The Story Behind That Perfect Episode of ‘Hacks’

Stand-up comic Deborah Vance, the character played by the inimitable Jean Smart on HBO Max’s Hacks, has long peddled the story about the time “my sister stole my husband.” On stage at the Memphis Comedy Club, she goes off-book and reveals the worst thing that happened to her wasn’t her personal life blowing up. Instead, losing a late-night talk show takes that title. “I got over my husband, but I never got over that,” is a joke that liberates the teller.

From here, the floodgates open as the confessional tour theme takes shape. “I wasn’t a great mother. I missed my daughter’s first steps, but I made it up to her. I was the reason she did 12 more,” is one admission. “I’ve always been so competitive with other women. I mean, I once stole backup dancers from Cher. I’m a comedian! I don’t use backup dancers,” is another.

Deborah Vance is finally owning up to her mistakes.

No, she didn’t have an epiphany after insulting a boat—sorry, ship—full of lesbians or when she confessed to backstabbing an old friend in her early standup days. Instead, a post-coital conversation with a one-night-stand played by Devon Sawa (Millennial Editor’s Note: OH MY GODDDD!!!), who has zero clue he just banged a comedy legend, helps uncork all the feelings the veteran performer has been missing.

In the most recent episode of Hacks, “The Click,” no-strings sex turns out to be a real confidence boost. “We’re going to LA, baby!” Deborah announces. Between her protégé betraying her in a gossipy email and her own securities, she has a lot to unpack. But until then: a comedy special!

“She [Deborah] needs to tell the truth about what happened to her, but she also needs to tell the truth about how she's been culpable—how she's wronged people—and her own flaws,” says Hacks co-creator Jen Statsky about this revelation in the most recent episode of Season 2.

Deborah has long painted herself as a woman scorned, but this is only a fraction of the story. “Audiences are smart. They can handle more than you think, and I think Deborah learns that in the sixth episode,” notes Statsky. “The audience can handle the full story. It doesn’t have to be that she paints herself one way. It can be that she is honest about even the things she’s done wrong.”

Professional heartbreak is the source of her resentment. It’s a deep, unspoken wound that festers until she finally shares it publicly in “The Click.”

Deborah’s almost-late-night gig has been lost to the annals of television history, at least until Ava found the unaired pilot. The 1976 Time cover proclaimed Deborah as “TV’s It Girl.” This never came to pass. Entering the world of standup was a path she took after her professional and personal partnership fell apart.

“To her, it is the worst thing in the world that she got so close to this dream of hers, and it was taken away,” Statsky says about Deborah’s off-book riff about the one heartbreak she has never got over.

Indeed, there is a recognizable link to Joan Rivers as inspiration for Deborah (as well as other “great women”). Statsky references a “two-person [Mike] Nichols and [Elaine] May type act” as an analog for Deborah's creative relationship with her ex-husband. What the late-night offer represents is “something that would be very hard for her husband at the time to accept, that she was getting more of the spotlight. As talented as, in our minds, they both were, Deborah was far and away, the star.” With Jean Smart in this role, it is hard to imagine it any other way.

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Decades later, Deborah has found a new unlikely partner in Gen Z writer Ava (played by Hannah Einbinder). This bond weathers a betrayal that the Vance marriage could not. After too many drinks and a Xanax, Ava wrote an anger-fueled email to the creators of a TV show, which included grievances ranging from pointing out Deborah’s blunt comments about Ava’s appearance to revealing deeply fraught details shared in confidence about Deborah’s daughter. “We wanted this email that was planted at the end of Season 1 to reverberate throughout the entire season,” Statsky says. “We didn't want it to be a plot device [that] then went away.”

Painful truths about Deborah’s bullying tactics are entwined with statements Ava made because she was hurt, “such as the fact that she doesn't love her. That’s obviously untrue. Ava does love Deborah.”

While stand-up can be considered a solo endeavor, on Hacks, this onscreen partnership reflects the collaborative spirit behind the scenes. The now 36-year-old first met co-creators Lucia Aniello and Paul W. Downs (who also plays Jimmy on the show) in 2008 while performing in a sketch group that was an offshoot of the Upright Citizens Brigade.

“Instantly, I was desperate to make this person [Aniello] my friend and work with her because I thought she was so funny, smart, and cool. Then I met Paul through her, and we all hit it off,” she recalls.

The process of pitching and refining jokes that is such a part of the Hacks tapestry has roots in Statsky’s first job in TV comedy as a monologue writer on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. “I wrote hundreds of jokes a day, hundreds of—I should specify—bad jokes a day,” she laughs. “Not that the show is bad. It’s just that when you have a deadline for a certain number of jokes to hit by a certain time in the morning, you throw some real bad ones in there.”

Statsky made the transition from late-night to narrative on the Mike Schur-created Parks and Recreation and The Good Place. She remained close with Aniello and Downs, and “we always would talk about ideas we wanted to do.” Eventually, this led to Hacks, which, in contrast to Deborah’s career, is experiencing a high, with Emmy, SAG, and DGA wins.

In the past, Statsky admits she used to find it annoying when people said they were shocked when they won awards. “It's like, you knew you were nominated…” However, this changed when the creative team won for writing and directing at the 2021 Emmys. Statsky refers to Smart as the “world’s best living actor,” so her Best Actress victory was less unexpected. “The show was still relatively young and new. It was shocking and surprising in a very lovely way.”

Of course, pressure exists, whether you are coming back from bombing or scored 15 Emmy nominations in your debut season. The solution? To keep it small. “One of the joys of the show is that it's a very collaborative process. By creating it with Paul and Lucia, and having these wonderful writers, actors, and crew, you begin to make things for each other.”

The first season broke down Deborah’s walls as a person, and the second finds her shedding her habit of using jokes as armor on the public stage. “She's doing this terrifying thing, which is reinventing herself and telling her truth,” explains Statsky about Deborah’s choice to leave the comforts of Las Vegas for a tour bus.

Hacks isn’t a 30 Rock rapid jokes-per-minute ratio, nor is it as dark as Barry or Atlanta.

Episodes have made me tear up several times this season (as they did last year), and Statsky says they don’t want to give audiences tonal whiplash.

“We are always trying to hone things and get them more right in the middle lane of where we think it should be tonally,” she says. One example of this occurs in the third episode when Weed (guest star Laurie Metcalf) accidentally throws away Ava’s father’s ashes. (She thinks it is a tennis ball tube full of dirt). This scene encapsulates how Hacks walks the razor-thin line between absurdity and emotion, and showcases Einbinder’s ability to go toe-to-toe with Smart.

While Deborah is battling to reinvent her routine, Ava is dealing with the emotional weight of her father’s death. “What we wanted to make sure we didn't do was that this character would have this huge thing happen in her life suddenly, this traumatic thing of losing a parent relatively out of the blue, and then it doesn't ripple throughout the rest of her stories.”

Grief doesn’t have a timeline or an expiration date. “It's the water you're swimming in for the rest of your life, so to speak,” notes Statsky. Running parallel to that is Ava’s guilt over betraying Deborah. “She's dealing with the difficult thing of, 'Oh, when I fuck up, how do I make amends for it? How do I be better?'”

Ava is Einbinder’s first significant professional acting role, and it is impossible to undersell the tricky balance she strikes this season. “I think it's such a testament to Hannah that she can play both things so beautifully, and it never feels inauthentic,” says Statsky.

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In addition to this performance, small details such as texts from Ava’s dad that mentioned basketball and the 1976 Time magazine having a written (and readable) story add to the lived-in quality. “We want these characters to feel real and this world to feel real,” Statsky says.

On the road, the duo hits a bumpy patch almost immediately when Ava confesses to sending an email sharing extremely personal anecdotes about her boss to the creators of the fictional series Bitch PM. (“Their show is about a Prime Minister… who is a bitch,” Ava explains.) “We're drawn to this idea that conflict is intimacy,” Statsky notes about one of the primary elements of the central dynamic and how it is playing out this season.

The email caused the rupture, but it is also the blueprint to moving forward. “It is true what Ava says. [Deborah is] a bully who thinks of herself as a victim. As painful as it is for Deborah to hear and as awful as it is that Ava put it in writing, there is truth to it,” Statsky says. “Deborah comes to realize that is true: ‘I should reckon with that, and I should reckon with it on stage.’”

Before she hits on this light-bulb moment, it is far from smooth sailing. (No, I am not only referring to the lesbian cruise.) “It's about two women who are artists, and we wanted to show as organically as possible that process of creativity and how it can be incredibly frustrating,” says Statsky. “But also incredibly rewarding, especially if you're doing it with someone you have a deep connection with.”

Deborah’s confidence takes a battering, and she is upstaged at the State Fair by a calf birth (actually, its twins) in “Retired.” A residency on the Las Vegas strip this is not.

Guest star Harriet Sansom Harris plays Susan, Deborah’s friend and comedy rival from back in the early days of battling for the one spot reserved for a woman. As the showbiz cliché/reality goes, there could only be one for women in stand-up.

The morning we chat over Zoom, Statsky has been working on the official HBO Max tie-in podcast. She says guests such as Rosie O'Donnell, Margaret Cho, and Susie Essman have confirmed this is an accurate portrait. “There was only room for one woman on the bill. Rosie was saying there would be something called ‘Estrogen Night,’ and they would throw all the women on that, and that would be good for the month or whatever.” In an environment that forced women to be competitive, it is no wonder Deborah rubbed Susan’s name off the board.

Deborah feels guilty about what she did to Susan, but Statsky also doesn’t think she would alter too much about her journey to the top.

Ava’s comment that “nothing matters more, even if it should” applies to her boss. “Nothing matters more to her than stand-up and comedy, so she's not going, 'I would change so much.' She would probably change various punchlines and tags to jokes. That's probably what she wishes she could go back and change, to get a bigger laugh.”

It isn’t a redemption tour that Deborah is on. No one wants to watch that. Instead, Hacks digs into a protagonist who has fixated on her career rather than striking a work-life balance.

Ava and Deborah connect on a granular level, and the pool scene at the end of “Retired” hits on their inability to switch off. “Sometimes you realize you have this thing, and you're not going to be able to stop thinking about it,” Statsky describes. “That would happen to Paul, Lucia, and I. We'd be hanging out getting dinner, and we would start talking about the idea for the show. It would creep in, and it's hard to set boundaries. Like, it just happens.”

Deborah’s aspirations were too big to survive her marriage, but Ava doesn’t want a slice of the spotlight. “All these pairs of people on the show who realize they're workaholics are like, ‘Well, maybe I can't stop this bug that makes me want to work all the time. I can't escape it,’” Statsky says. “‘But maybe the best I can do is find a partner to do it with.’”

It is a notion that would initially draw eye rolls or a snarky comment from both Ava and Deborah, but the love story at the heart of Hacks is about finding your comedy soulmate. Both can stop searching.

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