With The Comeback just wrapping its final season and only two episodes of Hacks left, therapists for pop-culture superfans who care far too deeply for this kind of stuff are doing the Lord’s work right now. (Shout to you, Sharon!)
Rather than wallow and obsess alone over the last stretch of episodes of Hacks, I did something far healthier and way more fun: I interviewed the show’s co-creator, Jen Statsky, about them for a new episode of Obsessed: The Podcast.
“We’ve worked on this show since 2019, when we pitched it,” Statsky, who created the show with Lucia Aniello and Paul W. Downs (all of whom are now Emmy-winners), told me. “But even before that, we came up with the idea in 2015. So this has been more than a decade of my life. And so to now be at this stage where it’s coming to an end, it’s really wild. I’ve found that it’s hard to emotionally take in. I think my brain is still thinking, yeah, and then you’ll start the writer’s room in a few days... I don’t think I’ve processed it yet.”
In the final season of the show, stand-up comedy legend Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) has been legally barred from working after throwing her TV network under the bus in support of free speech. She and her writer, Ava (Hannah Einbinder), are plotting her big return once that statute of limitations lifts, the pressure of it being a blockbuster, sold-out event building day by day.
I remember during the press tour in the lead-up to the Hacks season premiere, Smart was asked what she thought about how the series ends, and her response really intrigued me.
“I was shocked and unsure about how I felt because it was not remotely anything I could have imagined,” she said. “But then I realized, no, it’ll work because they’re writing it and they’re amazing. And so I went, ‘OK.’”
What does she mean, I wondered. What could happen that is so removed from what the woman who has played this character for five seasons imagined?
Then I saw the final episodes myself. Don’t worry, I’m not going to spoil anything. But they do go in a direction that does sort of shake you awake as a fan, and make you wonder why we are going this way. Then, of course, these writers are geniuses, and it all makes sense and is absolutely perfect.
I asked Statsky what she thinks the show’s fans will feel about those episodes.
“I hope that when people finish the series, it speaks to what we think the entire point of the show has been about this very special relationship between creative partners and, honestly, friends, and what the value of making your friends laugh and just what that means to the experience of life,” she said. “And I hope people look at the ending and go, this is very Hacks. This is very what the tone of the show has been all along.”
She laughs, recalling how Smart herself has said in interviews that, in her mind, the show should end with Deborah and Marty (Christopher McDonald) getting married. “As much as there are massive Ava-Deborah shippers, Jean is kind of the biggest Marty Deborah shipper.”
“But the truth is, and the beautiful thing about Jean and Hannah is, for the entire run of this series, they trusted us very much in terms of, they didn’t ask to hear their arcs before the season started,” Statsky continued. “They didn’t want to weigh in about things they were doing. They got the scripts as they came, they read them, and they were so trusting. And so I feel very grateful that at the end of the day, Jean, that trust paid off to the very end, it sounds like from what she was saying.”
Statsky and I dig into so much more in our conversation, including why she, Aniello, and Downs wanted to cast a legitimate actor like Smart as Deborah rather than a stand-up comedian like Kathy Griffin or Wanda Sykes.
Obviously, we dig deep into the best comedy episode of the year and maybe Hacks’ best episode ever, “Montecito,” and all the lesbian chaos and Ava-Deborah shippers’ fantasy fulfillment that happens. Plus, I’m me, so I had to ask about Paul W. Downs’ nude scene.
Check out the whole conversation here.
