Cancellation is regularly the only way for a sitcom to go out on a high note, especially if a show has slowly shed its most famous cast members towards the end of its run. Hacks creators Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky proclaimed from the beginning of the HBO Max show’s run that their intention was to make five seasons, but the ambitions have always felt aspirational. Although Hacks is a well-plotted, delicately-structured show, it didn’t have to rigorously apply to the narrative arc that was required of fellow HBO shows like Succession or The Sopranos. Even if the Hacks team had an ending in mind when they wrote the pilot, the series has evolved significantly over the course of its run.
Hacks was smart to avoid being a cat-and-mouse game for its entire run. Initially, the series had been solely about the friction between the comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and the ambitious young comedy writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), whose ambition is to usurp her. The initial pitch of Hacks as a n incendiary commentary on the generational gap in humor may have been entertaining for a season, but it wouldn’t have succeeded as a show intended to hit its release date on a yearly basis. That consistency meant that there couldn’t be any significant change to the status quo that would cycle out Deborah’s relationship with Ava, given that it's the chemistry between Smart and Einbinder that has provided the series with its ripest commentary.
Hacks made the right choice to become a broader satire of how the industry has lost its soul; instead of pushing boundaries, comedians have been asked to give audiences what they want to hear. The fourth season of the show saw Deborah rebel against the late-night talk show gig that she’d been hired for because of the demands to provide positive PR for the studio’s clients and incorporate native advertising. Perhaps the funniest joke of the fifth and final season is that this type of morally upstanding declaration would be celebrated, only to be forgotten immediately by an audience that wasn’t invested in the first place.
The penultimate season provided the show with one of its best gags when a misreported headline circulated that proclaimed Deborah’s death, which gave her the opportunity to stage yet another comeback. However, the public relations fiasco had little impact on her career, given that her former network retained the ability to selectively reveal information about her supposed “breakdown.” While the smear campaign in Hacks isn’t directly correlated to any recent Hollywood controversies, its sentiments are well-founded. Conflicting accounts regarding a feud result in indifference, even if there are clear motivations for one side to be dishonest. In cases as recent as the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni feud on It Ends With Us, or the trial of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, the presumption among media consumers of a "mutually destructive” situation is enough to discredit credible accounts.
Hacks has depicted Deborah as a sympathetic character held back by institutional and cultural biases, but she’s never become a victim. The cancellation of Deborah’s show is most damaging because of a clause that prevented her from doing other work for a select amount of time; it’s not a career-ender as much as it is a black mark on the one point in her career where she had the most momentum. Deborah’s are always vain, and her latest presumptive ambition is to become an “EGOT,” or a winner of a Tony, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. Given that Smart has cleaned up at nearly every awards show she’s competed in for Hacks, the commentary on the self-congratulatory nature of award season is well-earned.
There are some more jokes about the type of roles that win Oscars; Deborah’s able to adopt a minor role in a prestige biopic, which has given her the type of melodramatic monologue that’s ripe for the senior voters in the Academy. Yet, the satire in Hacks is most scathing when its lens is pointed at the studio politics involved in this type of campaign. Deborah’s part was earned because her agent has a connection to the film’s director, and a shared client is generally in everyone’s best interest. It’s the first time Hacks has directly looked at the insular way that studios pick from their own frequent collaborators to push for prestige, which is a sign of a shrinking industry. While presumably this was written and filmed before Warner Bros. (which owns the streaming services that airs Hacks) was acquired by Paramount and David Ellison, it’s still a caustic irony.
The comfortable position of Hacks is one where it's able to admire flawed characters. Ava and Deborah have evolved from being spokeswomen for their respective generations, and simply made into neurotic, highly-motivated creatives. The main difference between them is only tangentially related to age; Ava’s far more willing to burn bridges, which is something that Deborah’s years of experience have taught her to do. Hacks is never so nasty that its audience is made to feel ashamed for their investment in self-absorbed characters, but it's also a reminder that narcissism is plentiful in the performing arts. If there’s a thesis that has emerged after five seasons of Hacks, it’s that art is worth fighting for, even if artists could take themselves less seriously.