Duo delivers more than just laughs in Hacks

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This article was published 25/05/2024 (735 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

At the centre of Hacks (currently streaming on Crave) is a boomer-versus-millennial relationship. If this saga of 70-something standup star Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her much-put-upon 20-something comedy writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) just played the age gap for laughs, the show would still be watchable.

There’s plenty of zingy banter about the women’s very different skill sets and world views. Deborah is weirdly insouciant about climate change, is still trying to figure out gender fluidity, and — of course — struggles with memes. Meanwhile Ava, who came of age in the 21st century, finds it hard to imagine a time when Deborah, as a pioneering female comic in the 1970s, was fined by the FCC for using the word “abortion” on air.

What makes Hacks more than watchable is that it goes beyond the usual comic clichés of entitled snowflake millennials and clueless selfish boomers. In this strong third season, showrunners Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky are offering something a bit more poignant — a caustic but ultimately optimistic look at intergenerational feminism. (Or as Ava might say, “feminisms.”)

Deborah and Ava’s back-and-forth bickering can be hilarious, but as it goes from combative to codependent to collaborative, it’s also an unexpectedly sweet sign of the life lessons these two very different women can offer each other.

Season 3 starts with a deceptive serenity. Deborah’s comeback comedy special My Bad has been an award-winning hit. Her QVC sales are through the roof. She’s even on Tom Cruise’s famous coconut cake Christmas list. (This is a real thing.)

Ava is also thriving, professionally and personally. She’s working on a politically topical comedy show — though she sometimes struggles to find funny material about dying coral reefs. She’s living in a very cool L.A. pad with girlfriend Ruby Roja (Lorenza Izzo), an action star currently playing the titular Wolf Girl in a DC blockbuster. “It’s a metaphor for female anger,” Ruby explains to Ava.

And there’s plenty for women to be angry about, whatever age they are, as this season’s main storyline suggests.

One of the perks of Deborah’s newfound fame is the chance to be a guest on the big late-night talk shows. But she remains resistant. At first, her reluctance can be ascribed to fears her anecdotes sound a bit dated. (How about that time she went to Benihana with O.J. Simpson? No?)

It turns out Deborah doesn’t want to be “just a guest” on the legendary show she almost got to host 40 years ago. She wants to sit behind the big desk. As she points out, no woman has ever hosted a major broadcast talk show after dark. (This is also a real thing.) Women may be allowed to do daytime TV — predicated on the outdated idea the ladies are all home doing their ironing and need something to watch. But the prestige of nighttime remains off limits.

Then a chance remark suggests the hosting gig might be up for grabs. Deborah finds herself competing with a “generically funny” young guy (Luke Cook) for the spot. But she’ll need Ava’s help. Too bad she fired her at the end of Season 2.

Fortunately, Deborah and Ava have an accidental elevator encounter at the (sadly now defunct) Just for Laughs Montreal comedy fest and end up bonding over Cruise’s coconut cake.

Of course, Deborah is still gloriously self-absorbed. She still blithely violates boundaries, blowing through the rule that she can’t comment on the way Ava dresses. (“Like you’re about to have lunch on a steel girder,” Deborah suggests.)

On the other hand, Ava, who likes to take the moral high ground when dealing with Deborah, has her own blind spots. Her vaunted solidarity with working people turns out to be rather more conceptual than practical, for example, as we see when she volunteers to be Deborah’s caddie at a charity golf tour.

There’s a terrific bottle episode midway through this season, when the two go for a mind-clearing hike and end up getting lost in the Pennsylvania woods. This almost feels like a woman-centric version of a famous Sopranos episode, Pine Barrens, when Paulie and Christopher — who also had their share of inter-generational workplace frictions — ended up wandering round a New Jersey forest.

Ultimately, though, dying of exposure in the Pennsylvania wilderness pales beside the subsequent prospect of a PR disaster, when Deborah’s stubborn notion that you should “never apologize for a joke” undergoes a severe stress test. Ava’s survival skills include navigating contemporary cancel culture. Deborah, for her part, knows a thing or two about resilience and reinvention in a male-dominated industry. They both end up learning something.

There’s a lot of fun in this third season, including cameos from Helen Hunt as a driven entertainment exec and uber-intense pickleball player, and Christina Hendricks as an oil heiress with some very specific interests. Christopher Lloyd plays an oddball descendant of silent-film star Fatty Arbuckle, and soap diva Deirdre Hall plays Deirdre Hall. There’s Hollywood satire about nepo babies and pointless Intellectual Property projects. There’s a Christmas episode.

But the core pleasure of Hacks is the changing, deepening relationship between the two women. “A hack is someone who does the same thing over and over,” Ava says at one point. “Deborah is the opposite.” That’s also true of this series, a female buddy story that keeps evolving.

alison.gillmor @freepress.mb.ca