At Curtain Call, ‘Hacks’ Does Everything It Does Best

The following recap of Hacks’ series finale contains A LOT OF SPOILERS ABOUT THE HACKS SERIES FINALE! NO REALLY! DO NOT READ UNTIL YOU HAVE SEEN THE EPISODE! The finale was written by the trio of freaky geniuses who created the show—Jen Statsky, Lucia Aniello, and Paul W. Downs—and directed by Lucia, who directed all of my favorite episodes of the series. The finale is a love letter to Vegas, to the writing process, to the beautiful and hard-to-summarize relationship between Ava and Deborah, and to the art of comedy.

I’ve never been very good with endings, but I’ll try.

Hacks premiered its pilot two weeks before my 29th birthday, the beginning of the end of my twenties. It was less than a year after my then-girlfriend, now-wife and I had moved out of Las Vegas after what was supposed to be a semester-long stint there elongated due to the pandemic. We had fallen in love with Vegas, despite the end of our time there feeling like an escape. We had met incredible artists there, made art of our own, become spellbound by the desert air at night and all the lights. In the pilot, when Ava’s plane touches down in Las Vegas, the flight attendant announces the temperature is currently 111 degrees. Her seatmate opens the plane window, and comically harsh sunlight streams in. Vegas confronts Ava, but then she finds an unexpected home there. I know what that’s like.

Vegas gets portrayed on screen all the time, and while Hacks also shows a very specific side of it, its portrayal of the often misunderstood and mythologized city has always stood out to me. The inclusion and ongoing development of characters like Kiki, who live and work in Vegas and are not just passing through, contributes to that. But also even just the way Vegas is filmed throughout the show stands out. I never got the sense Hacks was making fun of Vegas for all the usual reasons it gets made fun of—tacky, too bright, “fake.” Rather, there’s a sense of awe, wonder, magic even to the way Vegas is framed and shot. In the series finale, which I promise I’m going to get to more directly, a shot of the Eiffel Tower in Paris melts into a shot of the Eiffel Tower replica on the Strip. On a show with a more mocking tone about Vegas, this would have read like a joke, but it doesn’t here. It’s just genuinely a transition and point of connection between two places immensely important to Deborah Vance.

(The “fake” thing always gets me. Vegas is one of the most authentic and real places I’ve lived even if it’s painted otherwise by outsiders; it reminds me of Orlando, my home city now, in that way.)

The series finale feels like a tribute to Vegas, too. In her speech as she finally opens the Diva, Deborah talks about finding her home in the city, which welcomed her “too muchness” with open arms. Don’t let the capitalist endeavors of casinos (which, sure, yes, Deborah is very much an active participant in) fool you; Vegas teems with life, art, and creativity. It’s a very special place, and I’ve felt Hacks has always understood that, starting from the very first sequence in the pilot to the very end of this finale.

I put off watching the series finale as long as I could to still allow time for being able to write about it, as I’m attempting to do here, dragging my feet as I am. Once again, it falls close to my birthday, this time by only a matter of a couple days. On May 30, I will turn 34, and in the five years since Hacks first started, I have learned a lot about myself as a writer, artist, and creative collaborator with others. I realize I am making this all about me when I’m merely supposed to be recapping a series finale, but here we are. I’ve never been great at writing about Hacks without slipping into personal essay territory, try as I might to rein it in. The show is so full of genuinely applicable life lessons for people living a creative life. It finds both humor and horror in the realities of pursuing creative success under capitalism and making your art your job. It makes me feel excited to write, because the show itself is well written but also because nothing is more thrilling than when Ava and Deborah are in the zone with their writing. Oh, you’re doing The Artist’s Way? I’m simply going to rewatch all of Hacks.

All season, I have been thinking about co-creators Jen Statsky, Lucia Aniello, and Paul W. Downs writing that they’re ending the series on their own terms and in the way they always planned to do. That’s a rare thing in today’s television landscape. And everything about this final season has felt so intentional and organic as a result, not a rush to tidy things up. All the callbacks and references to the first season, as a result, are earned and poignant. When Deborah tells Ava after the Diva opening event that she has cancer and, in lieu of treatment, she wants to travel to Europe to end her life on her own terms, it might hit Ava like a ton of bricks, but the news went down easier for me as a viewer. Well, no, it didn’t go down easy. I still immediately broke out into tears. It was a proper emotional gutpunch, the first of many increasingly potent gutpunches  throughout the finale. But it was a grounded reveal, one that feels like we’ve been building to for much longer than just Deborah’s confession about a mass in “Montecito.”

The finale provides the type of back-and-forth arc Hacks has done over and over again throughout the series, sometimes over the course of a few episodes or over the course of an entire season. Deborah makes a decision, Ava pushes back, Deborah doubles down on her decision, Ava pushes back, Deborah insists she is sticking to her decision, tries to push Ava away, but Ava pushes back. Something shifts. Deborah finds herself chasing after Ava instead of pushing her away. This version is just very condensed and very high stakes (life or death, in fact). Ava, of course, does not want Deborah to die. She spends much of the episode attempting to convince her to at least try treatment. She argues with one of the most stubborn women alive, as she has so many times before. I’ve written about this before, but it speaks to the strengths of the writing and character development on Hacks that even when these sorts of back-and-forths feel frustrating and repetitive, they still work. Deborah and Ava are such fully realized characters, but their relationship, too, is so well drawn, which is different than being well defined. Because no, even at the end, it’s hard to succinctly define what they are to one another in the language most readily available to us. What do you call the person you choose to bring with you to the end of your life? Is that not a life partner?

Deborah and Ava head to Europe for one big final vacation together. It unfolds like a rom-com. Deborah teaches Ava to haggle for antiques and to drive stick. She introduces Ava to real bread. They stay in beautiful hotels, and Deborah buys out the entire Louvre so they can wander its galleries alone. Ava dresses Deborah for a night out dancing, putting her in one of Ava’s own signature Chaotic Bisexual Uniforms. During that night of dancing, there’s a gorgeous slow-motion sequence where Ava focuses completely on Deborah, like it’s suddenly just them alone. (Lucia Aniello, I’ll see you in court for the emotional damage that particular scene caused.)

The full weight of the history between Deborah and Ava is felt throughout this. It hits all the notes a series finale should, and it has been a long time since I’ve seen a series ender as good as this one. There is sentimental closure (I’m talking, of course, about Deborah’s reveal that her hands are much larger than Ava’s despite all the jokes she has made about the size of Ava’s hands through the years), and there’s more open-ended narrative, too.

Just as the whole final season has echoed parts of the first, the finale echoes the pilot. These echoes include direct touchpoints: The opening tracking shot of the finale follows Ava through the set of her new Who’s Making Dinner? series like the opening tracking shot of the pilot follows Deborah in the immediate aftermath of her Palmetto show, making her way through backstage. In the finale, Jimmy and Kayla resume the same exact desk placements at Latitude where we first met them in the pilot. At a cafe in Paris, Deborah reaches instinctively for her little red notebook to write down a joke; we saw her do this for the first time while at lunch with Marty in the pilot.

There are more abstract parallels, too. When Ava screams at the wheel while navigating the Arc de Triomphe roundabout, it’s fun to remember how minutes after they first met, Deborah almost ran Ava off the road chasing her down the driveway. Also, the very first thing we hear Ava say in the pilot is a suicide joke. How fitting she is now tasked with accompanying for the assisted suicide of Deborah.

My favorite echo happens at the end of the finale. Deborah chases Ava through a crowded train station so she can punch-up a joke. She worked out the better joke in her head, and now she wants to run it by her partner. After Deborah ran Ava down in the driveway in the pilot, she did the same thing. She punched up the joke that had gotten Ava lightly canceled. They riff together. It’s the first glimpse into their comedic alchemy together. To those fans who lament the fact that Deborah and Ava never had sex, I’d like to point to these two scenes and say: Are you sure they haven’t? Punching up each other’s jokes is its own form of intimacy. My wife and I do it all the time.

When writing is very good, there’s a sort of pain and pleasure to it. Nothing beats watching Deborah and Ava work through a joke. For all their differences, it’s the plane on which they meet, this sort of raw creative expression and work. This would be a beautiful thing to watch no matter what, but against the backdrop of the proliferation of generative AI, which many people are using to outsource the beautiful process of brainstorming and forming ideas (which LLMs literally cannot actually do), it hits even harder. And that’s why I’m so glad the show decided to incorporate that AI backdrop into the season. There’s an ecstasy to good writing, to nailing the perfect punchline, but without the grind of the process to get there, the ecstasy never comes. Hacks has a reverence for process, not just output. It seems so small, but watching Deborah jot something down in her little red notebook signals how much the writers of Hacks care about process.

Given my warning up top about not reading this piece until you’ve seen the episode, then surely you know by now that Deborah does not go through with her plans to end her life. Her mind is changed last minute not by Ava’s pleas but by the spark of inspiration, the realization that she might not have much time left on this earth but she does have the seeds of another hour-long special in her. It’s always the writing and the comedy that has meant the most to her, more than her relationships. She has another hour in her, and she wants Ava to help her write it. Just as the cancer reveal may have felt overly sentimental if not backed by such strong writing and character development, this ending, too, would perhaps land as pat or corny, but it is neither of those things. The final season’s callbacks to the first season aren’t mere fanservice or gimmick but instead help scaffold everything that happens in the finale so that it all rings true to the story and its characters. It’s just good writing, and as Deborah Vance might say, what could be better than that?

Truly nothing I write about this finale could ever feel like enough. There is more I want to say, but I have to stop myself before this all becomes too incoherent. Good writing takes time, after all. I imagine I have more writing in me about this show, especially after I’ve had some distance from it. I’m sure you can expect more essays in the future! But for now, I’ll end things here. I’d love to discuss the episode with you in the comments.