“Sometimes there’s just one person we wanna impress.”
That’s what Ava tells Jean near the end of “Who’s Making Dinner?”, the stronger of the two Hacks episodes that dropped last night, with a script by Samantha Riley and direction by Lucia Aniello. Deborah has just had the horrifying realization that she still wants to hear praise from her cheating son-of-a-bitch dead ex-husband Frank Vance. Why does she still care what this guy she met when she was 18 thinks? Well, that’s just the way it goes sometimes. The beginning of her career is all tied up in this man, in his personal and creative betrayals, and in how he was the first to assign her the reputation she can’t quite seem to shake: that of a crazy, unstable woman who could breakdown any time.
The episode has me getting emotional about a 1970s sitcom that never existed. But Hacks brings Who’s Making Dinner? to life through Deborah’s memories and reactions to everything that goes down at the PaleyFest special event celebrating the sitcom’s legacy. Thanks to Bob Lipka, Deborah cannot actually speak at this event; instead, her dead ex-husband who tricked her so he’d end up with sole creator credit on the sitcom despite them writing it together gets the final word yet again. Hacks doesn’t use full-on flashbacks to tell the story but instead does something more interesting that allows us to stay in the present with Deborah while still journeying through her memories: short moments of the past play out as Deborah makes her way around the PaleyFest exhibit. It’s an effective device. We get to see things through Deborah’s eyes without being overloaded with unnecessary exposition or backstory. It’s clear the memories are complex for her, a confusing mix of joy and pain.
Ava certainly understands what it means to obsess over what one person thinks of you; though their situation doesn’t perfectly map onto Deborah and Frank’s marriage, of course, there are interesting parallels here. Deborah has betrayed Ava in the past, and she’s also made a punching bag of her. I know a lot of viewers prefer when these two are getting along on the show, but I like both sides of their dynamic, because I find it to be the truer and more revelatory thing: that the person who you can create so well with can also be a person you’re at odds with.
Certainly not all of Ava’s memories with Deborah are positive ones; some are quite bleak. But Ava will never stop wanting to impress Deborah. By the end of “Who’s Making Dinner?”, she’s contemplating making a reboot of the sitcom about a new generation, but in the following episode, she’s really nervous to broach the subject with Deborah, who doesn’t own the rights (Kathy does, so welcome back, J. Smith-Cameron!). That hesitation from Ava is predicated on everything she has come to learn about Deborah through the years. She’s guarded, and she doesn’t like when other people tell her story. But Deborah surprises by being supportive. She wants Ava to do this; she just doesn’t really want to be involved herself. Deborah’s growth as a character is always pretty small (and often subject to regression, but I find that believable about her character!), and I think this is one of those instances of meaningful progress. She can become erratic when she feels threatened, but here, she doesn’t overthink it or see this as Ava coming for her legacy. It’s a surprisingly quiet and passive passing of the torch. Not everything has to be a knockout fight between these two.
The first episode grapples with a question that circulates in discourse on comedy periodically: the balance between substance and comedy and whether having much of the former makes up for having less of the latter. Put more simply: How funny does comedy have to be? Hacks itself is certainly a substantive comedy; my recaps are often focused on the industry and the realities of being a working artist these days or on relationship dynamics, primarily between Ava and Deborah. I’m admittedly not writing much about the actually comedy of it all. But trust the jokes are there.
Hacks wouldn’t work if it wasn’t consistently funny, because Hacks is too often cyclical in its storytelling. Season four was one of my favorite seasons of the series, and by that point, we’d seen Deborah and Ava come together, get driven apart, come together, get driven apart, unlock a career achievement, then hit a career obstacle, unlock a career achievement, then hit a career obstacle…so many times over and over. But all along the way, it was funny. Even in this episode, we have explorations of comedy and Deborah’s complicated past but also plenty of space taken up by stuff that’s just simply funny. For example: Anna Konkle’s guest turn as a PaleyFest admin who has an extremely flirty dynamic with Jimmy. It’s often through the one-off bit and smaller recurring characters that we see a lot of this funny for the sake of funny side of Hacks, a show that isn’t necessarily always laugh-a-minute but rather changes the equation of its substance to comedy ratio episode-to-episode, scene-to-scene.
The week’s second episode, “D’Amazing Race” — directed by Jeff Rosenberg and written by Pat Regan — is a bit heavier on the goofs, sending Deborah and DJ on a mother-daughter journey in a special new celebrity season of The Amazing Race, and the results are mixed. Maybe this hits harder for serious fans of The Amazing Race, but I found the setup more distracting than anything, which is a bummer, since I love Kaitlin Olson and do find Hacks to be riotously laugh-a-minute when DJ is on-screen. All the funniest DJ lines in the episode though are in the scenes just before and just after the Amazing Race sequences start (case in point: “Well that’s what you get for suing me for criminal negligence for breaking grandma’s teapot, okay? Stuart and I have developed a lovely working relationship.”). Something about the Amazing Race setup takes away from the humor rather than adding to it. Again, maybe I’m missing something here. It’s not my preferred reality TV ministry.
There are parts that I enjoy! I love how good Deborah is at the clown routine. She’s hitting her marks and not really breaking out of her clown character, as opposed to DJ who of course can’t help being herself throughout. Deborah’s a star, baby! She’s committing to the bit no matter how inane it is! We get to see the full range of performance experiences across both episodes for Deborah: In “Who’s Making Dinner?”, she spectacularly bombs at the podium (I love seeing people bomb on this show). Then she crushes an impromptu set in jail at the end of the episode that really feels like it’s comedy on her own terms. But then she literally crushes clown choreography in “D’Amazing Race”, an instance where she’s just performing for the gig, not really doing exactly what she wants to be doing. Being a performer truly has its ups and downs. I love these little reminders of what a showman Deb is.
What’s the right ratio between jokes and story in a show like Hacks? “Who’s Making Dinner?” contends with that question directly and fittingly then actually serves up that right ratio. But whereas that episode is more representative of Hacks as a whole in that the jokes and bits feel more organically threaded into the storytelling, “D’Amazing Race” feels a little more segmented, and the smash from all those silly Amazing Race sequences into Deborah and DJ’s tender moment in the airport after isn’t as seamless as other tonal turns on the show tend to be. I definitely don’t think every joke needs to service the emotional narrative or have a real point, but there’s a seamlessness to “Who’s Making Dinner?” between the standalone jokes and deeper stories that’s not quite shared by “D’Amazing Race.” Still, they’re fun to watch in tandem, showcasing a range of Hacks‘ tones.
Favorite Line of “Who’s Making Dinner?”:
“My dentist is such a pervert, and she’s a girl.” Nothing drops us into a scene quite like an unhinged Kayla line. This one reminded me of her line about the lady on the raisin box, which was apparently improvised by Meg.
Favorite Exchange of “Who’s Making Dinner?”:
Kayla: Email’s first base, I mean the last person I emailed, we ended up fucking Jimmy.
Jimmy: Oh my god, the HVAC guy?
Kayla: Ew, no, the exterminator.
Jimmy: You slept with Adnan?
Kayla: Yeahhhhh
[later]
Kayla: You never had sex with a married person?
Jimmy: Not that I know of. Have you?
Kayla: Yeah, I just told you. Adnan.
Favorite Exchange of “D’Amazing Race”:
Kathy: How did you find me? Do you still have that PI following me?
Deborah: PI? What PI?
Kathy: *looks*
Deborah: He died.
