There’s a moment in the fifth episode of Hacks – the smartest, most genre-defying comedy on TV right now – in which you realise that, like the best comedies, it’s not really a comedy at all. More like a drama with wit or a Beckett play with zingers.
Our antiheroine is Ava (Hannah Einbinder), a redhead gen Zer with a frown she has never attempted to turn upside down. She’s an LA comedy writer whose star was on the rise until an ill-judged joke on Twitter saw her come plummeting back down to earth: cue a public shaming, the loss of her job and, worst of all, having to decamp to Las Vegas in order to work for an ageing Joan Rivers-esque stand-up called Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) in the hope of freshening up her calcified set. Yet by the fifth episode something has switched. She’s met a good-looking young man, seemingly in Vegas on his own. They connect, do molly, kiss. She tearfully confesses something the audience already suspected: it wasn’t just that tweet; she was kind of an asshole generally. That’s why she couldn’t find work. It just gave everyone the excuse.
Cue a night of passion, her getting coffee for them both the next morning and returning to discover he’d decided to throw himself out of the hotel room window while she was gone. Bad break-up. Any other show would weave its whole series around this incident, except in Hacks it’s almost by the by – a random horrific event in a world that doesn’t play fair, because, hey, that’s life. Put another way, it’s a TV show that refuses to play by the rules of TV shows.
Until this point, you could have been forgiven for thinking you had Hacks’ number: entitled navel-gazing young comic meets battle-hardened old-school gag queen. It’s zoomer vs boomer! They’re united by their self-obsession but divided by their outlook: Deborah is a teller of punchline jokes for the masses and an arch pragmatist forced to shrug off backstage gropes; Ava is a post-Me Too feminist who sees women like Deborah as part of the problem, for putting up with it, and prefers one-line dips into post-millennial melancholy (“I had a horrible nightmare I got a voicemail”).
Of course, you’ll think, what better way to explore hot-button issues of feminism, cancel culture and comedy these days than two women who are essentially the same, only separated by generation and wealth? But here’s the thing: any other show would have a message it was trying to push.
You only need to look at something such as The Morning Show – Apple’s take on Me Too-era breakfast TV, set to return for its second series – to see how when most dramas attempt to tackle these problems head-on, what they really mean is they’ll also provide the solution. Take the scene in the third episode of series one, when Jennifer Aniston, resplendent in bright red in a boardroom of male grey, takes the network suits to task. “I don’t need to justify anything,” she roars. “You all are so convinced that you are the rightful owner of all of the power that it doesn’t even occur to you that someone else could be in the driver’s seat. So we have to just gingerly step around your male egos in order to not burst this precious little bubble. Well, surprise! I’m bursting it!”
Hacks does no such grandstanding. Rather, the conflicts about the right way to do both feminism and comedy come naturally from character. And when they do go toe-to-toe, you also find yourself going back and forth between them. It’s an argument not a lecture.
It also makes you realise how rare it is to have a show about two generations facing off like this. At the heart of Me Too is a conversation about power and age and what happens in the imbalance. But look at the dramas that cover issues around sex and consent and they’re singularly mono-generational: Euphoria is about teens and sex; You is about toxic dates and stalking in your early twenties; I May Destroy You is about sexual assault in your late twenties; I Hate Suzie is about the assault of having sexual pictures hacked in your thirties. It’s only Hacks that truly zooms out.
For a comedy, Hacks only gets more melancholic and serious as it goes on, and it becomes more heartfelt and warmer too. But just when you think the series will have a typical arc – it seems to be leading to Deborah finally throwing out her shop-worn set to say some things both personal and true – it undercuts expectations once again.
In a low-down comedy club, a world away from the Vegas venue she now calls home, Deborah steps up to the stage to test the new material out, only to have the douchebag compère make a crack about her tits. Her revenge? She bargains with the man and offers him $1.69 million if he’ll sign a contract saying he’ll never set foot in a comedy club again. He agrees; the crowd cheers. It’s a victory of sorts. She’s used her power to shut him up.
But you see it on her face as she leaves: there’s not enough money in the world to silence them all.
Hacks is out this autumn on Sky Atlantic. The Morning Show series two is out on 17 September on Apple TV+.
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