For a show about a stand-up veteran and her young comedy writer, Hacks could have a better sense of timing. The third series of the award-winning show premiered in the US last May, but British fans have had to wait nine months for it finally to land on streaming platform Now. Luckily, it proves well worth the wait.
It picks up a year after the previous season’s finale, in which legendary comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) celebrated the success of her comeback special by firing her Gen-Z jokesmith Ava (Hannah Einbinder). A mercy sacking of sorts — intended to push Ava to pursue her own career — it seems to have left both happier and healthier. While Deborah is selling out arenas and hawking merch, Ava is a staffer for a satirical news show and living with her A-list actress girlfriend.
But when the two run into each other at a festival, the encounter is uncomfortably civil. As far as Ava is concerned, the only thing worse than being on the receiving end of Deborah’s lacerating quips is being the recipient of her halfhearted niceties. “You’re not going to say I look like a little page boy?” she asks, insulted not to be insulted.
It’s no spoiler to reveal that the two soon resurrect their combustible partnership as Deborah mounts a campaign to become a late-night talk-show host. It’s a dream she has harboured her whole life — and for a more meaningful reason than Ava might have expected.
Hacks has many sharp-witted observations about comedy and the entertainment business, especially its attitudes towards older women. But its appeal and resonance go beyond sending up the industry. As a dual portrait of two self-absorbed, utterly codependent people, the show reaches new heights as both become further entrenched in their twisted yet strangely tender protégé/mentor, love/hate relationship.
Much of that is down to Smart and Einbinder’s effervescent chemistry — the latter a perfect neurotic foil for the other’s deadpan brilliance. But show-creators Lucia Aniello, Jen Statsky and Paul W Downs (who also plays harried agent Jimmy) deserve praise for crafting such compelling characters. While lesser series might have focused on the generational divides between the performatively progressive twenty-something and the blasé boomer, Hacks continues to interrogate Deborah and Ava’s shared sense of what it is to be ambitious and perennially dissatisfied — to crave validation and find loneliness. The result is a comedy that can deliver a killer punchline one moment, and a gut-punch the next.
★★★★☆
On Now in the UK and Max in the US now
