Hilarious and beautiful, female-led, generation-spanning screwball comedy.

Writing this at the end of season 4: I enjoy Hacks so much. It’s beautifully realised, and contains many very good things. I say this up top because it will perhaps sound like I’m more critical of the series than I am, or that I seem to have more nitpicky than positive things to say. So to be clear: I’m really into Hacks. I love Jean Smart as Deborah Vance and Hannah Einbinder as Ava. I’m invested in what Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky have created in Hacks, and I can’t wait for more… sort of.

The Underdog-to-Cautionary-Cliché Pipeline

The series follows the twisted working relationship between Las Vegas comedy veteran Deborah Vance and her young upstart writer Ava Daniels. The first two seasons feel more vital and revelatory, perhaps in part because of the scrappy underdog storyline, primarily because its ‘women in comedy across generations’ premise just isn’t something we’ve seen much of before, at least in this form. The third and especially fourth seasons’ “careful what you wish for” storylines feel less essential, and I can’t tell if that’s because its ground is more well-worn, or because I personally find that ground less interesting.

One daring point of distinction is Hacks‘ interest in and portrayal of development and progression in entertainment business. I found myself thinking often of how 30 Rock, which frequently engaged with women in comedy across generations, only ever showed glimpses of ‘TGS’, the show Liz Lemon and the gang worked on, leaving it to us to imagine the show (and leading us to imagine it’s bad). It’s bold of Hacks to show us way more of Deborah Vance’s shows. To its underrated credit, Hacks succeeds where most series and movies about creative people doing creative things fail: Deborah’s comedy plays in our world more or less the way we’re told it does in the story world. But more importantly and interestingly, showing Deborah in action plays with the tension of our expectations, both of her show and of Hacks. Deborah is proving her evolving comedy (and by extension Ava) to her audience, to herself, and to us.

Whether dramatic irony or just irony, as Hacks progresses and its real-world success grows, it also begins to lose its grip on what makes it, and its core relationship, unique and engaging.

As the new phase of Deborah’s career blows up, and the professional and ethical stakes for her and Ava scale up accordingly, the dramatic tension between the two becomes as generic as Deborah decides her show needs to be in order to succeed with a bigger audience. So while I want more, I don’t want them to keep heading in their chosen direction.

Undeniable Star Power

Jean Smart had already given us such a range of wonderful performances (in the past decade alone, I loved her in Watchmen and Legion, and my personal all-timer is her run as the riotous Lana on Frasier). So it’s saying a lot to call Deborah Vance the role of her career, though I’m sure many have. The character is richly drawn, and Smart’s portrayal is textured, nuanced, and deeply rewarding to watch.

Hannah Einbinder, beyond being an instant classic screwball comedienne, is a mesmerising screen presence. Her physicality is crafted and fine-tuned, and she is completely in control of her presence. Her face often traverses a spectrum of hilarious and poignant notes in seconds, as she contorts her cherubic features from Botticelli muse to Daffy Duck, often as the wordless coda to her perfect delivery of a fantastically-written punchline.

Hacks is at its strongest somewhere between its broadest comedy and its more mean-spirited moments.

The Stretch

Hacks is fantastic, but not perfect. Specifically because its central duo is so amazing at realising the show’s engaging premise, I find its less successful fringe elements both distracting and fascinating.

At the broad comedy end, nepo baby Kayla (Megan Stalter) is so broad that she takes me out of every single scene she’s in. Kayla is outdone in Season 4 when the more unqualified Randy (an at times anachronistically vaudevillian Robby Hoffman) joins her subplot with embattled nice guy manager Jimmy (Paul W. Downs), and stretches the comedy so broad it snaps. Perhaps it’s because series co-creator Paul W. Downs plays Jimmy with such restraint and grounded warmth that these two, then three, characters never feel like they’re in the same show as eachother, much less as its leads. But Hacks can and does offer a broad comedy counterpoint to Kayla and Randy who feels more uniquely of the show’s world: Poppy Liu‘s Kiki is comedic genius, has some of the show’s best lines and one-of-a-kind deliveries, and is a scene-stealing revelation wisely deployed only in small, strategic bursts.

In between: the handling of the supporting characters and storylines is uneven. They dip in and out unpredictably, and vary wildly in tone. Furthermore, the ways in which they mirror or complement the central duo’s adventures or episode themes are so inconsistent, that

it’s difficult to track or even know how much to invest in any of what’s going on around Deborah and Ava, and therefore thematically.

The supporting players and their subplots take up more space in the earlier seasons, then dissipate over the successive seasons, until the original supports are relegated to cameos, and the newer supports are practically extras. It’s difficult to know who or what to invest in, or even track, when threads seem to be developing until they just… dissipate. The more I think about Damien (Mark Indelicato), Wilson (Johnny Sibilly), and particularly Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins), the more unsure I feel of what any of them are for or about. By the time we get to the later seasons, and have for example an entire writers room full of anonymous characters, and Ava feels increasingly out of her depth as head writer on Deborah’s show, the more unwieldy it feels Hacks‘ expanding roster has become for its real-life writing team. And my goodness, it felt like there was so much more to say and do with the character of high-powered network executive Winnie Landell, portrayed by generational comedy-series-star-turned-Oscar-winner herself, Helen Hunt.

And at the mean-spirited end: it’s perhaps inevitable for the purposes of story tension that Ava and Deborah take turns each taking a heel turn. But somehow, perhaps given how richly each character is drawn, each successive turn feels increasingly contrived. It’s a backhanded compliment, perhaps, but a compliment nonetheless. I love both of these characters, not despite their imperfections, but because they are both capable of being shitty and examining their own shittiness in order to grow – so it feels disappointing, not in their characters but in the writing (if that distinction makes sense), on the occasions when they get in the muck simply to be dirty for the sake of drama. Perhaps that’s the point?

What Next?

So: I warily anticipate another season of Hacks. I want to spend more time with these characters and see where they go next, but if possible, with the intimacy and specificity of their early days.

Here’s Jean Smart on the finale (no spoilers):

jean smart on the hacks finale 😵‍💫 pic.twitter.com/fCO6eBCLLu

— Cris ✨ (@lionesspike) April 5, 2026

Further Viewing

To balance out my criticism (and arguably point-missing) of the heel turns of it all, here are series creators Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky, as well as Hannah Einbinder, talking about the season 3 finale showdown. It reveals the kind of care and craft which is palpable throughout the show, even in an outcome which didn’t work so well for me personally (via Variety):

Hannah Einbinder’s special Everything Must Go brought me to Hacks (via HBO):