Hacks Stopped Being About Comedy

In its first season, Hacks had a specific, well-articulated identity. It was a comedy, sure, but really it was a show about comedy. As veteran stand-up comic Deborah Vance and her new young writer Ava Daniels chipped away at reshaping Deborah’s persona, they tried to hash out ideas about what comedy is, what makes it good or bad, and when it is and is not a form of art. Amid all the jabs slung about shilling for QVC and Gen Z’s politically correct hangups, Deborah and Ava were also pitching each other, constantly. What is a good joke? What is a personal joke? Is it better for a joke to be personal? What happens when a joke feels too careful, or too distant from the joke-teller? As Ava pressured Deborah to make her stand-up more revealing and intimate, Hacks also expressed its own value system for what makes comedy not just funny, but also “good.” It’s better to tell a truth about yourself, build a narrative, and come from a place of authenticity and disclosure.

This was the heartwarming and too-simplistic center of early Hacks. While most shows about Hollywood careers focus on the mess and absurdity of putting on a show-within-a-show, Hacks was about writing and the difference between art and craven commercialism as it applied to one person’s presentation of their own life story. Its diagnosis of what makes comedy “good” was more about therapized self-awareness than craft. By the end of season four, though, Hacks is no longer a show about comedy. As it charts Deborah and Ava’s ambitions, Hacks has become a show about late night as a genre and the shape of a Hollywood career. It’s gotten more cynical, more general, and it’s drifted further from the elements that once made it distinct from other inside-Hollywood series. That move certainly has not fixed all of Hacks’s problems, but the show now feels motivated and coherent in ways it has not accomplished before. Whether people value truth in comedy has never been a particularly complicated issue, or at least not in the way Hacks has ever been able to present it. Whether a network late night talk show can still be popular, though — that question is harder, and it’s given Hacks a tension in season four that the show otherwise lacked.

In moving from being a show about stand-up to being a show about late-night television, Hacks also stopped being a show about what is funny. That idea was at the heart of Ava and Deborah’s biggest arguments early in the series. They wrestled constantly over whether it was better to aim for a broad audience or to embrace material with a niche target, and whether people would accept Deborah telling more personal, darker jokes about herself and her history after years of her safe casino-crowd shtick. Season four abandons that question almost immediately, and is better for it because the answer was never in doubt.

The mandate now is that Deborah Vance’s late-night show should become the number one show on television, and although Ava makes half-hearted comments about how it’s a bad idea to cater to focus groups, their discussions never veer into detail about comedic style. Adjustments are made to superficialities and format. Deborah tries wearing long hair, which looks ridiculous. She becomes a little more daytime, which means doing cooking segments with Antoni Porowski. That stuff is all bad, and Ava tells her so. The fixes, the things that do propel Deborah’s show to number one in the Nielsens, aren’t about comedy, either. Instead, Deborah’s late-night show saves itself by focusing on dishy interview segments and booking guests Deborah has chemistry with rather than prioritizing boring movie stars with new movies to promote. They hire an influencer called Dance Mom to do goofy segments. Most importantly, they decide to tape shows the day before rather than the day of, allowing them to create buzzier promotional cycles that funnel viewers toward watching the show live every night rather than waiting for clips on social media the next morning.

It is a vastly more cynical approach to what defines success in entertainment than the early seasons’ insistence that personal disclosure wins the day. It doesn’t matter in the slightest whether Deborah goes out there every night and bares her soul to a national audience! All that matters is whether Dance Mom, a character designed in a lab to be a depressing punchline, pulls in just enough of the always-online demo to boost their numbers among younger viewers. To underline the point, this season introduces a social media editor whose entire job is to show up at the beginnings and ends of scenes, thrust a phone on a selfie stick into Deborah’s face, and say things like, “While I have you, we just need to wish Dakota Fanning a happy birthday.” Everyone loathes him. Hacks loathes him! But they all know he’s necessary, and the grim joke of his presence is that he’s absolutely crucial to keeping this whole thing afloat. Respecting and yet resenting the necessary compromises of working inside a business is a tension Hacks has avoided until now, one it can no longer dodge once Deborah is part of a late night TV mechanism rather than a stand-up personality. Whether late night can be popular again is a problem without a heroic, authentic solution. The key to success is selling out — promotion, and TikTok influencers, and buzzy interviews.

The late-night setting turns Hacks into a bog standard insider Hollywood show, with roughly the same perspective and same frustrations as series like The Newsroom, The Morning Show, or The Studio. Little of the comedy comes from Ava and Deborah’s relationship. All of it comes from the absurdity of their circumstances, and the Kayla-and-Jimmy agency side story has to carry nearly the full weight of the show’s continued desire to be light and fun and young and cool. (Unfortunately, Jimmy and Kayla do not have what it takes to carry that burden, especially because Hacks has decided they should be both heroic and competent at every turn.) In becoming a more familiar show about Hollywood, Hacks has given up the things that made it distinctive while also becoming more entertaining in a petty, pointy way. It has more friction now, and is uninterested in trying to resolve it all.

But Hacks has always insisted that authenticity matters in comedy, and even as this season feels less specifically tied to Deborah and Ava as characters, it also feels more derisively honest about the industry they’ve always operated within. The back half of every preceding Hacks season has had to make it seem like audiences might actually reject Deborah’s new comedic persona, and the show then pivots into a heart-warming declaration that sincerity matters. But Hacks has never been good at pretending that Deborah’s bravery and Ava’s growth won’t eventually win the day. By contrast, there’s something almost nakedly contemptuous about the end of this season. Yes, Deborah takes a stance and quits her show rather than fire Ava. It’s sweet! It’s loyal! But the point of Deborah’s heroism is in finding an ethical line she will not cross, and in refusing to bow to the network’s demands. It is not a bold investment in comedy as an art form. Neither Ava nor Deborah pretend that Deborah’s subsequent residency at a Singapore casino has comedic value or that it matters that she’s so bored she’s falling asleep on stage. They’ve given up the high-minded ideals about what good comedy is and how to do this job The Right Way. Deborah simply can’t stand the idea of retiring quietly rather than going out on top. It’s about winning. Maybe this is a new turn for Hacks, but maybe it’s what this show has always been — it’s just no longer doing the work to hide it.