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It’s been two years since we last saw Hacks, thanks to the dual strikes that delayed pretty much every project coming out of Hollywood. So if you don’t recall what happened at the end of Season 2, we go over that a bit in the body of this review. Suffice to say, it seemed like a pretty conclusive ending. So where does the show go from there?
HACKS SEASON 3: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: “ONE YEAR LATER.” We see a shot of the Las Vegas Strip, and it continually zooms in until we get to the entrance of Caesar’s Palace, where a woman who looks a lot like Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) gets out of a car and walks in and through the casino.
The Gist: It’s actually a lookalike, hired by Marty (Christopher McDonald) to promote the new Vance-themed slot machine at his hotels. Where is Deborah? At the Time 100 gala, of course.
In the year since her very personal comedy special, My Bad, was released, Deborah’s career has exploded in ways she’s never experienced. She’s hobnobbing with Nobel Prize winners, and hasn’t bought her own dinner in a year. There are some slight drawbacks, though; when she goes to a comedy club to try out new material, the audience laughs hysterically at anything she says, even if it’s not meant to be funny. Also, she’s not sleeping: Her house manager Josefina (Rose Adobo) pulls aside Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins), the CEO of Deborah’s corporation, to show him that she’s rearranged her extensive salt-and-pepper shaker collection.
She’s being given an award at the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal, and when the gowns her stylist bring don’t do it for her, she takes everyone to her “closet,” which is a huge storage hangar where she has her gowns carefully stored and categorized. She takes out a yellow gown that everyone tells her looks fabulous, even though it doesn’t.
Ava (Hannah Einbeinder) has been doing well since Deborah fired her after My Bad, which Ava helped her write, was released. She lives in LA with her girlfriend and writes for a current-events comedy show that’s started to gain traction. She’s doing so well, that the host, Lewis Benton (Aristotle Athari) asks her to join him on a JFL panel he’s going to be on.
In the meantime, Jimmy (Paul W. Downs) and Kayla (Megan Stalter) have struck out on their own and started their own agency, and with Deborah still in Jimmy’s stable, they have some juice. They go to JFL to support Deborah and look for new talent to represent; Kayla insists that they rent a purple Lambo to arrive at the hotel in style. To get the jump on some rivals from their old agency, they decide to talk to an up-and-coming comic whose set was the talk of the festival, even though they never actually saw it.
When Ava finds out that Deborah is in Montreal, she tries to avoid running into her old boss and friend. But that doesn’t last long; they run into each other in an elevator, and Ava then knocks on Deborah’s hotel room door when their awkward interaction isn’t as brutally honest as she’s used to.
They fall right into the same rhythm they had when they were working together, starting with Ava calling that yellow gown “hideous.” The frost between them starts to melt, but when Deborah asks Ava about the wording of a joke in her award acceptance speech, Ava bitterly reminds her that Deborah fired her, and worse, has barely kept in contact in the intervening time. But her remaining anger towards Deborah dissipates, when during the panel, she advises a writer who’s starting out that, even though their profession is a constant struggle, to “try to enjoy where you’re at right now, because you’ll miss it, and you can never go back.”
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? At this point, Hacks is hard to compare to other shows, though with the way Downs and his co-creators, Lucia Aniello and Jen Statsky, have built the world around Deborah and Ava, you could compare the show to other ensemble series like Ted Lasso or Insecure.
Our Take: We were wondering how Hacks was going to navigate a third season, given how conclusively Season 2 ended. Deborah has revived her career with her special, and, right as she and Ava’s personal relationship is at its warmest, Deborah fires Ava as a way of helping the young writer explore her career on her own. She sticks with Jimmy, who quits his agency and starts a smaller one with Kayla in tow. Where else could the show go?
At this point, with Deborah and Ava both doing well career-wise, it’s their personal relationship that still needs to be addressed. Deborah ended it abruptly because she felt the need for a “clean break,” as she tells Ava, but Ava isn’t a clean break kind of person, and she angrily tells Deborah how much she was hurt by being cut off like that. More than the comedy, it’s the emotions between these two women, who are each searching for the familial relationship that they can’t get from their own kin, that is at the heart of Hacks. And when Ava and Deborah fall back into their old rhythm in that hotel room, that’s when the show is at its best.
So there’s plenty for Downs, Aniello and Statsky to work with there. Sure, comedy will be a part of all of this. Opportunities are going to come to both women, and the work is always integral to how they relate to each other. But if this season is less about the “biz” and more about how Ava and Deborah rebuild their relationship and come to the conclusion that the audience already knows — that they need each other — it’ll be very satisfying to watch.
Smart and Einbinder continue to fully inhabit their characters, and the two years between seasons (thanks to the dual Hollywood strikes, of course) hasn’t dimmed either’s enthusiasm for their roles and the story. But it’ll be fun to watch Jimmy and Kayla operate as a tiny agency, with Kayla now being Jimmy’s inappropriate, but daring and hilarious equal. We want to see more of Marcus, whom we think got the short end of the narrative stick in Season 2. But for the most part, if the rest of Season 3 of Hacks is as satisfying as the first episode was, we’ll be pretty happy.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Deborah takes a coconut cake (long story) to Ava’s room, but finds out she’s checked out. She takes a fingerful of icing, which she couldn’t do while trying to fit in her ugly gown, and throws the rest in the trash.
Sleeper Star: Can Megan Stalter be considered a sleeper anymore? We love her manic energy, and now that Kayla can exasperate Jimmy at will, she’ll be even more fun to watch. Helen Hunt makes a quick appearance as the president of the service that airs the show Ava works on; we’ll see more of her later. Christina Hendricks will also play a guest role this season.
Most Pilot-y Line: We think that the woman who looked like Deborah at the beginning of the episode is actually Marty’s new wife. We get why Marty would want her to dress like Deborah, but why she’d agree to it is anyone’s guess.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Hacks keeps on keeping on in Season 3, finding a way to keep Deborah and Ava in each other’s emotional orbits even though they don’t work together anymore.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
