Note: This story contains possible spoilers for season four of Hacks.
It’s difficult for any popular TV show to recapture the original, lower-stakes magic of its first season, but there’s a moment early on in season four of Hacks—Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky’s award-winning Max series about Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), a disenchanted millennial comedy writer forced to write jokes for legendary Vegas stand-up diva Deborah Vance (Jean Smart)—that makes it perfectly clear just why the show keeps cleaning up at the Emmys and Golden Globes.
In the scene, Ava schlumps her way down the escalator at Los Angeles’s Americana at Brand mall (where she just so happens to live), exhaustedly sipping coffee in a camo-thermal-and-basketball-shorts-forward look that Deborah swiftly condemns by telling her: “You know, you’re not funny enough to dress like Adam Sandler.”
Deborah’s relentless and consistently funny bodying of Ava aside, the fourth season of Hacks explores the ever-shifting dynamic between the two women, revealing a new side of Ava in particular that feels genuinely refreshing. In case you’ve already forgotten, season three ended with Ava extorting her way into a head writer job on Deborah’s new late-night show, and seeing her attempt to keep up with Deborah’s decades’ worth of vengeance-getting experience is fascinating, whether they’re in the writers’ room, at a major Hollywood event, or at a strip club.
“I so admire our writers, because they’ve been able to evolve Deborah and Ava’s relationship while at the same time dealing with a certain amount of push-pull and generational difference,” says Smart. “I was afraid after season one that if they started to work together and became closer, that friction would kind of go away, and I thought that would be a big loss, but it’s obviously not the case.”
When I ask Einbinder how it feels to have to be mean to Jean Smart, she levels with me: “It really feels bad. It’s very hard for me. It feels super-warranted that they’re fighting, but when we cut, Jean and I just look at each other sadly.”
Deborah and Ava’s ongoing rivalry is far from the only emotionally resonant plot point of the season, however, with Downs’s slightly nervous straight-man agent Jimmy and Megan Stalter’s deranged-but-kind-of-brilliant assistant turned girlboss Kayla becoming a bona fide buddy-comedy duo on (somewhat) equal professional footing. The development of Jimmy and Kayla’s onscreen chemistry clearly stems from the admiration the actors have for each other.
“There is nobody like Megan Stalter. She is one of a kind,” Downs tells me, with Stalter saying of Downs: “Everything he does is the funniest; every idea he has is profound. That goes for all the creators and cast of this show. I just love being the Kayla to Paul’s Jimmy. Kayla and Jimmy 4ever!” (Stalter also had an immediate response when asked who Kayla’s biggest Hollywood-glow-up inspiration would be: “Bethenny Frankel. Kayla would have invented the Skinnygirl margarita if Bethenny didn’t do it first. You don’t think Kayla is scooping the bread out of her bagel every morning and eating it with caviar? Not because of calories, for the taste!!”)
Of course, no self-respecting comedy can rest on its previously established relationships for a whole season, and to that end, one of the new season’s brightest, most unexpected arcs involves ex-Hasidic lesbian comedian Robby Hoffman as Kayla’s new assistant, Randi. Hoffman is more or less playing herself, and when I congratulate her on her recent marriage to Traitors star Gabby Windey, she responds with classic Borscht Belt timing: “Married life is unbelievable. I recommend to everyone. Are you married? Get on it.”
Randi is no less forthright, despite being brand-new to Hollywood, and Hoffman describes the specifically absurd experience of essentially auditioning to play herself thusly: “Imagine auditioning for a part they basically wrote for you, and you don’t get it. It’s the easiest basket you could nail, but if you miss that basket, you’re never showing your face again.”
Fans of Hacks will find a lot to love in season four (including the return—however brief—of the effortlessly hysterical Poppy Liu as Vegas card dealer and Deborah confidante Kiki, whom I would absolutely watch in her own spinoff), which premieres on Max this spring and feels like a thoughtful and well-crafted riposte to the notion that a story centering on two very different women would eventually run out of runway. As long as Ava and Deborah are still feuding about the definition of success, I’m watching—and if Deborah is still finding innovative ways to critique Ava’s hairstyle, I’m laughing.
See more images from season four of Hacks below.
