‘It’s Arousing That She Has a Worth...

SPOILER ALERT This interview contains spoilers from “Bulletproof,” the Season 3 finale of “Hacks,” now streaming on Max

Published Time: 31.05.2024 - 18:31:33 Modified Time: 31.05.2024 - 18:31:33

SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers from “Bulletproof,” the Season 3 finale of “Hacks,” now streaming on Max.

“Hacks” spent its third season bringing its two lead characters back together, and enmeshing them more thoroughly in each other’s careers and lives. And in the season finale, it bound them together for the foreseeable future — all while ensuring that their next steps together will be colored by blackmail, betrayal, and all the other elements of interpersonal comedy.

The previous season had ended with Deborah (Jean Smart) firing Ava (Hannah Einbinder) so that Hannah could grow into her voice independently; it was a state of affairs that couldn’t last long. Brought back into the fold, Ava embraces an unlikely new mission for her comedy-legend boss — getting her the coveted position of hosting a late-night talk show. Having helped secure that job for Deborah, Ava simply assumes she’ll be brought on as head writer. Not so: Deborah is concerned that the fact of her own casting will be risk enough for the network, and plans to keep the previous show’s head writer, a man with more experience.

What follows is a blistering fight — the “Sopranos” episode “Whitecaps” transferred into the world of comedy, and to this very particular mentor-mentee relationship. Series co-creator Lucia Aniello says: “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen any scene on this show as strong as the Deborah and Ava fight in the finale. Hannah’s performance in that scene is insane.”

But Ava isn’t done yet. She goes on to blackmail Deborah, promising to expose the fact of her having slept with the head of the network before getting her new job. And Deborah, thus forced to work with a colleague she now knows would gladly threaten her humiliation in order to get what she wants, ends the season with everything she wanted: except for stability with Ava.

Aniello, with fellow co-creators Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky, spoke with Variety in March for a magazine feature about the season as a whole. In our conversation, they addressed the May 30 finale and other events throughout the season, the evolution of the Deborah-Ava dynamic, and why — if only subliminally — Deborah finds Ava’s heel turn “arousing.”

I was struck by the way that the fighting over Ava’s role in Deborah’s life seemed like how these characters express a complicated love for each other.

Paul W. Downs: We always talk about their relationship being one step forward, two steps back. As they evolve, they’re going to backslide. People can make incremental change, but they don’t completely change who they are. Both of them think they’re doing right by the other person. Deborah thinks, “We have to get this show to work, so sit down and let’s figure it out.” Ava is like, “It will work better because I do it.” They both are being a little bit selfish. They both have learned moves from the other person.

But in the end, it’s their love language. They’re forced to be together — their destinies are intertwined. Because they’re after the same thing, which is dignity.

Lucia Aniello: Especially the idea that Ava has been studying Deborah through the seasons, and understands how Deborah operates and how she doesn’t ask for respect — she takes respect. And in that fight scene, it’s almost like Deborah is subconsciously, subliminally telling her, “If you want this, you have to go get it.”

It recalled the Season 2 finale of “Succession,” when Kendall blows his father up on live TV and his father watches with a smile. It’s like he has a newfound respect for his son — and the same felt true of Deborah.

Downs: We definitely will take “Succession.” But we’ve been trying to bake that in. They are mirror images of each other. They found the other half of the coin in each other. While it is infuriating and really scary — because what will this do to the foundation of the relationship? — Deborah is lit up by it.

Jen Statsky: She didn’t know Ava had it in her until that very moment. It’s a shock, and for lack of a better term, it’s a turn-on for Deborah.

Aniello: I was going to say — it’s arousing!

Statsky: It’s arousing that she has a worthy opponent. I don’t think Deborah ever feels like she has a worthy opponent.

Was there ever a world in which Deborah wasn’t going to get the late-night chair?

Downs: She was always going to get it.

Aniello: The big thing was how to justify it. If that happened tomorrow, we would be surprised if a 70-year-old woman was suddenly a late-night host. But we felt like, we’ve set up Deborah at the height of her career. And if there was ever going to be a moment, this is it. That’s the situation — how do we make sure it feels real? She would get it, but how do we make sure it feels like something that could actually happen in the realm of existence in our society?

Downs: If there was a Deborah Vance in the world, I could see her getting it. Because it is a novel thing, especially in this time of “Oh, we got her wrong.&r -

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dquo; Now, executives would say, “Let’s do that, because it’s noisy.” I think when Ellen DeGeneres’ sitcom was canceled, no one was like, “Oh, an openly gay woman is going to be a daytime talk show host, and win all these Emmys.” Not in this world! And yet she was able to accomplish that. So I think it’s closer to reality than not.

Aniello: But it was important for us to have a formidable foil in Jack Danby. Because that is who would get it, right? The good-looking guy who’s six-foot-five. We have to take him down, we have to go to the affiliates. We have to go to “Talk Stoop,” do all the things — because she is shameless. So if she is shameless, and she is willing to sell herself, let’s watch her do that.

Statsky: We always like that —even though Deborah is a larger-than-life character — we want the show to always feel grounded. So we wanted to make sure that it felt like a grounded, real way that could happen in our entertainment industry. We wanted to make sure that it felt earned and real, because we never want the show to feel like a fantasy.

It’s funny we ended up here, given that the second-season finale, when Deborah fired Ava, felt to many viewers like a potential series ender. Getting them back together was an obvious challenge.

Downs: We did talk about the show for many years before we pitched it, and we did have the math of what we wanted the series to look like. That said, we don’t always have the specifics of exactly how to get them back together. That was something we had to challenge ourselves to figure out — we’d painted ourselves into a corner and had to figure out exactly the ways in which we did the details. But for us, it was never going to be a series finale.

Aniello: We didn’t want to get them back together, and then forget about it, and it’s over. Deborah being like, “I need you to come back,” and Ava saying, “OK, well, I need to know that this will result in something for our relationship.” But in the end, Ava is like, “I gave up all that…”

The way they got back together is now coming to roost in the finale. For us, it felt like making sure that splitting them up wasn’t just a MacGuffin. I wanted to make sure that splitting up meant something for the relationship that grew as the season went on.

Touching on other events late in the season, it interested me that the penultimate episode took place on a college campus, and involved conversations about “cancel culture.” I’d been wondering if that particular perspective on comedy would ever enter the show.

Downs: It was a tall order to do, and it was very carefully thought about. We’ve had the idea for the episode since Season 1.

Aniello: It was in the original pitch.

Downs: Because we don’t want to come down too hard on one side, and because it’s a very nuanced and complicated conversation, we wanted to wait for the right moment. The quest she’s on this season gave us the perfect opportunity to do this story. It’s something we felt we had to tackle — when context shifts over time, comedy does change. It’s really triggering for people, because it’s not that you age out of being funny, but sometimes your material ages out of being relevant or appropriate. Grappling with that is a marker of Deborah’s evolution.

An interesting element of the season was the introduction of Deborah’s sister Kathy, played by J. Smith-Cameron. I’d kind of assumed she’d be like Maris Crane on “Frasier” and never be seen.

Downs: It was so fun to open the door and see her.

Statsky: We’re always trying to make sure we’re pushing all of our characters to evolve. For Deborah to keep growing and evolving, she had to confront this thing. If you’re an artist, especially a comedian, you need to be honest to yourself first. And one thing Ava has pushed Deborah to do over three seasons is to be a more honest version of herself. And to do that, she would eventually have to confront Kathy and this relationship. It’s obviously something that has stayed with her for 50 years. We always were going to have her.

Downs: The how and when was a high-wire act. There is a mystique to her — it is the Maris thing. When do we do it? There’s so much happening this season. But the storytelling dictated that we do this, with D.J. and her pregnancy. The rekindling and the loss of her sister was going to be one of the things that drove her to what she does in the finale.

Statsky: Finally having this conversation with Kathy, it took us three seasons to earn these moments. Deborah needed to earn it with her evolution, and as a show we needed to earn it with our audience.

Downs: We needed the actor to be available too.

Statsky: We needed another successful HBO show to end.

This interview has been edited and condensed.