Television Watch: Hacks Concludes

Apparently I've never posted about it before, but for the past few years, HBO's Hacks has been among my favorite shows.  

The basic premise is that Ava (Hannah Einbinder), an up-and-coming comedy writer, seems to have a career on the slide when her agent, Jimmy (Paul W. Downs) teams her with his top client, Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), a legendary stand-up comedian, now in her 70's.  Deborah is fabulously wealthy from her long and lucrative stand-up career with side-businesses like a line of goods on QVC.  She has a team surrounding her that is probably insulating her a bit from dealing with any unpleasantness, a daughter in her 40's, DJ (Kaitlin Olson), who is erratic at best - and has kind of seen and done it all.  

Deborah is let go from her long-standing gig at a major Vegas Casino, and is adrift.  She's a workaholic who defines herself by her career, which has been less than a straight line.  She's a product of 20th Century showbiz and culture, and *could* just retreat to her mansion(s), but instead decides to pivot with the help of Ava, writing a new set.

The show starts as a collision of very-online-young-Millennial sensibilities and a highly-successful show-biz Boomer.  Ava takes the moral grandstanding of lefty politics as a given, but though her proximity with Deborah begins to understand what it was that made her - from a horrendous divorce (which included her husband leaving her for her sister) to the shit women in showbiz, let alone comedy, put up with over the course of her career.  

What could have been a preachy, treacly show, instead managed to find to co-stars with insane on-screen energy/ chemistry together.  

Like a lot of people, I hadn't thought much about Jean Smart since a few 90's movie roles until she showed up on Fargo and absolutely ran away with the season in which she starred.   I just thought of her was "the tall one" on Designing Women who was really funny in The Brady Bunch movie.  But dear god...  here's to late career renaissances.  

Ava is played by Hannah Einbinder who is the daughter of SNL founding cast member Laraine Newman and writer Chad Einbinder.  She is - if you ever see her stand-up, hysterical on her own.  

There's also standouts like the pairing of Jimmy and Kayla (Meg Stalter) as Deborah's agents - and we can't really say about about about Stalter on this show.  But it was, really, an ensemble show where it felt like everyone brought their A-Game.  And maybe that's because it was such a character driven show, we got to see everyone have their arcs or play their important part.

It was perfectly filled with guest-appearances, from Christina Hendricks to Lauren Weedman (someone I've adored since her bits on early The Daily Show), to comedian Luenell...  But I am not going to stop to list everyone who showed up.  It would be insane.  

You can read plenty about Hacks all over the place right now, but just trust that it has earned its reputation, and not because of cute weird plot stuff - although there was plenty of that.  It really did let characters exist first, and then let the forces of the universe push and pull them, as well as let characters impact the universe.  

In the heightened world of Hollywood, QVC and Las Vegas - it felt surprisingly grounded, lived in and believable.  As it followed the growing relationship between two extremely different people, I never felt it hit a false note or something done just for television - these were things we believed these people would do and say.    

And it got out on top.  Five seasons, 47 episodes.  The show did what it wanted and said what it had to say, and even as we rounded into a fifth season after four seasons of Ava and Deborah sorting each other out, it made a point of - so what does it look like when these two *are* at peace and what does that mean?  What does it look like to have found a real friend and creative soul mate?  

No one on the show was perfect (well, maybe Lauren Weedman's Mayor Jo is my kind of gal) and everyone was a bit messy, including side characters.  

And, honestly, if you've never watched the show - all I want to do is recommend it.  And hang in there.  It is not all people yelling at each other.*  You will not always like the leads, or at least the decisions they make.  You may wish they focused more on this or that as the show goes on.  But as a show that speaks a bit to blindness of generational and lifestyle conflict, it's hard to think of one better in the past twenty years.  Or as a look at two unlikely people finding each other, and both finding how hard all of that really can be when you have such different perspectives.

Be aware, this is an HBO show, so language is raw, there's an occasional boob...  not one to watch with the kids.  But it's been a delight from start to finish.

*maybe my least favorite critique of non-reality shows.  But I suspect that showing actual conflict with a hint of truthiness to the fiction is a tad scary to people and jangles the nerves.  Maybe that reaction explains how we get so many soporific procedurals, Hallmark movies, and two-note sci-fi and fantasy shows people obsess over.  

Y'all can figure out why people watch any show with the word "Housewife" in it on your own.