Hacks Recap: Do You Believe in Christmas Miracles?
Everything is coming up Deborah.
The fake snow is falling in front of Deborah’s mansion: It’s Christmas in Las Vegas! Reeling from the news that her dream job went to Jack Danby, Deborah and her team are strategizing other gigs for her. Maybe something medical? Jimmy wants to know if Deborah has a loose pelvic floor, and I write in my notes, SOMEbody wasn’t paying attention to DJ’s roast because if you’d listened, you’d know that Deborah is famous for her tight grip.
Deep down, though, Jimmy and Kayla have not given up: Not on Deborah having a sexy, young disease or her hosting aspirations. They have one last shot, as discovered by Kayla through her dad: Get the last living descendant of Fatty Arbuckle to agree to release his grandpa’s life rights so Jack Danby will be too busy shooting his dream biopic to host Late Night. It’s all very “we need $500 to save the rec center, and, oh wait, there’s a dance contest, and the prize is $500, but only one of us knows how to dance and the other is a total klutz!” (Complimentary.) So Kayla and Jimmy go on a buddy-comedy journey to convince Larry Arbuckle (It’s Christopher Lloyd! Doc!) to do just that. Larry already wrote his own screenplay about Grandpa Fatty — it’s his life’s work, it’s his only copy, and it’s VERY long — that he wants Jimmy to read. Today. Today is Christmas, just for everybody playing along at home.
I love seeing Kayla and Jimmy work together, as they did on the pickleball court. I like that their nepobaby/industry kid lore is reaching Alexis-on–Schitt’s Creek proportions (“Remember when the Olsen twins were obsessed with you?”) Kayla swiftly clocks that Larry is lonely and has no one to spend Christmas with, something she is predisposed to pick up on as a pretty lonely person herself: her parents are in Aspen and forgot to text her (!) so she’s also planless for the holiday. (I am obsessed with Kayla’s obsession with whether or not Larry is Jewish and with the fact that she had a bat mitzvah, even though she … isn’t actually Jewish.)
Jimmy salvages everything by inviting Larry and Kayla to his family Christmas. He reads on the drive over, and all signs point to the script being a disaster. “Do you like the font? Larry asks. “I put the jokes in Comic Sans so you’d know they’re supposed to be funny.” But at least Jimmy’s mom (Days of Our Lives stalwart Deidre Hall, playing Deidre Hall!) takes this last-minute surprise-guest situation very well.
Speaking of moms: Ava’s mom is in town for the holiday, and every line out of her mouth is just so AVA’S MOM. Really perfect character work. She brought Ava’s Abercrombie miniskirts (“They’re back in style!”) and is renting out Ava’s room for passive income, so now she has a roommate/surrogate daughter/cultural educator named Priya. But she’s hardly the guest to be worried about: Deborah’s sister, Kathy, will be in attendance. This must be chilling for Josefina, who was made to go through all of Deborah’s childhood photos and scratch Kathy’s eyes out. When the doorbell rings, and Kathy arrives, the corgis CHARGE, and I feel like they were trained to do that to her, no?
One thing I’ll say for Deborah here: She is not fucking around about Christmas. She is very invested in the gingerbread replica of her house (it’s to scale!), so you know something bad is bound to happen to it. She has an actor dressed as Santa come down the chimney! She gives everyone a Dyson airwrap! Should I be jealous? Like does that really live up to the hype, or am I just spending too much time on TikTok? I feel like if you have a round brush and solid hand-eye coordination, you can really do it all with a regular dryer.
Kathy is nervous and self-conscious, which for Succession freaks is a whole new look for J. Smith Cameron; Deborah’s rage and jealousy are impossible to suppress. As the party unfolds — far too small a gathering for anyone to sort of disappear into the crowd — it becomes clear that Kathy has been, behind the scenes, an affectionate and present aunt, throwing into relief how Deborah has not been an affectionate or present mother. Deborah’s increasingly desperate attempts to form nonexistent intimacy between her and DJ are fooling absolutely anyone. She unveils her big gift for DJ — a crib — only to discover that DJ already got one from Kathy, and then Kathy breaks off a piece of the gingerbread house. (Deborah, reacting very calmly: “Just because it’s EDIBLE doesn’t mean you can EAT it!”)
The sisters take it outside. Deborah is apoplectic, mean, and obvious: “Oh, you were always good at wrecking homes.” From Kathy, we get a different spin on the story. For instance, did we know Kathy was only 19 when Frank made the first move on her while Deborah was away? I feel like that is MISSION-CRITICAL intel. Kathy was shattered by the loss of her sister but asserts that she and Frank were, much as it pains Deborah to hear it, a better match. Deborah’s creative cruelty in the aftermath of the affair sounds like it was really something. That missing person prank? Woof. Deborah wants to have a monopoly on her sadness since, as far as she can tell, Kathy got everything else. The argument devolves into a snowball fight, except the snowballs are made of chemicals, which really burn when they get in your eyes. (A+ for “THEN WHY WOULD YOU THROW IT AT ME?”)
Finally, Deborah admits she was hoping she could do whatever this is: be sisters and spend Christmas together. She is still so angry, even though she doesn’t want to be because frown lines are the hardest to treat. If she had asked me, I would have suggested starting with something significantly lower stakes, like coffee. Even families with mostly healthy, positive relationships can struggle with Christmas! It’s like the Olympics of Goyim family time! Fortunately even without my counsel these two arrive at this healthy conclusion. They will try again later with no six-sided crystals involved.
And if you think that’s it on the Christmas-miracle front, do I have news for you: Ava’s mom is actually watching On the Contrary and lets Priya tell her why the things she doesn’t get really are funny! AND Jimmy tells Larry that his script is really good! Sure, it could lose the dream sequence, and yes, it should probably be in just one font. But there’s real there there! Larry agrees to pursue the project and attach Jack Danby on one condition: that Jimmy produce.
WHICH MEANS: Deborah is back in the mix for Late Night. It’s between her and the X-Games guy. What a gift! Take THAT, Dyson Airwrap!
“Yes, And” picks things up two weeks from Deborah’s test show. She’s got a LOT going on, including being profiled by a New Yorker journalist, Mina Elahi, who is (in)famous for her takedowns of public figures. There is so much going on, in fact, that she’s double-booked: Deborah is supposed to be at Berkeley getting an honorary doctorate and headlining Palm Springs Pride. If this were a different sort of Palm Springs, she could probably use time travel to sort this out. However, in this world, she is going to try to make it work by traveling via private plane. So much for that climate pledge!
Mina is focused and humorless, unmoved by Ava’s flattery. (“I loved your piece about how white people have gentrified jokes about white people.” “Thank you. A lot of white people liked it, which is interesting.”) And though Deborah at first receives a very warm welcome at Berkeley — getting hit on by frat guys who invite her to a party — soon a supercut of Deborah’s old jokes, which, as you can imagine, contains your standard-issue smorgasbord of racist, offensive nonsense that wouldn’t fly today.
Ava encourages an apology, but Deborah digs her heels in, thinking she can ride this out. “You never apologize for a joke,” she says. (Hilarious back-and-forth with Ava about this over the use of the word they: “I thought everybody was ‘they’ now!” “THAT’S A DIFFERENT THING.”) Of course, Deborah is so against saying, well, yes, the old material is bad, but she has learned and grown a lot since then, and that’s why the new material is good! Obviously, the kids love to dig up artifacts about present-day stars, but I would bet that Deborah’s new material totally passes muster and that her male peers, based on what we saw from colonoscopy night, are the ones who are really deserving of Gen Z’s ire.
Deborah thinks the best move is to charm other students by going to the frat party and doing a student improv show, even though Ava tells her correctly that “improv has never made anyone look good.” The whole improv scene is terrible, by which I mean perfect, from the dopey alliterative introductions to the use of “Who Let the Dogs Out.” It’s unclear whether Deborah’s story about pediatric AIDS, intended to highlight her charity work, lands with the crowd; we skip ahead to the frat party, where she and Ava dominate at flip cup. Deborah even does a keg stand while Ava holds her wig! I am amazed at how many calories she’s willing to consume on the altar of proving she’s a chick who can hang.
Over in Palm Springs, Marcus is stuck managing the House of Vance event without its promised star. He also gets a call from Jimmy, who is just giving him a heads up that if Deborah gets Late Night, she will likely have to stop her QVC side hustles; she can’t be the face of competing products, according to the network. Marcus’s life unravels as he is again abandoned by a boss who does not value his time or work. So he violates one of his cardinal rules and has sex with a Deborah fan. Love the morning-after-tryst reveal of the Deborah face tattoo on this guy’s butt cheek. If you, too, have ever regained consciousness to discover an unexpected tattoo on a paramour’s naked body, PLEASE tell your story in the comments.
The night swiftly sours. Everyone is too drunk, and Deborah finds out that the network canceled her test show. (“Get me the info for that crisis-PR woman for that time I groped Elmo.”) Deborah is enraged that Ava, a clueless, entitled woman, doesn’t even realize what trails Deborah blazed — in the Hacks-verse, she was fined by the FCC for being the first person to say “abortion” on TV — while Ava screams back that Deborah’s old jokes were “hurtful and shitty” and people are allowed to react to them.
For Deborah, beneath all her bluster, the real fear is always that she is running out of time: She can’t wait this out, she can’t wait one more second, she has to do what she wants to do right now, or she’ll never do it. (I wonder if, by the end of the season, she will apply that same sense of urgency to her relationship with Kathy?)
By the sober light of morning, Deborah is (literally) canceled due to the number of student groups who plan on protesting. But she’s also been invited to a student town hall, which Ava supports. Deborah attends and, wisely, says very little … but she does say sorry! I love the quick moment when Deborah doesn’t know what “ableist material” is, and Ava goes, under her breath, “Why do I even send the emails?”
In agreeing to attend this, she bails on Pride, much to Marcus’s continued outrage. He reconnects with a fan from the previous day (Tim Bagley, who you may recognize as Brad from the excellent Somebody Somewhere). This fan has the perspective Marcus lacks: Deborah’s success means her gay fans, who loved her when nobody else did, have to share her with the world. You get left behind, sure, but the artist you nurtured gets to thrive, and then everyone gets the Believe album. So Marcus, too, is ready to do some leaving behind and talk to QVC about those other opportunities.
Mona’s article, as Mona’s articles go, is quite positive. Ava is quoted and didn’t embarrass herself or anyone else! We get a great Leo-pointing-meme moment: “A hack is someone who does the same thing over and over. Deborah is the opposite. She keeps evolving and getting better.” The internet is aflame, and not just because of the article: Kayla tweeted that Deborah got Late Night. And that’s because DEBORAH ACTUALLY GOT LATE NIGHT.