“Hacks” finale is a moving tribute to comedy’s power to keep going

Comedy loves a good callback. The fifth and final season of “Hacks” contains some outstanding nods to triumphs that Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) savored together in the past, while also revisiting a few tribulations. But the ones in the finale top them all.

The series began with the camera following Deborah backstage as she kindly banters with the staff who make her act look easy, and ends with Ava doing her version of that stroll behind the scenes on her own sitcom pilot’s set. 

The Deborah we meet in the series premiere is an extremely wealthy comedy legend (which, in the business, can be polite code for calling somebody a has-been) who views the inexperienced, cocky Ava as an entitled nobody. The show closes with Ava and Deborah as the best of friends, enjoying croissants while waiting for a train at Paris’ Gare de Lyon. It’s a lovely scene, albeit clouded by despair.  

After rising from the ashes of a career burned down by a vindictive ex-husband, circumventing naysayers to revive her stand-up career, making late-night history as the first woman host, only to abandon the job to retain her principles, and securing victory over one of the industry’s most powerful men who tried to silence her, Deborah reveals she has cancer. In her mind, however, this foe isn’t worth fighting.

So the pair’s haute holiday is meant to be Deborah’s last hurrah. First stop, Paris. Last stop, for Deborah anyway, is an assisted suicide facility in Switzerland. If you have seen enough of “Hacks,” you may not have doubted Deborah’s commitment to this bit. For most of the finale’s 46 minutes, she and Ava argue over why Deborah, someone who’s never said die, would so easily surrender to a treatable malady.  She’s already reset her legacy at least three times, sure. But she’s also vain and doesn’t want to be remembered as wasting away. Why not go out on a high note?

The answer “Hacks” creators Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky write into the finale’s climactic scene echoes the moment Deborah and Ava’s professional partnership began, with each helping the other to remember why they love making people laugh.

Television shows built around name-brand comics are a dime a dozen. But by making the art of comedy its vehicle and having two women steer through the industry’s obstacle course, “Hacks” became a celebration of blasting through hurdles. For Ava and Deborah, those impediments could be defined as ageism, sexism, homophobia, or personal vendettas. And for much of the show, both learned they could be their own worst enemies.

Deborah’s fifth season exploits include a romance with a much younger star, and this show’s Harry Styles equivalent, Nico Hayes (Christopher Briney), which she ruins by assuming his genuine feelings for her are a publicity stunt. A few beats later, she partners with her longtime business advisor, Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins), to open her own casino, The Diva — because while a Vegas residency is wonderful, it’s better to own the house. It always wins, don’t you know.

Meanwhile, Ava rises to captain her own sitcom ship, commanding this one with joy and gratitude, having learned that fear is antithetical to producing one’s best work.

(Courtesy of HBO Max) Jean Smart in “Hacks”

Beyond all that, this curtain call means leaving behind one of TV’s best intergenerational relationships and its most poignant, accurate exploration of the craggy emotional geography of friendships between women. Deborah and Ava became the best and worst parts of each other’s lives. Even when they were locked in combat, they brought out each other’s sharpest wit. Desiring a happy ending for these two, along with their manager, Jimmy LuSaque Jr. (Downs), and Jimmy’s loopy bestie Kayla Schaefer (Meg Stalter), is only natural.

Before Jimmy and Kayla can ascend, however, they get knocked down by none other than Kayla’s father, Michael (W. Earl Brown), who runs Latitude, one of Hollywood’s biggest talent management agencies. Daddy forces them to hand him their company and banishes Jimmy to the Latitude mailroom. But that move leads to Michael’s undoing, as Jimmy uncovers a trail of financial malfeasance he uses to blackmail Michael into handing him and Kayla the keys to a larger kingdom and much more influence in a famously fickle town.

“Hacks” departs at a transitional moment for stand-up comedy and late-night TV, much like the circumstances in which it arrived. Broadcast is in decline, and the late-night position Deborah long coveted is one most comics don’t want, gunning instead for a Netflix or HBO deal, or a prime spot within Joe Rogan’s edgelord-infested Comedy Mothership universe.

Comedy was always a boy’s club, something this series explored in detail as Deborah both pushed back against sexism while, at times, trying to placate the industry’s patriarchy to get ahead.

A giant twist in the series’ penultimate episode, “The Garden,” came with the reveal that the crowning achievement motivating Deborah all season long, a sold-out Madison Square Garden performance, was a cruel illusion. Deborah had planned her Garden debut to mark her victorious return once her “Late Night” non-compete expired. But her former network boss and present tormentor, Bob Lipka (Tony Goldwyn), bought out the place to prevent her from dishing dirt about him.

(Courtesy of HBO Max) Megan Stalter, Paul W. Downs, Hannah Einbinder and Jean Smart in “Hacks”

Bob’s move signals he’ll do anything to silence her, now and in perpetuity. He offers her a generous payoff to stay quiet, and she tells him, in so many words, to stick it. Then she mounts a free show in Central Park, something he can’t buy out from under her, that breaks attendance records.

“The Garden” premiered on the same Thursday as the finale episode of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” Some believe Colbert’s exit marks the beginning of the end of the broadcast late-night genre, and that may end up being true. But Colbert presented that series finale as if it were just another episode, one that closed with a giant wormhole drawing him and the audience into an unknown dimension where the host happily performed a song with a few of his friends, as if to insinuate the show would go on somehow, somewhere.

Sure enough, the next day Colbert commandeered an episode of “Only in Monroe,” the same Michigan-based public access program he hosted in 2015 before his “Late Show” debut. Although CBS Studios produced that hour, the latest “Only in Monroe” showed a version of Colbert largely unfettered by broadcast restrictions, with his talent at its freest and most unhinged since his early Comedy Central days. Proof, as former “Late Show” host David Letterman told him, that powerful people can take a comedian’s show, but they can’t take their voice.

“Hacks” showed that in action for five seasons, whether Deborah battled to be taken seriously or Ava fought for her shot. Deborah famously tried to muzzle Ava a few times, only to back off when she realized that by hurting her protégé, she was wounding herself. The show never gave up on seeking a happier ending for both, separately and together.  

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(Courtesy of HBO Max) Jean Smart in “Hacks”

For a woman who Hollywood exiles into the Nevada desert, only for her to build an empire and return to Los Angeles to conquer the industry, besting cancer should be a cinch. But the superstar isn’t convinced until the very last moment, when she and Ava are about to take their final train ride and can’t resist trading a few wisecracks about death.

“The best part of dying for a person with disordered eating is having a second croissant,” quips Ava, goading Deborah to one-up her: No, she says, the best part of dying is not having to save receipts, because you know you’ll never be audited again. Ava comes back with, the best part of dying is knowing how ticked off people are going to be when they realize how much money you left your dogs. But the worst part of dying, Deborah replies, is that she won’t be able to see how her corgis spend her $550,000. 

Ava steps away for a moment, giving Deborah an opportunity to reach for her notebook to scribble a thought . . . then it happens. She comes up with a superior punch line, one worth delivering to an audience. Comedy wins the argument again, delaying Deborah’s self-imposed deadline indefinitely. “I may not have 30 years, but I think I have another hour,” she tells Ava, and they clasp each other in an embrace reminiscent of the greatest Hollywood movie romances — except, and even better, it radiates love and relief, the kind shared by two friends who can’t live without each other.

With that, “Hacks” goes out on a Seinfeldian high note, cutting to Deborah and Ava happily strolling the Vegas strip on a sun-soaked day as a Barbra Streisand-Judy Garland duet lilts behind them. We won’t see what comes next, so we’ll just have to trust that there’s always a better joke to be written. And that’s enough of a reason to keep on striving.

All episodes of “Hacks” are streaming on HBO Max.