Jean Smart Is Finally Getting What She Deserves—and Hacks’ Creators Are Thrilled - Vanity Fair

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Hacks has been the sleeper series of this spring, the jaded but heartfelt show we didn’t know we needed: a serrated buddy comedy about the generation gap between two female comedians. Along the way, the HBO Max dramedy poked at the underbelly of comedy culture—the misogyny that for decades shaped and limited women’s careers, the question of who gets to be the punch line, and how once-edgy humor hardens into shtick.

The brilliant thing is that it did so while clinching the Smartaissance. On the heels of her winning supporting part in Mare of Easttown, Hacks offered 69-year-old Jean Smart a long-deserved starring role on a TV show, in a world where women over 50 are still often relegated to long-suffering mother or, worse, sassy grandmother parts.

“There’s so much happening now, with rewriting the narratives of women in popular culture, and I just feel like people have finally caught up to Jean Smart,” says Paul W. Downs via Zoom from Mexico, where he is vacationing (between Zoom calls) with Lucia Aniello, his longtime partner. Aniello and Downs created Hacks with Jen Statsky. The trio met in New York’s improv scene and worked together in the writers room of Broad City, where they helped conjure a joyfully anarchic, unapologetically feminist comedy about two 20-something best friends. Hacks is less antic, but does revolve around a similarly odd couple.

A comedy pioneer who almost got to be the first female late-night television host, Smart’s Deborah Vance has calcified into a flashy Vegas fixture. She endlessly recycles her ancient, self-deprecating routines to pay for upkeep on her lavish desert lifestyle—until she collides with oversharing 25-year-old comedy writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), who encourages her to forge a more authentic act out of the trauma she’s been suppressing all these years. “There was a line cut out of an episode about how much the world has changed in the last 15 minutes,” says Aniello. “Recently, things have shifted just enough that people might actually want to hear [women’s truth].”

Courtesy of HBO Max. 

Hacks walks a tightrope between comedy and pathos, and its first season culminates in a finale that brought as much emotional upheaval on set as onscreen. The funeral scene that brings Deborah and Ava back together was integral to the season’s arc, dating back to the original pitch. The idea was that Deborah would say she doesn’t do funerals—but would ultimately decide to show up to Ava’s father’s service, entertaining the mourners as an olive branch to Ava.

Smart’s own husband of nearly 34 years, actor Richard Gilliland, died just before the scene was to be filmed. “It was very unexpected and then we had this week left of shooting an episode about grief, which was really profound and difficult,” says Downs. “She took time off and we didn’t expect her to come back for a long time. We didn’t want to adjust anything that she didn’t want adjusted.” But Smart did return, as she told my V.F. colleague Sonia Saraiya last month. In some ways, she said, filming the episode was “a good distraction.” The show dedicated the finale to Gilliland.

Aniello still marvels at Smart’s willingness to take on any challenge they threw at her. “Often there would be something that we would say, ‘Oh, we can change that to make it easier for you.’ And she would kind of shoot us a look, like, I don’t need anything to be easy for me, I’ll do what the script says,” Aniello says. Smart even wanted to do her own stunts—like when Deborah tries to run Ava down with her Rolls-Royce or jumps into a helicopter. “She is honestly Tom Cruise–level committed to her stunts, and I’m being dead serious,” Aniello continues. “If we told her we wanted her to strap herself to the side of a plane and have it take off, I guarantee you, she would do it.”

Hacks builds toward the moment when Deborah finally lets loose on stage. She is being put out to pasture by her Vegas casino, and Ava is helping her write a final set that will serve as an uncomfortable cultural reckoning, à la Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette. “We really wanted to explore that kind of internalized misogyny that made or encouraged women to be self-deprecating—and not just women, but any artist or comedian that’s on the fringes,” Downs tells me. “And we hope the Ava character helps Deborah [understand], you don’t have to make yourself small to make them laugh! You can punch back, and a lot of them are still going to laugh.”

But the show’s writers made the decision not to show viewers Deborah’s no-holds-barred stand-up performance. The idea instead was “to focus on the offstage moments of these women's lives. We really wanted to do a show about why these women tell these jokes,” Downs says. “We really wanted, for instance, her performance at the funeral to be the performance that you see—she’s exposed and just being herself, but she’s naturally liquid funny.”

The finale also required serious acting chops from Einbinder, a 26-year-old stand-up comedian in her first major TV role. “She’s so sweet and lovely and squishy and hilarious and great and just also a dream, to have such a new little bird in your hand,” Aniello says affectionately. “I joke that she has production-assistant energy, because she’s just so happy to be there and she’s like, ‘Can I get you something to drink?’ And I’m like, ‘You’re number two on the call sheet!’”

After Ava flirts with another job offer, she has a knockdown fight with Deborah, who is getting cold feet about making herself vulnerable onstage. “To be able to hold your own with Jean Smart, who’s operating at 10 out of absolute 10…that’s really not something you can teach in acting school. She does it,” Aniello says of Einbinder. “Ava gets the shit slapped out of her, and I believe that moment, when her voice is cracking and she says, ‘Well, I quit, obviously’—that felt like the moment a new star arrived.”

Hacks is at least partly a tug-of-war between boomer and zoomer cultural modes. Deborah came of age on an old-school sitcom; Ava got kicked off her TV-writing gig for a bad-taste tweet about a politician. Deborah believes jokes need to have a punch line; Ava declares that “traditional joke structure is very male, so focused on the ending.” Her idea of funny—“I had a horrible nightmare that I got a voicemail”—utterly baffles Deborah.

Funnily enough, Aniello and Downs fall right in between these two generations. Although Aniello points out that when they first pitched the series roughly five years ago they were closer to Ava’s age, she accepts the idea of them as a middle ground: “In every argument, they’re both a little right and a little wrong. Even though they won’t admit it,” she says. “We do love both characters and hopefully, you can feel that.” In fact, Downs himself plays the man in the middle—Deborah and Ava’s shared agent, Jimmy, who tethers them together for better or worse.

Hacks has been renewed for a second season. When I ask Aniello and Downs if they’ve started working on new scripts, they both shake their heads no. Still, Downs says, “When we pitched the first season, we knew where season one ended, and where season two and hopefully three go.”

Might the next chapter involve a very extravagant tour bus in which Deborah and Ava will be trapped for long stretches of banter-filled time? “I think you might be heading in the right direction,” Aniello says with a smile. “And maybe this is a spoiler, but I think they're gonna argue over who gets space in that fridge.” Downs adds, “When you have to refrigerate many, many face creams, there’s not a lot of room for somebody else’s tofu.”

Where to Watch Hacks:

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