Review: Hacks, "Just for Laughs" & "Better Late"| Season 3, Episodes 1 & 2
A two episode premiere reunites Deborah and Ava, but suggests that their bond is going to be as fraught as ever
Welcome to Episodic Medium’s coverage of the third season of Max comedy Hacks. This first review is free for all, but subsequent weekly reviews—covering two episodes a piece until the finale—will be exclusive to paid subscribers. For more on what we’re covering this month, check out our full spring schedule.
It was hard not to wonder, at the end of the second season of Hacks, if the show was going to end there. Deborah had reclaimed her place as a sharp and respected legend in the comedy world, and Ava had gained confidence and seasoning as a comedy writer thanks to the creative alchemy that came out of their partnership. After Deborah’s tough love firing of Ava in the wake of their critical and commercial success together, they’d both go on to bigger and better things, with Deborah’s special and their subsequent parting proof that they were both emotionally mature enough to overcome their shared tendency for self-sabotage. Parting was hard and sad, but it was time for them both to take on new challenges without each other.
Or was it? Season 3’s premiere, “Just for Laughs,” ends with a hint that the two of them might reunite, but it also works hard to provide the storytelling juice sufficient to make it believable that they’d get sucked back into each other’s orbit.
To some extent, this involves proving that neither of them knows how to be happy. Sure, Deborah’s got the red carpet appearances, the Super Bowl commercial, and the invite to the Time 100 to prove she’s on top of the world. But she also can’t tell jokes in a comedy club anymore because audiences are too primed to laugh at everything she says. No one will tell her a hideous dress is ugly. Having battled a certain level of affectionate disinterest from the public for years, she’s unprepared for a frictionless lifestyle of adoration.
The opening scene has a lot of fun with the concept of Deborah’s old level of fame versus her new status. The viewer sees what seems to be Deborah in her usual sequined jacket strolling through her usual milieu, a casino floor, but she’s there without assistants. Even the response of the people playing there feels on par with what we used to know about Deborah. Sure, there’s at least one couple that’s going to take a photo of her because she’s a celeb, but for the most part, people keep playing their games without noticing her because she’s such a fixture, and the event she’s there for is pretty depressing: the debut of a slot machine featuring her likeness. Except we’ve been following a lookalike, and the real one is hitting all those red carpets. It’s a reminder of how far she’s come, but also underlines the fact that Deborah’s been exercising the muscle of wanting more for herself for two seasons now. She can’t give up setting herself new mountains to climb.
The show has always suffered a bit in its efforts to make Ava’s life matter as much as Deborah’s, and that hasn’t gone away in the new season. A comedy writer learning to thrive at a new gig where she does dependable but not showstopping work simply cannot compete, narratively, with a titan of the comedy world reclaiming her former glory. Plus, thanks to the fact that the rest of the cast is populated with people who work for Deborah, no one in Ava’s life ever seems that scintillating, and the cracks in her life aren’t that extreme. The whole thing lacks the texture it needs to feel meaningful. The life we care about here is Deborah’s, and we’re only ever waiting for everyone else to return to it.
But since the premiere is mainly about showing what these two are up to apart, it’s perhaps fitting that the episode doesn’t really spark until they’re back together. It’s not bad—it’s doing necessary work to situate us in the changed circumstances of these two characters. It’s just not as funny or emotionally fraught as the best scenes of this show.
There’s finally a frisson of tension when they encounter each other in the elevator at the comedy festival, but it’s not until Ava chases Deborah down in her hotel room so Deborah can insult her to her face that it really feels like Hacks again. The hotel room scene gets back to what makes the show sing: the give and take between these two women. But even that scene makes clear how flawed that relationship is. Sure, we’re going to get some hilarious cracks about Ava’s new haircut and they’re going to have some fun together, but we’re also going to see the emotional damage Deborah has a nasty habit of imparting. Not only did she fire Ava, we learn, but she cut herself out of Ava’s life completely, which goes beyond tough love into the mildly sociopathic. Why in the world would that be necessary to help Ava grow? It’s a question Ava herself has clearly struggled with, so much so that her girlfriend has forced them into couple’s therapy to hash out why Ava is so obsessed with this singular relationship in her life.
The second episode back, “Better Late,” certainly makes the argument that their connection is the most creatively fulfilling thing in either of their lives. After Deborah starts responding to Ava’s texts again, they’re off to the races, in the special world they’ve created where they’re funnier and more important than everyone else. “Better Late” emphasizes that their bond really is quite productive, even if it stacks the deck by making all the other comedy writers dullards. But that connection also pulls them away from other people in their lives, and the episode plants the seeds for what seems like it might be the singular conflict of the season: for all that they may be comedy soulmates, the power dynamic between them means that Ava is always going to be working for Deborah. Of course, this reality doesn’t hit Ava until she’s already blown up her relationship to come help Deborah prepare an audition to be the next late night host. Even the best case scenario here is that she goes on to work on Deborah’s show, where Deborah would remain squarely in the spotlight.
But is that enough, if it means working with the person who understands her better than anyone else? By the end of this episode, the show has sort of proven there may be no perfect way for these two to coexist. Apart, they’re both a bit aimless and unfocused. Together, they’re toxic, and as Ruby reminds Ava, Deborah has done some truly awful things to her. What would a happy, healthy relationship for them even be?
Luckily, the longer they take to figure this out, the more the show will have to work with—that said, it’s a bit telling that it doesn’t really feel like the season has begun until Ava shows up at Deborah’s Las Vegas mansion once again. That’s two full episodes of narrative churn to get to the really good stuff. The central thread of this show has consistently been so good that it more or less overshadows the fact that it doesn’t totally have a handle on managing its other threads. Is it funny every time Jimmy gets humiliated? Yes, of course. Do I care that much that he’s trying to make a go of it as a manager on his own? Not unless the show suddenly does.
Marcus has generally fared better among the secondary characters, though the initial glimpses of what we’ll just call the Etsy plotline don’t quite make clear what his role in it will be. It’s fun to watch him spar with Guy Branum’s Ezekiel, but harder to tell what he makes of the whole thing. After getting such a deep look into his inability to balance his devotion to Deborah with the rest of his life, the thread lacks the fizz of the other times we’ve gotten a glimpse of his efforts to step outside his shell.
Still, even if it’s two episodes of setup, it’s still a pleasure to see the show come back and reset its own stakes so capably. Deborah’s gravitational pull may occasionally mean that some of the patchwork is showing in the rest of the show, but Jean Smart’s performance remains so fully realized, so soulful and profound, that you can hardly blame everyone else for getting sucked in. How could they not?
Stray observations
Some of the music cues here were a little on the nose. “Evil Woman” is so overused at this point that it’s hard to wring much more meaning out of it, and playing “Dirty Work” over Ava’s realization that she’s back under Deborah’s thumb felt a bit like putting a hat on a hat.
They’re set up for failure as not-Ava, but I was still pleased to see Dylan Gelula and Jordan Gavaris pop up as Deborah’s new writers. Though it is still a bit uncanny to see Gavaris without his Orphan Black accent.
“You’re not going to say I look like a little pageboy or something?” “No, I just thought maybe you’d put a child’s wig on backwards.” Nobody does it like Deborah.
There’s something especially funny about Jimmy getting ground into the dirt all the time, considering Paul Downs is one of the executive producers. It’s always impressive that it’s not his fault, either. He’s actually pretty competent! He does not deserve to end a meeting with an important executive plaintively asking her if she hooked up with his dad before or after his parents got divorced.
Megan Salter is so funny as Kayla that I’m impressed with the show’s restraint in not overdoing it with a character that doesn’t really have a connection to reality. Renting Jimmy a bright purple $300k car to drive in a foreign city without English signage is pretty funny, as is his eventual pitiful insistence that he did a good job driving it (he did not).
Some of the show’s imbalance towards Deborah is inevitable, and some of it is because it’s hard not to take her side when Ava starts griping about the toxic masculinity of leading man culture while eating Tom Cruise’s special coconut cake.
The late night run-through is some good, efficient storytelling about how important all of the people around Deborah are. Marcus is going to make sure she’s getting filmed in ways that make her look good, Ava will sharpen her jokes, and you know what, Damien is right that those cushions looked great. It takes work to make the Deborah show run this well.
Very excited to be here providing Hacks coverage! I haven’t been on a show for the newsletter in a minute, and I’m glad to be back, and covering one of my favorite shows. Can’t wait to see where this season goes.
I had sort of forgotten about this show with the long hiatus, but these episodes were a great return I thought. I agree that the show has great restraint with Kayla considering how much they could potentially over use her.
I find Ava often annoying, but also very funny. I laughed hard at:
"I knew you never read the graphic novel!" "I cant follow the fucking boxes!"
That was Jordan Gavaris?! I watched every episode of Orphan Black and did not recognize him even a little bit. That accent did some *work*.
So glad to have this show back! Deborah's deadpan remains absolutely killer. That hosting gig was such a great showcase for her brilliance. Really good 'show don't tell' work there.
Part of the problem with Ava's storyline feeling slight is it feels like we never see her struggles/triumphs in the way we do Deborah. We're told Ava's doing well, the host says she's his fav writer, she's invited to Montreal, but we never *see* her doing good work away from Deborah. She had that moment where she told the girl in the audience that it's always a struggle, but we haven't really seen that from her, either (and what struggles we do see came from her being insufferable, not the toughness of the biz where you can sympathize). Ava only exists to stand in Deborah's shadow or to reflect her light, never on her own. Which is why she has to be *with* Deborah for anything with her to feel resonant. It doesn't have to be that way, but it's what the writers have chosen, perhaps to make the two of them together sing in the way they do.