‘Hacks’ Season 3 Is the Show’s Best Release Yet: Review

DEborah Vance and Ava Daniels can’t seem to separate themselves. For two seasons, the love-hate relationship between HacksImperious old-school comedian Deborah (Jean Smart) and woke, down-on-her-luck 20-something comedy writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder), hired to update her material, have fueled some of the funniest and most provocative humor in history. TV. about people who make a living telling jokes. So, for a year or so, it seemed like the joke was on Hacks. First, Smart needed heart surgery. Just days after she recovered and the Emmy-winning series returned to production, the WGA and then SAG-AFTRA went on strike.

Hence the two-year wait for Season 3, the first two episodes of which debuted May 2 on Max. Such a disjointed production schedule could have been disastrous for a show that relies so heavily on the chemistry of its cast — and especially among its intergenerational leads. . Fortunately, the actors seem to have flourished amid adversity, just as Deborah and Ava often do. Creators Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky created Hacks‘best season yet, the one that allows the characters to grow without killing their thorny, push-pull bond. Smart and Einbinder elevate this story arc even further with a relationship that feels more natural and intimate than ever before.

When we last saw the divine Mrs. V, her career was soaring on the strength of a wildly successful self-released special, in which she ditched her dated stand-up and told the funny, sad, and real stories she’d accumulated as a pioneering woman in a male-dominated entertainment industry. It was Ava who encouraged Deborah to try hard, and Deborah obliged by pushing her out of the nest. At the end of season 2, the diva fired a protégé she had come to respect, hoping that the young woman would take advantage of the opportunity to start realizing her own dreams.

But Hacks would not be Hacks if its stars spent all their screen time apart. Season three picks up a year after its predecessor ended, as Vance’s rise continues with the appearance of Deborah – what else? – on TIME 100. Things are going great for Ava too. She got a job writing for a John Oliver-style comedy news program. Last week tonight and is living with his actress girlfriend, Ruby (Lorenza Izzo). Then she meets Deborah at Montreal’s Just for Laughs festival and they bond. Tom Cruise’s coveted coconut cake.

Ava misses working with a boss who can certainly be a self-centered bore, but who also understands her sense of humor. Deborah is surrounded by sycophants, from the two mediocre writers she hired to replace Ava to the stylist who signs off her poor fashion choices to the audience that laughs appreciatively even when she’s not telling a joke, and longs for a collaborator who Tell her the naked truth. So, with Deborah up for her dream job as a late-night host, Ava agrees to spend her show’s three-month hiatus helping her prepare.

Deborah’s new place at the center of the comedy universe gives Aniello, Downs, and Statsky an excuse to examine the strange, fractured, and often contradictory state of this art form in 2024. There’s a roast that brings both the hired and the offended comics together by Deborah. adult daughter, DJ (Kaitlin Olson), together to say the cruelest things they can think of about her. Then there’s his X-rated show, happily co-hosting the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. At one point, Deborah’s story of callous humor resurfaces. Though she initially vows to never apologize for any joke, Ava encourages her to at least listen to a generation that wasn’t even alive when she made many of them, in what is perhaps the least hysterical “cancel culture” storyline TV has ever produced.

For all his timely self-awareness about the industry he represents, Hacks is, in many ways, a traditional sitcom. It’s a professional will-they-or-won’t-they movie, centered on a classic pair of odd couples: two women of widely divergent ages, politics, and bank balances, one just beginning her career and the other a battle-scarred veteran. The third season smartly increases the show’s focus on another mismatched pair, Deborah and Ava’s dangerously decent agent, Jimmy (Downs), and his flighty assistant, Kayla (the wonderful Megan Stalter, now more than just comic relief crazy), who left the agency that their father runs and went out on their own. (The season’s only notable flaw is the dearth of substantial stories for two chronically underdeveloped characters, DJ and Deborah’s repressed deputy Marcus, played by Carl Clemons-Hopkins.)

The writers make inspired use of sitcom devices, from the character who absolutely needs to be in two places at once to the bottle episode; Deborah and Ava are forced to spend hours alone together, as Deborah finally confesses her mixed emotions about getting everything she ever wanted so late in life. “You know,” she tells Ava, “you say all your life, ‘One day I’ll do this, one day I’ll achieve that.’ And the magic of “one day” is that everything is in front of you. But for me, ‘one day’ is now. Anything I want to do, I have to do it now, otherwise I will never do it. That’s the worst part about being old.” The speech resonates whether you’re Deborah’s age or Ava’s age, made all the more moving by Smart’s gradual shift in mood from difficult to vulnerable. In this scene and others, the tumultuous love between her character and Einbinder has a familiar authenticity.

Just like its best precursors, since Seinfeld for 30 rock, Hacks is moving forward a few seasons because it takes a long time for the cast and writing team to learn how to make each other as brilliant as possible. At the beginning of the series, there was a certain disconnect between Einbinder’s affable performance and some of Ava’s more obnoxious moments. Now, the character is perfectly coherent. Deborah has always been the role of a lifetime for Smart, and in the new episodes, the creators reward her virtuosity by giving her more material for introspection and growth than ever before. In the heyday of television comedy, a sitcom that had achieved such ideal synergy could retain its audience – and its network’s support – for more than a decade. It’s fitting, when you consider that one of her heroines is Hollywood’s last survivor, that Hacks has become the rare streaming show with the potential to have the same longevity.