Because they’re not just writing jokes; they’re writing a years-long love letter to each other.
As a rule, Deborah Vance doesn’t do funerals. Neither, it turns out, does Hacks (2021-26), which commits itself to a vision of survival in the most improbable times and places. The five-season, award-winning HBO comedy follows the “odd couple” relationship between aging Vegas comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her Gen-Z writer-turned-creative partner Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), as they warm from an initial antagonism that nonetheless crackles with potential to the near-total entanglement of their personal and professional lives. The question of legacy drives much of the plot, and nowhere is that focus clearer than in the fifth and final season, which sees Deborah furiously working to rewrite the less-than-flattering obituary TMZ printed after mistakenly reporting her death. “Every obituary leads with a person’s greatest achievement or failure,” Deborah declares after a sleepless night; “That’s why I need a win, a legacy-defining win that they cannot spin. I refuse to be remembered on other people’s terms—as a quitter or the person who killed Late Night or some hysterical woman. I have worked too hard, and I have fought far too long.” If Season 1 Deborah was willing to play along with the story her jealous ex-husband fed to the press about the “crazy” wife who burned down his house for audiences more willing to “laugh at [her] than believe” her, by Season 5, she’s taken up Ava’s “fuck the man” ethos: she won’t let another vindictive man define her or her career.
The focus on legacy does not, however, consign Hacks to a retrospective mode. Its final season instead invests in the possibility of survival in a world where persistence—of individuals, whole industries, and even humanity itself—feels far from guaranteed. From chemotherapy treatments and climate catastrophe to constricting creative industries and the incursion of AI, Hacks’s final episodes foreground the often brutal reality of what it means to live and make art in the conditions of the present. As Deborah herself yells to tourists shocked to see her alive after her preemptive obituary: “That’s right, I’m alive! It’s hard, but it’s worth it.” It appears as a throwaway line, easily missed in the scene change and partially drowned out by the music and the Bellagio’s fountains, but it captures a message the show and its creators Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky have repeatedly affirmed both on screen and in interviews. Their insistence that the hard thing is worth it, even when it seems doomed to failure, resonates across the seasons: from Deborah’s choice to scrap her old act and dare to trust Ava, to Ava’s willingness to sacrifice romantic relationships and career opportunities to stand by Deborah’s side again and again. While it would be easy to (mis)read this sentiment as little more than a queerly repackaged affirmation of the capitalist grind mentality—work til you die!—I suggest that it is better understood as an embrace of the potential inherent in collaborative creative labor, which produces intimacy as a value untethered from wage economies and forges a relationship to legacy pitched athwart its typical temporalities.
To be clear, Hacks doesn’t shy away from the commodification of labor, and Deborah’s Vegas mansion and climate-controlled wardrobe warehouse stand as testaments to her accumulative tendencies. But what the show does do is insist on a both/and position—the duality of the “athwart,” which means against, but also across or through—in response to the capture of creative labor under capitalism and its relationship to the future. Deborah delights in the (excessive) comforts that work secures for her, but until Ava shows up and gives Deborah a reason and a language to make the work meaningful again, she’s coasting by on an act that went stale decades ago. (Who says Gen Z invented quiet quitting?) And as career-driven as both women are, they repeatedly sacrifice “dream jobs” to keep each other because the queer intimacy cultivated in “mak[ing] each other better” ultimately outranks everything else. As Deborah tells Ava, “There is no show without you,” and viewers come to realize that the preserved objects that pitch their legacy into the future tense are the happy byproducts of the much more foundational present-tense commitments they make to one another in their writing. Because they’re not just writing jokes; they’re writing a years-long love letter to each other.
It is here that I diverge from most critics of the show, who speak of love between Ava and Deborah only insofar as it’s modified by “maternal” and “platonic.” But the show itself insists on a thread of queer eroticism that is no less palpable for its not being realized in ways mainstream audiences expect. When posing as a couple in the final season for a weekend away with another lesbian couple (Cherry Jones and Leslie Bibb), Ava and Deborah find that a beat-for-beat narration of their own history reads to others as a compelling love story, and in an earlier season, the two are given a romcom-style texting montage as their world shrinks to little more than the words and laughter shared between them. Against journalists’ insistent classifications of their relationship as “mother-daughter,” the show’s creators describe the ways Ava challenges Deborah as “arousing”: “a turn-on for Deborah.” None of this changes the fact that the two are not a traditional couple, but it does mark their intimacy as legibly queer, as does their slantwise relationship to futurity. Rather than the promise of generational reproduction in a maternal model, Ava and Deborah exemplify the pleasures and promises of intergenerational intimacy in the here and now—what we might, following Sarah Ensor, term “queer lasting,” persisting and forging unlikely attachments in a “precarious present.”
The show’s investment in lasting and living is perhaps best glimpsed through its handling of a pair of deaths—one real, one looming. In Hacks’s first season, viewers learn that Deborah has two life rules: “I don’t do funerals,” and, “Never forgive, never forget, baby.” Within two episodes, she breaks both for Ava, flying from Las Vegas to Waltham, Massachusetts, in the midst of their then-biggest fight for the funeral of Ava’s father Dennis, a man she has never met. In the awkward silence that falls when the funeral home director asks if anyone would like to say a few words about Dennis, Deborah emerges from the back of the room, her voice carrying over the hushed tears: “Oh god. This is so awkward. This is painful.” She takes control of the mic and the room and soon has the bereaved laughing as she prompts cousins and friends to remember Dennis at his drunkest, his most mischievous—in short, his most alive. He might not be among the living anymore, but Deborah gives those gathered the opportunity to remember that they still are and that joy hasn’t disappeared just because it requires a warm-up act to find it. By Hacks’s final episode, Deborah is the one confronting the apparent imminence of the grave after a cancer scare-turned-diagnosis leads her to make the choice to “call her own lights” and go out on her own terms. No amount of Ava’s pleading, grief, or research on advances in chemotherapy can persuade Deborah otherwise. But, temporarily alone after riffing with Ava about the best part of dying, Deborah reaches for the ubiquitous comedy notebook viewers have seen her carrying since the pilot. The joy at stumbling upon something irresistibly funny with Ava is as enticing as ever; the pleasures of the here and now cut through even the pall of death’s shadow. In an instant, Deborah’s expression morphs, delight draining from her features. Because this time, there is no stage waiting for her, no reason to remember a joke, to workshop. She races after Ava: “The worst part about dying,” she begins, continuing in the same vein as their earlier riffing: “I can’t even enjoy being bone thin. That’s the better joke.” A confused Ava acknowledges that, yes, it is the better joke. Deborah curses under her breath before sighing, “I may not have another 30 years. But I think I have another hour.” Ava barely dares to look hopeful until a teary Deborah asks: “Will you help me write it?” As Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand’s “Get Happy”/“Happy Days Are Here Again” plays, Ava throws herself into Deborah’s arms and promises, “Always.”
Significantly, it is neither the promise of a long future ahead of her—that is, as Deborah well knows, hardly a guarantee—nor the demands of the living that compel Deborah to choose to fight another day. It is instead the lure of knowing that there is still something left that might bring her joy, even if it (the joy, the joke, life itself) is fleeting. After all, stand-up as a performance, no matter how ubiquitous the taped hour-long special or the innumerable TikTok-length clips pulled from it have become, is still ephemeral: an element of it remains tethered to the room where it happens, to the crowd gathered at any given show, to the way the energy flows and laughs ripple across the space. Comedy saved Deborah after her world fell apart the first time, and Ava saved Deborah when she lost her stage and her world a second time, and somehow, together, they give Deborah just enough to decide to last, persisting on in the face of an unknown future.
The show’s attachment to survival extends beyond the question of mortality, particularly in the fifth season’s confrontation with the looming threat that generative AI and its forced adoption poses to the human work of creation. In the season’s sixth episode, Graham Sweeney (Alex Moffat), a venture capitalist launching QuikScribbl, an “LLM generative AI model that helps users write material for their daily lives,” promises to step in as a funder for Deborah’s planned hotel/comedy club project if Deborah and Ava agree to sign over everything they’ve ever written and to train the model. Initially, Deborah is unpersuaded by Ava’s ethical arguments against AI, too compelled by the promise of the funding she needs to help her friend and former CFO Marcus Vaughn (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) open The Diva hotel and comedy club. But once again, the startling, unexpected delight of a joke inspires an about-face. In response to Graham’s insistence that soon she’ll be using QuikScribbl “cause it’s gonna be so good, you’re gonna want to,” and “everyone’s gonna be using it, so if you want to keep up…you’re gonna have to,” Deborah rears back and out of the artificial gravitational pull he keeps insisting is inevitable. She explains that she wants to write jokes and do the hard work of workshopping them, that to take a shortcut would do away with what made her and others like her comedians and transform the punchlines into “something else…not art.” Their disagreement builds, frustration simmering, until he snaps, “Oh, excuse me, I didn’t know Shakespeare had a beehive.” A frisson of startled delight cuts through Deborah’s anger, a bemused scoff giving way to a snort of laughter as she concedes, “That was good. See, you came up with that all by yourself. Aren’t you proud?” Graham may not be, but for viewers who have watched season after season of a show that promises that a shared sense of humor is the ultimate human connection, that huff of laughter is a promise. Specifically, it promises the persistence of the human, of other, older, queerer (if we follow Elizabeth Freeman in imagining queerness as a lingering, a “willingness to be warmed by the afterglow of the forgotten”) ways of doing things in an era of increasing automation and “optimization.” Where so many think pieces and op-eds on both sides of the AI issue have characterized its epidemic-like incursion as inevitable, rendering any attempts at resistance in a preemptively elegiac mode, Hacks treats generative AI as a real, omnipresent threat without conceding an early defeat.
Part of the way I see Hacks finessing its non-defeatist stance is by embracing the bad—the hacky and the tacky—as equally vital spaces for creative empowerment and human flourishing. At this point, predictive-text AI has, tragically, won more than a few writing awards. It has been published in prominent outlets like The New York Times. It is racking up submissions and publications in scientific journals at an alarming pace. None of this is to suggest that generative AI—itself the simple generation of the most likely sequence of words and ideas based on a corpus of scraped data stolen from us, the very humans who first wrote it and thought it—is somehow superior to humans. But it is to acknowledge that its outputs, at least on occasion, can and do pass as intelligent thought or careful prose, even if they are just as likely to be consigned to the F pile of a stack of grading. Arguments against AI that hold up masterful works of classical art, music, and literature as our last and only line of defense on behalf of humanity are vulnerable to these stories, each one chipping away at the apparent untouchability and inimitability of human creative expression.
Hacks instead teaches us to find and value the humanity in the bad and the low, as much as in the sophisticated and the award-winning. Yes, the show has some of the most thoughtful, nuanced depictions of intergenerational intimacy between women I’ve ever seen on television, but it is just as true that the first time Ava makes Deborah laugh is when she threatens to leave a stool sample on her front lawn after their disastrous first meeting. As viewers, we laugh along with Deborah’s new, honest material just as much as we laugh at her schlocky insult comedy about Ava’s hands and shoes. Even by the final season, when one could imagine Deborah’s having left behind the hacky comedy of her Vegas residency and the bedazzled Vance-branded products she hawked on QVC, she remains committed to the kind of bits that her new audiences would hate and to the glittery, garish aesthetics that threaten to mark her non-belonging. “How are people supposed to make an entrance,” she demands of the contractor who dares to suggest they do away with the planned larger-than-life Deborah Vance statue that will serve as the entrance to the new Diva hotel, “if not between my legs? Where’s the joy, the whimsy? Where’s the—the…wow factor… The underwear mirror for upskirt selfies will be a destination in and of itself!” Against the contractor’s concerns about the cost and feasibility of the “technically unnecessary,” Deborah reminds us that, despite her brush with prestige streamers and Late Night fame, she is still a woman who takes pleasure in the campy, the bad, and the low.
Deborah provides the clearest celebration of these pleasures in the show’s finale, where she likens herself to the city of Las Vegas: “The truth is: I needed Las Vegas. I was told I was too loud. Too tacky. Too much. But this town embraced me when no other place would…[The Diva] is a place to be who you really are without shame because this city does that better than any other place on the planet.” To momentarily detour away from the screen and into the living room, I admit I may have been the perfect audience for this show—even before I knew exactly how queer the cast and characters would be, how willing the showrunners would be to lean into the intimacy and eroticism of creating something with another person.
I’m the daughter of a stand-up comedian; most of my childhood trips were car rides to whatever comedy club had my dad’s name on the marquee that weekend; and in college, I’d meet the woman who would become my wife while working at the DC Improv. But beyond the personal appreciation for the art of stand-up, I was also a kid who, improbably, fell in love with Las Vegas. My first domestic flight took me to my dad’s gig at the MGM Grand Casino in Las Vegas, where I was convinced I had encountered the height of luxury and glamour—from the lazy river connecting seven whole pools outside, to the fact that the Spice Girls (whose photographs adorned my pink-and-white backpack) were staying in the same hotel. A few years later, my personal “Flat Stanley” was dutifully stowed in my dad’s luggage and taken on a tour of Vegas comedy clubs, likely becoming the first and only Flat Emily to perform on the stage of Catch a Rising Star. And when we had to pick a state for a research project in fifth grade, I was the first to throw my hand in the air and plead my case for Nevada. I may not have understood the appeal (or the class politics) of the ski resort lift tags that adorned my classmates’ coat zippers all winter, but I knew for sure that not one of them had experienced the magic of the Flamingo. It was something of a disorientation to realize later that not everyone shared my vision of Vegas. But from the opening shot of Hacks, I saw a glimmer of that same magic. As we follow Deborah off-stage and through the staff-only tunnels below the Palmetto, glimpsing her easy rapport with the bouncers and dancers, audiences are treated to a side of Vegas that’s all too often rendered invisible outside of moments of catastrophe like the 2008 financial crisis. It is not just a destination to (not) remember; for many it is, as Deborah puts it, “home.”
Yet it is an improbable home. As the showrunners note in their post-episode commentary on the finale, Las Vegas is “this glittering strip in the middle of the desert, which is uninhabitable, and yet people live there. And I think it’s symbolically appropriate that this place that represents survival is the place that Deborah and Ava would be at the end.” After an episode spent largely in Paris, where Deborah teaches Ava to drive stick in a vintage Fiat 500, introduces her to “real” bread and French dining, and buys out the Louvre to spend an afternoon showing her some of the world’s most famous art, we find Deborah and Ava walking and laughing along the Champ de Mars, past the Eiffel Tower. Lingering on the iconic landmark, the camera match cuts to another Eiffel Tower without our noticing. As the music builds to a crescendo, Streisand and Garland’s voices joining together for the first time, the camera pans down to reveal the Vegas Strip where Deborah and Ava are still strolling arm-in-arm, still riffing, still joyous, still alive. As the camera climbs skyward, the directorial script notes, “we float over the Strip—that gaudy, shimmering mirage rising from the Mojave. We see all of Las Vegas now, proof that life can flourish in the most unlikely places. Its very existence a testament to survival—and a sparkly, defiant survivor at that.”
It is there that the show leaves viewers for the last time, inviting us to lean into a rhinestone-bedazzled vision of queer persistence. As Deborah told Ava way back in the first season, “I can absolutely do it without you. But, you know, it would probably be…a lot less fun.” In an analogous way, we, too, could sidestep the labor of lasting, of insisting on the hard and sometimes embarrassingly earnest work of embracing the beauty of human-made art. It would save time and effort. But it might well turn out to be a lot less fun.
Emily Coccia is the incoming Pennington Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Focusing on nineteenth-century genres of working-class and mass-popular literature, her first book project considers how American working women’s fannish reception practices allowed them to envision queer futures and cultivate spaces for pleasure and intimacy. In her free time, she can be found walking her dog or searching for new TV shows featuring strong female leads and homoerotic subtext.