”) with plans for a post-gag order comeback. Yes, in one sense, this season treads old ground, but fans of the multiple Emmy Award-winning series will not be disappointed.
As the final episodes build towards Deborah’s gag order lifting, there are more fabulous guest stars than ever – all of which we are forbidden from revealing – potential romances for Ava and Deborah and the usual blink-and-you-miss them ratio of punchlines-per-minute. Behind many of the jokes and the brutal skewering of the entertainment industry, there remain the more serious motifs – about gender inequality, family relationships, ageism, generational divides and redemption.
Storylines around the edges of her comeback show include Deborah hastily attempting to win an Oscar and a Grammy so she can become and “EGOT” (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony award winner); a wedding that ends in an FBI bust; Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) opening his own Vegas venue; and a scathing episode about AI in which a sketchy venture capitalist offers Deborah exorbitant amounts of money for her back catalogue, so other comedians can “optimise the creative process”. Even Deborah realises, eventually, that it’s a bum deal, asking the shocked billionaire, “Is art even art if there’s no humanity behind it?”
The show’s creators get another dig at AI later in the series, too, involving “digital resurrection”, technology that uses AI to recreate and use the voices of dead actors, which the real Hollywood is already doing.
Hacks has always been a joyous mixture of silly physical comedy and farce with cultural satire, and this blend is stepped up a little for the final season. But the moments of poignancy are still there, especially towards the final, dramatic plot line, which the show’s creators have, reportedly, always had in mind – and which we definitely cannot spoil.
We can report, though, that some things come full-circle, in a meta sense, with Ava, now 30, finally selling one of her scripts; Deborah and daughter DJ are in a good (if still dysfunctional) place and Jimmy (co-creator and showrunner Paul W. Downs) and Kayla (Megan Stalter) are happily co-managing their agency.
And that even until the final episode, the mentor-mentee relationship between Ava and Deborah remains deliciously flawed. “I always wondered,” Ava says to Deborah as she shamelessly vies for media attention at another celebrity’s residency launch, “what Machiavelli would have been like if he’d been warped by Boomer misogyny”.
The best pairing since The Odd Couple will be seriously missed.
Hacks (season five) streams on Stan (which is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead) from April 10.
Want more TV? We’ve got you.
- Newsletter: Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.
- Outlander: The Scottish time-travelling hit is coming to an end. Its Australian star David Berry talks about the show’s other great love story.
- The Testaments: Ann Dowd was terrifying in The Handmaid’s Tale. She thinks you should be more scared of its sequel.
- The Miniature Wife: Succession star Matthew Macfadyen had his pick of scripts when he said goodbye to the billionaire Roy family. This is what he chose to do next.
- Your Friends and Neighbours review: Season two find’s Jon Hamm’s light-fingered thief up against a formidable foe.
- Streaming guides: What to watch this week; and what to watch this month.
