The Diva and the Writer

The Diva and the Writer The Diva and the Writer Hacks was a sharp satire of show business, but at its core it was about the creative process as a labor of love. The show-within-a-show has always been a generative plot device. The audience gets to witness the mounting of the performance that we ourselves are watching. What is the magic and trickery done unto us? How is the wool pulled over our eyes to make the scene before us take on the appearance of realness? A truly good show-within-a-show keeps us playing with these nesting dolls, reverberating between reality and unreality, and, in the process, encourages us to look outside the show we think we’re watching toward the conditions of its making. Shows about the entertainment business have become a fixture in prestige comedy. In Apple TV’s The Studio, Seth Rogen plays a movie-loving executive who finds himself responsible for enforcing corporate constraints. In HBO’s The Comeback, Lisa Kudrow stars as an aging actress returning to a very changed business. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel reimagined 1960s New York City women in comedy; Better Things looked at actors’ working conditions and Los Angeles as a company town; The Other Two considered child stars and the internet; I Love LA satirizes Gen Z influencers and social media. Hacks, the HBO Max award-winning dramedy that ended its five-season run in May, is a show with many shows within it. Its arc includes a Las Vegas residency, an across-America comedy special, a late-night TV talk show, and a legacy-making act at Madison Square Garden. Following the golden years of the brash, glamorous, and spiteful seventy-something stand-up comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), inspired by icons like Joan Rivers and Debbie Reynolds, Hacks shows the moving parts that orbit “the talent.” Every star is a business: there are her managers, business partners, personal assistant, housekeeper, stage crew, hair and makeup staff, and, in Deborah’s case, her troubled daughter and pampered Corgis. Most important of all is her writing partner, who she meets in the pilot: Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), a Millennial/Gen Z cusp comedy writer who, through cycles of power struggles made funny by insult humor and topical hijinks, gradually becomes Deborah’s treasured collaborator. Television is rarely amicable to radical thinking, since it is rarely produced without corporate buy-in. Accordingly, Hacks toes the line between satire of Hollywood and embracing it as an indulgent, if guilty, pleasure. Yet if its narrative satiates our obsession with the inner lives of celebrities, it also pays close attention to their relationships with marginalized audiences and the evolving political valences of high-profile personas over time. As a study of women in mass culture, Hacks spins show business history into sharp, clever commentary on intergenerational meta-comedy, queer icons, and corporate entertainment. Created by the comedians Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky, Hacks established itself right away as a work of astute cultural historians connecting place and time to fashion. In the pilot, Deborah wears a glittering sequined full-length jacket and sparkling silver earrings on stage at the Palmetto Casino in Las Vegas while an unemployed Ava stumbles around LA in a flannel overshirt and a Bernie 2020 tote bag. When Ava’s manager, Jimmy (played by Downs), proposes the idea of working for Deborah Vance, Ava responds: “The QVC muumuu lady?” In characteristically uptight fashion, Jimmy replies: “They’re caftans.” Much of the buzz around the show’s debut season in 2021 was about how skillfully it spun such generational divides into comedy. Comedy itself is the primary subject: Deborah is old school, invested in widely commercial success, and astounded at Ava’s inability to write a classic punchline. Ava is young, trend-oriented, and conceptual, at one point suggesting a conversation between food ingredients that sounds like a Julio Torres bit. “They’re not jokes,” Deborah criticizes. “I mean, they’re, like, thought poems?” While Hacks delights in the catty amusements of the two women’s differences, it also tracks Ava’s evolving perception of Deborah as a trailblazing female comedian. In an instructive sequence in the first season, Deborah appears at a pizza chain opening in Vegas for a $100,000 fee. For a photo-op, the client suggests staging a shot of Deborah holding a pizza on fire. The joke is inane but works on two levels—it plays on a long-standing rumor that Deborah burned her ex-husband’s house down and adds gender-based slapstick: Women can’t cook! Deborah thinks this is “hilarious,” but Ava counters that it’s “degrading.” Deborah insistently goes ahead, but she becomes visibly upset once she’s cartoonishly posed with her hair poofed out madly and her face covered in soot. A few episodes later, Deborah confesses that she never burned down her ex-husband’s house, but once he maligned her as crazy and the story stuck, she gave up trying to set the record straight. She leaned into it, turning it into a joke she could sell: “Hey, might as well make money off it, right? I realized that people would rather laugh at me than believe me.” The fictional Deborah Vance takes on the outline of figures like Dolly Parton, who was known during her rise for making every self-deprecating joke about herself, especially her appearance, before anyone else could. Author Sarah Smarsh has suggested that Dolly represented a harbinger of third-wave feminism by embracing her body and sexuality, even though she—like Deborah—doesn’t embrace the label of feminist. Both Dolly and Deborah are superstars who broke new ground for women in culture industries, but they orient their work toward a middle American audience that might respond poorly to the label of feminist. Like Dolly’s film 9 to 5 (released in 1980), Deborah’s 1970s comedy was serious about women’s economic issues pertaining to marriage, labor, and harassment in the workplace. In one bit, she jokes about new policies she put in place on her set: “My very first order of business was to make sure the workplace was safe for all the ladies, so on day one I gave every man a pair of mittens and every woman a gun. . . . Next, I instituted a breastfeeding room. The only problem was, those executives were really hungry!” It is revealed that Deborah was the first person to be fined by the FCC for saying the word “abortion” on TV. In a scene from her sitcom, comedy ensues when Deborah dresses in drag in order to trick the bank into giving her a credit card, which banks could legally refuse to women prior to 1974. For Deborah, jokes are complicated devices of realpolitik; humor is both her craft and also a way out of (or through) slander, humiliation, and other traps. When Deborah brings Ava to a divey comedy club in Sacramento where she performed in her early days, she reminisces with an old friend, Francine (Anna Maria Horsford), about how the club owner would grope them and the other girls, withhold pay unless they provided sexual favors, and attempt to drug them (“I’m convinced he and Cosby had the same pharmacist”). Deborah and Francine laugh in the face of the owner’s death, modeling how spite can become an attempt to regain power. When there’s nothing to be done about a situation, it becomes adaptive to laugh. Ava, whose youth allows her to interpret these stories from a place of increased safety and principle, accuses Deborah of only looking out for her own career—a fair point, and true to her character. “You just worked your way up the ladder,” she says, igniting Deborah’s ire: “Now you’re accusing me of being a ladder puller?” Yet the criticism seeps in, leading Deborah to interfere with a misogynistic comedian’s harassment in the club. The sequence restages how the young can help the body politic address and process old wounds, and how through generative tension the old and new teach one another in a—potentially playful and humorous—spirit of exchange. Famously, Deborah Vance has many gay fans (as does Hacks, which may become something of a lesbian cult classic). Deborah is credited with supposedly starting the gay cruise trend. Periodically she refers to friends who died of AIDS, and the legendary gay fashion designer Bob Mackie makes a cameo in Season 5. Referring specifically to gay men, Deborah says: They “get me.” She and her fan base share a proclivity toward poking fun at sex, men and women’s bodies, feelings of jealousy and vanity, and the pleasure of misbehavior. They find amusement in the opportunity to act like a diva in ways that subvert expectations for them (i.e., her book Cleaning Tips for Drunk Housewives). The role of gay icons—who have often been expressive, high-femme women, from Rivers and Reynolds to Carol Burnett, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Cher, and Madonna—is explored as a beam through popular culture in Hacks. Divadom can be politically ambivalent. Deborah relishes being a marvelous, fabulously rich superstar, living (as Rivers did) in a mansion that looks like Versailles where she racks up fines for high water usage and collects enemies and bitternesses. Yet she appeals to gay audiences for her ability to use humor as both critique and to defuse tension, a sophisticated psychological and social strategy. In many ways, Deborah (like Rivers) shares a sense of humor with another vintage style of pageantry: the drag queen. Her jokes, like drag queen “reads,” are observational, cutting, and slapstick. “To read is to insult imaginatively,” as critic Desson Howe wrote in his review of the iconic drag documentary Paris is Burning (1990), and it is also to comment on the performance of gender. Hacks suggests fandom is a two-way street, not solely a one-way parasocial relationship. Deborah’s business manager, Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins), is a Black gay man who was a Deborah superfan before she hired him. In the third season, after a series of other disappointments, Marcus is angry when Deborah doesn’t make it to Palm Springs Pride, an event she headlines annually and that is personal to him. Drinking sorrowfully at a Palm Springs gay bar, as 1990s dance hits play in the background, an older white gay Deborah fan schools Marcus in the life cycle of the gay icon: “We loved her before anybody else did, and she loved us before anybody else did. That’s not nothing.” He suggests the link between Deborah’s persona and her devoted gay fans is rooted in a sort of grit and moxie: “She’s a survivor, like us.” If Hacks’ earlier seasons primarily grapple with feminism, representation, and celebrity, later arcs—once Deborah is spending more time in LA—are increasingly focused on the film and TV industry, tech, and the nature of writing. “Once I started learning about Hollywood, I couldn’t stop,” Randi (Robby Hoffman), assistant to Deborah’s managers, says in an early episode of Season 5, perhaps speaking for the Hacks writers. “Such a fascinating mix of culture and business and art and history. It’s America.” The behind-the-scenes story of the industry has been visible in Hacks from the beginning. As show co-creator Jen Statsky told Vanity Fair in 2021, “we talked so much about . . . this moment of reckoning we’re having with women whose stories we got wrong.” Britney Spears’s court case over her conservatorship was ongoing when Hacks debuted, and Statsky pointed to it, along with the cases of figures like Paris Hilton, Amy Winehouse, and Marcia Clark—OJ Simpson’s prosecutor, who endured invasive harassment and public mockery for her appearance during the trial—as examples of the grueling hardships high-profile women face in the media. Deborah’s story is therefore partially a response to #MeToo and Time’s Up—the Hollywood arm of the movement—as much as it is about the discourse of “cancel culture” and debates about going over “the line” in comedy. Yet as Hacks approached its midway point in 2023, it found itself in the midst of an even more tumultuous time in Hollywood. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike halted production of Season 3. When the strike began, the season had been written, but the showrunners were emphatic that the show could not go on without writers. “Writing happens at every stage of the process,” Statsky tweeted, with the hashtag #wgastrong. By the time Hacks finally released its third season on HBO Max in the spring of 2024, the landscape of Hollywood had also been significantly altered by debates about AI and Palestine. Most strikingly, Hannah Einbinder’s public advocacy emerged as another show outside the show. Over the course of Hacks’ run, Einbinder has become one of the most outspoken voices in American film and TV on Palestine. In her acceptance speech for the Emmy Award for supporting actress in comedy in 2025, Einbinder declared, “Go Birds, fuck ICE, and free Palestine!” to predictable backlash from the industry. “It pisses me off,” Einbinder remarked to Zeteo regarding Hollywood celebrities who are silent on the issue. “I look at these people who have absolutely every privilege imaginable to mankind, and they cannot utter a single word.” Several additional Hacks cast members and producers have also spoken out against ICE and in support of socialist LA mayoral candidate Nithya Raman. Despite a broader climate of fear in Hollywood, there’s not yet indication that Einbinder has been blacklisted for speaking out, although there is some indication that recurring Hacks cast member and fellow anti-Zionist and socialist Poppy Liu may have been. Appropriately enough, Hacks’ most overtly political moments appear in Season 4 and 5, which tackle the question of censorship head on. When Deborah achieves a wildly successful run of her late-night talk show, the network pushes her to interview an actor whose brand props up the studio’s theme parks and franchises, but who is accused of domestic violence and sexting underage girls. After Deborah cracks a joke about the controversy, the network insists on censoring it from the segment. Ava, who has become head writer on the show, accidentally leaks the story and is found out by the network; Deborah is told to fire her in a scene that plays like mafia cinema (“That does not mean you get to employ people who create problems for me”). Deborah defies this order, standing up against censorship on TV and corporate consolidation of the entertainment industry, and in the process loses her show. She addresses the audience in a coup live on air, as Jimmy physically fights network executive Bob Lipka to stop him from cutting the feed: I refuse to fire her, and not just because she’s my creative partner, but because it’s a slippery slope. A few days ago, I agreed to cut a joke I made to protect Ethan Sommers and the studio’s interests. And now I’m being asked to fire someone I love who did nothing wrong. So, what will they ask of me next? . . . I’m not naive. In this industry, you always have to make certain sacrifices, because this is a business, and I get that. And there’s good people on the business side, who are trying to navigate the difficult intersection of art and commerce. But thanks to Wall Street and big tech disrupting our industry, it’s gone too far. . . . I have a message for Bob Lipka, and this company’s board. You can try to silence me, but you— [Feed is cut] This episode was released in May 2025, just months before Stephen Colbert’s show was canceled and Jimmy Kimmel was suspended from his. After Deborah’s speech, Lipka drops the hammer: “We own you. You know that, right? We have a non-compete clause, you can’t touch a mic for the next eighteen months.” Season 5 follows the protracted legal battle between Deborah and the conglomerate that owns her late-night show, fictionalizing real-world legal battles over the creative output of female stars, from Britney and Kesha to Olivia de Havilland’s legendary 1940s fight against Warner Bros. Despite tireless legal efforts, Deborah never gets out of her non-compete clause and must wait it out before performing at the very end of the season. Instead, the season largely covers new topics, especially AI. In one arc, Deborah and Marcus court a tech developer venture capitalist named Graham Sweeney (Alex Moffat) for a casino they are developing in Vegas. Sweeney pitches a generative AI LLM that would aggregate data from Deborah’s comedy to make people funnier. Ava argues against the “forced inevitability” and profit motives behind AI, but it is the creative issue that convinces Deborah not to take the deal. Sweeney tries to persuade her that soon she’ll be using AI to write her own material; Deborah is unmoved. “I want to write the jokes. I like doing the work.” He asks her if she really wouldn’t take advantage of a tool to help her with writer’s block. “Absolutely not,” Deborah replies. “There’s no shortcut.” AI is really just a detour in the season, and maybe it will be in real life; the core concern is with the creative impulse as a life-affirming one. The series ends with Deborah and Ava on a trip to Paris, where Deborah plans to take the train to Zurich in order to access a doctor-assisted suicide. She’s been diagnosed with a formidable form of cancer and is rejecting treatment, wanting to “go out on top.” Here, the AI predicament feels like setup for another moment of reflection over the writer’s existential purpose. At the train station, Deborah’s mind is changed by a stirring moment of inspiration. She jots down a joke in her notebook and rushes to Ava: “Will you help me write it?” Hacks has always been about women’s labors of love, and their joint repulsion to AI simply reinforces what we already knew: that the two of them thrive when creating together. The task of the creative process, especially with another human being, is incomparable, Hacks seems to say, exciting enough to be worth living for. Why would you ever destroy a game you love to play this much? Nicky Yeager is a writer and artist in New York. They have contributed to the Cleveland Review of Books, the Brooklyn Rail, Texas Monthly, and elsewhere. Previously, they covered culture at the Texas Observer.