Over its five excellent seasons, Hacks has taken comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her writer-turned-best friend, Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), on a classic comeback journey from utter obscurity to the pinnacle of success and back again.
In the show’s final season premiere (Apr. 9 on HBO Max), Deborah discovers that she’s been wiped from streaming services following a feud with Bob Lipka (Tony Goldwyn), who seems to own every aspect of the entertainment business. As Deborah bemoans to Ava, “Everything we’ve worked for the last five years is gone!”
While this is tragic, it paves the way for a fresh new season with fresh new stakes. What Hacks chooses to do with the new start is savagely take down everything wrong with Hollywood in 2026.
First off, the show tackles the entertainment business’s pending monopoly disaster. The only reason Deborah is in this mess is that one guy—a guy she has personal and professional beef with—seems to run all the streaming services, media companies, and studios.
Because of her abrupt exit from her late-night show at the end of last season, she’s stuck in a non-compete clause that renders her inert. She can’t say even one joke without being slapped with a restraining order and the threat of jail time.
Current entertainment news is rife with merger-mania. And, of course, HBO is part of this mess.
Noah Wyle, star of HBO’s The Pitt, spoke to Congress to decry the proposed merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Monopolies, if you recall from the board game, are terrible for everyone except the person at the top. Art cannot thrive in this environment, and Hacks shows us why.
In trying to work around her legal issues, Deborah also has to deal with the reality that, while rumors of her death may have been greatly exaggerated, due to the smear campaign regarding her late-night exit, her career has never been more dead.
Like her fellow HBO comedy queen, Lisa Kudrow’s Valerie Cherish on The Comeback, Deborah needs to reanimate her career and fast. Deborah jokes that beating a rape trial is the metric that shows a comedian has made it to the top of their game. She references Woody Allen and hints that he’s not the only one to make it back into society after committing horrendous acts (see Louis C.K.).
Inspired by those men, Deborah and Ava cook up a caper in the first episode that not only gets Deborah back in the news but also, on a meta level, pokes fun at how being infamous is as good, if not better than being famous. This season also heavily criticizes how easy it is for canceled men to thrive in show business, but how women are labeled as crazy and cast aside.
As part of her comeback, Deborah decides another way to win back Hollywood is to EGOT (cue Tracy Jordan jokes). She already has her T from investing in Spamalot while in tryst with Eric Idle, and her Boggle-themed gameshow got her a (Daytime) Emmy. She tells her manager, Jimmy (Paul W. Downs), to get her an O (for Oscar), and he starts trying to use his influence… not her talent.
Talent doesn’t matter. Who you know matters. Deborah takes on the G, Grammy, first by attempting to write a best-selling memoir. After firing the best writer in the world, Tony Kushner, because he bored her, she tries, problematically, to get onto a Tejano music album.
Fortunately, she abandons this quest by the end of the first episode. Her desperation is reminiscent of others who have campaigned for awards, usually to great disappointment and sometimes embarrassment.
The commodification of celebrities is present throughout the season. In an early episode, Deborah has to win back fans at a convention, while in another, the show explores an age-gap PR relationship with actor Christopher Briney (The Summer I Turned Pretty). Like in The Comeback, a prominent reality show makes an appearance, further illustrating how celebrities and networks can cash in on celebrities as brands.
But the big question in Hollywood is whether AI is evil. It wouldn’t be 2026 without a show about the entertainment industry referencing AI, and our robot overlords rear their ugly heads throughout the season.
First, Ava chastises Deborah for using an LLM to help her brainstorm ways to get the EGOT, and later in the season, they have to grapple with the ethical dilemma of whether or not actors should train AI or if their likeness or voice can be used to create new work (see Val Kilmer).
Of course, Ava—like the actor who plays her—knows where she stands, but the path isn’t so clear to everyone else.
Finally, the most unrealistic thing about Hollywood is the Hollywood ending. Life has only one ending, and it isn’t the two leads walking off into the sunset.
As the show acknowledges later in the season, comedians often meet tragic ends. Hacks, over and over, has embraced “the show must go on” as its mantra. But, in the real world, we know it doesn’t.
Hacks leaves us with a nod to Hollywood’s relentless optimism. We can imagine a world in which the show will always go on, even though we’ve paused the TV and see there’s only five (beautiful, brilliant) minutes left in one of—if not the greatest—shows about comedy ever made.
The final curtain does fall on Hacks, and the last moments are simultaneously surprising and perfectly suited to the show as a whole—a miracle for a series finale.
While each episode offers up different iterations of everything wrong with Hollywood, Hacks never loses the love of the game.
After Robby Hoffman’s Randi falls down a Hollywood history rabbit hole, she says the business we call show is “such a fascinating mix of culture and business and art and history.” She’s speaking with a sense of wonder that the Hacks team shares. They love the industry they’re making fun of, partially because they’re stuck inside it, but also because, within this system of games and gamemakers, they were able to create something truly exquisite.
