Hacksis the story of Ava (Hannah Einbinder), a 25-year-old writer living in LA who recently got cancel-cultured for an insensitive tweet, and Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) a 75-year-old insult comic who’s become a fixture of the Las Vegas Elite. Unable to land a job in LA, Ava gets paired up with Deborah by their mutual manager Jimmy (Paul W. Downs). Ava’s task is to help revitalize Deborah’s comedy set, which has been stagnant for 30 years. Ava is passionate, she’s quick-witted, she’s hip to all the internet slang and social justice movements of today, but she’s also selfish, quick-to-anger, and doesn’t always have the soundest judgment. Deborah Vance is a Joan Rivers-style insult comic who was a feminist icon in her day, but has since lost touch with the trajectory of cultural awareness as it has grown and changed over the years. She is as complicated as Ava–she’s intensely selfish, has a biting sense of humor, and is very quick to use it, but underneath that diamond-strong surface, she’s also fearless, generous, wounded, and even sweet– when she wants to be. Both characters experience a kind of coming-of-age as they learn to trust each other and find that they have more in common than they initially thought. They share a certain workaholism, a self-centered single-mindedness, and that most bonding personality trait of all–a very dark sense of humor.
The scenes where the two comedians make each other laugh is truly heart-warming. The TV of today tends to focus on one generation at a time —Euphoriafollows the struggles of addiction in Gen Z,Insecurespeaks fluent Millennial, andSex and the City/And Just Like Thattoe the Boomer/Gen X line. Few have tried to bridge the gap between two generations unless they were making one “right” and the other “wrong.”Hacksflawlessly explores the similarities and differences between the two generations while taking a very nuanced neutral position, making no judgments about who is supposed to be the hero. In fact, they suggest that a lot of growth can come from sharing their experiences, their struggles, their wisdom, and their humor with one another.
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WhenHacksbegins, Ava has recently become Twitter’s “Main Character Of The Day” by tweeting a joke the internet found offensive. She finds herself on the wrong side of employable-in-Hollywood and while complaining to her manager Jimmy about how she can’t find work, he gets an idea. He contacts his most successful client, Deborah Vance, who he inherited from his father and makes the match from hell. Both women are highly opposed to this collaboration and at their first meeting and unleash a harsh few lines of rapid-fire roasting on one another. However, this exchange leads Deborah to agree to let Ava write for her. During Deborah’s early career as a stand-up comedian, mere moments after her deal to become the first woman talk show host fell through when her husband left her for her sister, she wastheprogressive. She clawed her way from the bottom,forcedpeople to respect her talent, and built a barricade of witty comebacks and verbal barbed wire around herself to protect what she was creating. Ava comes in like a wrecking ball full of corrections about appropriate language, critiques of capitalism, and a lengthy and meandering description of her complicated sexuality. She’s the avatar for Gen Z. And Deborah’s eye rolls are plentiful.
Initially, the two women find it impossible to work together. Deborah, obstinate and set in her ways, barely gives Ava a chance before delegating useless and time-consuming tasks to her and at one point literally stranding her in the desert. She sees her young companion as a Doc-Marten-wearing whiny know-it-all nobody. Ava doesn’t respect Deborah’s work either–she sees her as a rich, vapid, out-of-touch, offensive, washed-up hack. They don’t see eye-to-eye on anything. They fight constantly–and it getsmean. In fact, their harsh way with words and propensity for going for the jugular seems to be the first common ground they discover between them.
Like all great Odd Couple pairings, this hatred and toxicity starts to turn to mutual respect, admiration, and a realness that neither Ava nor Deborah can seem to cultivate in any of their other relationships. Gen Z is notoriously nihilistic and sarcastic–they are coming of age at the cross-section of internet addiction, mainstream social justice awareness, climate change, and the consequences of late-stage capitalism. Deborah doesn’t like being criticized for her opulent wealth-hoarding or her regressive humor, but she does resonate with the way Ava can joke about the heavier aspects of life. Baby Boomers, despite being old and unaware now, were in their youth the trailblazers of the counter-culture, they lived through the civil rights movement, second wave feminism, the introduction of prescription birth control, and the free love and psychedelic wave of the late ’60s. That’s not even to mention that they are two women trying to make it in the boys club that is comedy and in that regard, things haven’t actually changed that much.
Deborah, on the other hand, teaches Ava about stability. She gets her out of bed early, working regular hours, and taking responsibility for her own actions. For the first three-quarters of the season, Ava is intensely self-destructive. She is living in that suspended adolescence that has become the norm for Millennials and beyond. It just isn’t as easy to be an adult before age 30 as it used to be. Deborah teaches Ava the kind of work ethic she’s going to need if she’s going to have a career in comedy–and Deborah is definitely an expert. In a world of 15 fleeting fame minutes, Deborah has managed the Herculean feat of longevity. WhenHacksintroduces the legendary comedian, she is in her 70s, and she is still making people laugh. Ava learns to respect Deborah’s hard work, her influence on the art of stand-up comedy, and the way she paved the path for the female comedians who would come after her. The feminist undertones of the act that Ava and Deborah collaborate to create fulfills Ava in a way she hasn’t known yet. She is not only helping Deborah regain cultural relevanceandinnovate comedy once again, but she is helping tell the story of what it took to carve out a space for women in comedy altogether. She realizes she wouldn’t even have access to her passion in life if it weren’t for women like Deborah, navigating sexist men in dangerous spaces, coming up against extreme scrutiny, and that old cliché that women aren’t funny. It makes Ava grateful in a way her previous sense of entitlement made unavailable to her.
As much asHacksis about bridging the Boomer/Gen Z generation gap, it is also about the evolution of comedy. At one point standup was just a bunch of men pacing back and forth on stage and yelling into a microphone about how much they hate their wives. There was a particularly mean period of time when stand-up was about how offensive the comedian could be to marginalized people who didn’t yet have a seat at the table to speak for themselves. But that has shifted, and old-school chauvinistic comedians are having a really hard time with it. At one point, Deborah starts to get cold feet about the new show she and Ava are working on, which is just a collection of stories (some funny, some tragic) from her life. She says “these aren’t even jokes!” It is probably no coincidence that this has been the main criticism that has been thrown atHannah Gadsbyfor her groundbreaking comedy specialNannette. Copious cis, straight, male comedians have taken to their podcast mics to condescendingly complain about Gadsby’s success “sure it’s good, but it’s not comedy.” The whole point ofNannette, though, is about how sometimes telling the truth is nobler than being funny. This is the lesson Deborah learns as well. The way she self-deprecates as a defense mechanism, the way she makes jokes out of her own tragedies and the way that she doesn’t acknowledge how badly she’s been hurt has been holding her back from growing as a person for a very long time.
This is generational in many ways. The Baby Boomers are the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” generation, while Gen Z lives in a completely different reality. They greatly benefited from Gen X and Millennial generations’ disenfranchisement and rebellion from that old paradigm. The internet allowed for a deeper connection among people from infinite different backgrounds and experiences. This led to a greater cultural understanding, and a more honest grasp of history, of systems of oppression, and inspired movements like #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and Queer Liberation to become even more visible. The strength in numbers was too powerful and too obvious to ignore. Gen Z is the first generation who has always known the power of their own voice. They are themselves, fully. There are still struggles for them, there are still impossible beauty standards and dating apps and porn addictions and cyber-bullying. But at least they are empowered to share their own stories. At least they know that abuse of power is a bad thing, and not just the cost of doing business. Deborah learns that Ava’s “complaining” is actually just a refusal to put up with the kind of oppressive circumstances she’s been fighting (and imposing on others) her whole life. Ava learns that Deborah’s harshness, her defensiveness, and her complacency come from unresolved pain and a hard-fought but tenuous grasp on success. They come to understand each other, and mutual respect blooms.
