There are sitcoms you throw on for background noise, and then there’s Hacks — a show that somehow gets sharper, sadder, and funnier every time you come back to it. What starts as a biting comedy about a washed-up Vegas legend and an unemployed millennial writer slowly turns into one of television’s most layered character studies. Everything lands on a rewatch of this how, but the real surprise is how much emotional groundwork the series hides underneath it all.
By now, most people know the setup. Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) is an old-school comedy icon trying to stay relevant before the industry quietly pushes her aside. Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) is a young writer with talent, bad instincts, and a career derailed by one stupid tweet. Forced together out of professional desperation, the two spend the first season circling each other like trapped animals. Deborah thinks Ava is entitled, while Ava thinks Deborah is emotionally constipated. They’re both right.
‘Hacks’ Understands That Funny People Are Often Miserable
Jean Smart smiling with a microphone in Hacks Season 5Image via HBO Max
A lesser show would have turned Deborah and Ava into a standard odd-couple pairing within a few episodes, and thankfully, Hacks resists that temptation. The series lets them hurt each other—sometimes intentionally, sometimes casually, and often in ways that feel a little too recognizable.
Deborah fears aging and becoming invisible, and Ava wants success and validation so badly that she sabotages herself in pursuit of it. Every season strips another layer off of both women until their ugliest instincts become impossible to ignore. Once you know where these characters end up, earlier scenes start carrying extra weight. Deborah’s cruelty is more like a survival instinct than ego, and Ava’s self-righteousness starts looking like panic disguised as confidence.
The show also trusts silence more than most comedies do. Some of the best moments in Hacks happen after the punchline lands: Deborah sitting alone in her mansion after a set, Ava realizing she pushed too far, and Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) quietly burning out while keeping Deborah’s empire running. The series understands that comedians perform for a living, even when no one is technically on stage.
Collider Exclusive · Action Hero Quiz Which Action Hero Would Be Your Perfect Partner? Rambo · James Bond · Indiana Jones · John McClane · Ethan Hunt
Five legends. Five completely different ways of getting out alive — with style, with muscle, with charm, with luck, or with a plan so intricate it probably shouldn’t work. Ten questions will reveal which action hero was built to have your back.
🎖️Rambo
🍸James Bond
🏺Indiana Jones
🔧John McClane
🎭Ethan Hunt
01
You’re dropped into a dangerous situation with no warning. What do you need most from a partner? The first few seconds tell you everything about who belongs beside you.
02
You have to get somewhere dangerous, fast. How do you travel? How you get there is half the mission.
03
You’re pinned down and outnumbered. What does your ideal partner do? This is when you find out what someone is really made of.
04
The mission is paused. You have one evening to decompress. What does your partner suggest? Who someone is when the pressure drops is who they actually are.
05
How do you prefer your partner to communicate mid-mission? Good communication is the difference between partners and a liability.
06
Your enemy is powerful, well-resourced, and has the upper hand. How should your partner approach them? The approach to the enemy defines the partnership.
07
Things go badly wrong and you’re captured. What do you trust your partner to do? Who someone is when you need them most is the only thing that matters.
08
What does your ideal partner bring to the table that you couldn’t replace? A great partner fills the gap you didn’t know you had.
09
Every partnership has a cost. Which of these can you live with? No one comes without baggage. The question is whether you can carry it together.
10
It’s the final moment. Everything is on the line. What do you need from your partner right now? The last question is the most honest one.
Your Partner Has Been Assigned Your Perfect Partner Is…
Your answers have pointed to one action hero above all others. This is the person built to have your back — for better or considerably, spectacularly worse.
Rambo
Your partner doesn’t talk much, doesn’t need to, and will have assessed every threat in your immediate environment before you’ve finished your first sentence. John Rambo is not a man of plans or politics — he is a force of nature shaped by survival, loyalty, and a capacity for endurance that goes beyond anything training can produce. He will not leave you behind. He has never left anyone behind who deserved to come home. What you get with Rambo is the most capable, most quietly ferocious partner imaginable — one who has been through things that would have broken anyone else, and who chose to keep going anyway. You’ll never need to ask if he has your back. You’ll just know.
James Bond
Your partner will arrive perfectly dressed, perfectly briefed, and with a cover story so convincing it’ll take you a moment to remember what’s actually true. James Bond is the most professionally dangerous person in any room he enters — and the most disarmingly charming, which is the point. He operates in a world of layers, where nothing is what it appears and every advantage is used without apology. You’ll never be bored. You’ll occasionally be furious. But when it matters — when the mission is genuinely on the line and the margin for error has collapsed to nothing — Bond is exactly the partner you want. He has survived things that have no business being survivable. He does it with style. That is not nothing.
Indiana Jones
Your partner will know the history, the language, the cultural context, and exactly why the thing everyone else is ignoring is actually the most important thing in the room. Indiana Jones is brilliant, reckless, and occasionally impossible — but he is also one of the most resourceful, most genuinely knowledgeable partners you could find yourself beside. He approaches every situation with a scholar’s eye and a brawler’s instinct, which is an unusual combination and a remarkably effective one. He hates snakes and gets personally attached to objects of historical significance, both of which will slow you down at least once. It doesn’t matter. What Indy brings is irreplaceable — and the adventures you’ll have together will be the kind people write books about. Assuming you survive them.
John McClane
Your partner was not supposed to be here. He does not have the right equipment, the right information, or anything approaching the right odds. He has a sarcastic remark and an absolute refusal to accept that the situation is as bad as it looks. John McClane is the greatest accidental hero in the history of action cinema — a man whose superpower is stubbornness, whose contingency plan is improvisation, and whose capacity to absorb punishment and keep moving would be alarming if it weren’t so useful. He will complain the entire time. He will make it significantly more chaotic than it needed to be. And he will absolutely, unconditionally, without question come through when it counts. Yippee-ki-yay.
Ethan Hunt
Your partner has already run seventeen scenarios by the time you’ve finished reading the briefing, and the plan he’s settled on involves at least two things that should be physically impossible. Ethan Hunt operates at the absolute edge of human capability — technically, physically, and intellectually — and he brings the same relentless precision to protecting his partners that he brings to dismantling organisations that shouldn’t exist. He is not easy to know and he will never fully tell you everything. But he will carry the weight of the mission so completely, so absolutely, that your job is simply to trust him — and the remarkable thing is that trusting him always turns out to be the right call. The mission will be impossible. He will complete it anyway.
Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder Have One of TV’s Best Dynamics
Jean Smart’s Deborah on the phone with Hannah Einbinder’s Ava listening closely in Hacks Season 5Image via HBO
Smart deserves every award this show has handed her. Deborah Vance could have easily become a caricature — a one-note diva firing off insults in expensive caftans — and Smart refuses to let that happen. She plays Deborah like someone who built herself from scratch and never once got to relax afterward.
Then there’s Einbinder, who had the impossible task of keeping up with her. Ava could’ve been unbearable in the wrong hands; instead, Einbinder makes her frustrating in deeply human ways. She’s impulsive, defensive, insecure, occasionally selfish, and constantly trying to prove she belongs in rooms that barely tolerate her.
The brilliance of Hacks is that it never fully settles on what Deborah and Ava are to each other. Friends feel too simple, and a mentor-mentee relationship doesn’t fully capture it either. They fight like family, compete like coworkers, and understand each other with an intimacy neither woman seems comfortable admitting out loud. By the later seasons, that push-and-pull becomes the entire engine of the series. Their Season 4 feud — kicked off after Ava blackmails Deborah for a head writer position — is brutal, partly because the show spent years earning it. Every insult lands because these women know exactly where to cut. And yet, Hacksnever loses sight of how funny they are together. The series can pivot from emotional devastation to a perfectly timed throwaway joke without feeling manipulative. Few comedies manage tonal shifts this cleanly.
Every Season of ‘Hacks’ Finds a New Angle
Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance and Hannah Einbinder’s Ava Daniels smiling in Season 5, Episode 6Image via HBO Max
Most comedies lose momentum because the characters stop evolving; however, Hacks avoids that trap by refusing to let Deborah and Ava stay comfortable. The early seasons focus on stand-up and reinvention. Later seasons expand into late-night television, Hollywood politics, creative burnout, public image, and legacy. The show keeps widening its scope without losing the intimacy that made it work in the first place. Even side characters grow richer on rewatch. Marcus’ exhaustion becomes more noticeable. Jimmy (Paul W. Downs) and Kayla (Megan Stalter) evolve from comic relief into one of the show’s funniest partnerships, and Kaitlin Olson’s D.J. slowly transforms from a chaotic supporting character into one of the series’ emotional anchors.
That payoff becomes especially clear in the final season, which pushes Deborah to confront the damage she’s caused — professionally, personally, and especially as a mother. One episode built around The Amazing Race sounds ridiculous on paper, but somehow, Hacks turns it into one of the season’s most emotionally satisfying hours. The series has always understood that spectacle only works if the character work underneath it is real. That’s ultimately why Hacks improves with every rewatch. The comedy gets you through the door, but the character detail is what keeps pulling you back. Every season adds new context to the last one, and every argument reveals something uglier and more honest underneath it. Very few comedies trust their audience enough to let characters stay complicated, but Hacks does.
