The following is a recap of Hacks season four, episode six, “Mrs. Table” written by Carolyn Lipka and directed by Paul W. Downs.
This season of Hacks keeps blowing me away. Every week, I text my friends in awe about this fourth season, about how the series has never really run out of steam, even as it’s technically repeating the same big beats over and over again. Ava and Deborah come together, are driven apart, come back together, are driven apart, and so on and so forth, like two star-crossed lovers fated to repeat the same cycles and constantly be in want of something the other can’t give. That tension, that repetition, none of it would work without dynamic writing and nuanced performances, which of course Hacks has in spades.
Specificity in the various subplots of course also keeps things feeling fresh, but those alone aren’t where Hacks‘ magic lives. It almost has more in common with a series like Mad Men than with other streamer comedies. Mad Men always managed to make agency shakeups and the constant rotation of names into and out of Sterling Cooper thrilling even as they were technically hitting the same beats repeatedly. Hacks, similarly an exploration of power, ambition, and work, also maintains consistent dramatic tension and intrigue in its central power struggle and the back and forth of Ava and Deborah’s careers. Am I saying Ava is the Peggy to Deborah’s Don? I think I am! It’s not a perfect parallel, but it does work on some levels.
We’re a little over halfway through season four, and we’re thrust into a different part of Ava and Deborah’s toxic cycle. After pushing each other away and being at each other’s throats all season, the tides change. They’re moving toward each other again.
But they really have to reach their breaking points to get there. Midway through this episode, Ava has a spectacular mental breakdown. Hannah Einbinder is phenomenal at portraying Ava on the brink. She screams, she throws an entire grilled branzino at a window, she drives full force through a security gate on the lot like a woman not just on the edge but already falling off of it.
Ava is understandably pushed to this point by the events that precede it in the episode. It all starts with the news that Ava’s ex Ruby, star of Wolf Girl, will be a guest on the show (others will argue Einbinder deserves awards for many other parts of this episode, but I personally think she deserves them simply for her line reading of “I almost married her, in my opinion.”), prompting Ava to get an unhinged makeover and generally spiral in Ruby’s presence in her attempts to seem Totally Cool and Put Together. She even manages to deliver the news she’s dating a couple in the most awkward way imaginable. Ruby, a consummate professional, assures Ava she’s fine being interviewed by Deborah, despite Deborah and Ava’s unhealthy attachment to Deborah contributing to their breakup.
Ruby does keep it professional, but Deborah makes it personal. She asks, on camera, for Ruby to share the story of the ring, intentionally mortifying Ava. This would be diabolical under any circumstances, but the fact that it seems so premeditated makes it that much worse. Previously in the episode, Deborah rejects all of the writers’ jokes for a desk bit for the episode, forcing Ava to frantically come up with a slew of more alts. (This is such a physical episode for Einbinder, and watching her crash into people as she runs down the hallway to deliver the alts is just one of many physical comedy feats she pulls off in the episode.) Deborah rejects those, too, and says they’ll just have to extend Ruby’s interview to fill the space. I think this means Deborah was planning to pull the ring and failed engagement story out of Ruby this whole time.
And why? I believe it’s because of her encounter with Ava at the end of last episode, when Ava icily told Deborah the couple she’s dating haven’t seen the show yet because she told them to wait until it got good. I really do think Deborah is petty enough to want to embarrass Ava as a form of emotional revenge. She has proven to be just that wicked over and over, and there’s a certain pleasure she always takes in tormenting Ava, one of the people who sees and understands her the most.
Ava heads to the couple’s house, quite literally interrupting their cozy night in with a jumpscare. In Ava’s mind, her arrangement with the couple has been perfect. She’s too busy working to really be a steadfast and emotional presence in a relationship, so they can provide that for each other and she can just have really hot sex with both of them whenever she wants, as we see her do in last week’s episode in, indeed, a VERY HOT sex scene. The couple doesn’t feel the same way though. They feel used for sex and like Ava doesn’t want to actually get to know them. This wasn’t what they were looking for. I’m so into the turn here, because it isn’t really like any storyline about polyamory or open relationships I’ve seen on television before. Often with other portrayals, it’s the third who feels used, or the couple bring a third in to deflect ongoing problems. But Hacks delivers something more interesting and expansive here; this couple wants Ava to be a more equal part in the relationship than she currently is. They want the emotional intimacy from her, too, something Ava mistakenly assumed wasn’t part of the arrangement at all. And so now, she’s dumped, another excruciatingly awkward moment as Ava’s expectations deviate wildly from reality. It takes her far too long to realize she’s being dumped, and even as she’s about to leave, it’s like she thinks they’ll change their mind. But they only ask her to stop so she can return her key, not to beg her back like perhaps she was hoping for.
Freshly dumped and pissed off about the interview with Ruby, she delivers a big “fuck you” to Deborah before she gets to the branzino that breaks the bisexual’s back. She has been so obsessed with trying to be a good boss to her writers, perhaps subconsciously trying to prove she isn’t the kind of boss Deborah is, but she has overcorrected. She’s too nice. She has been subsidizing their lunches when they go over the studio caps, but her writers have been taking advantage of her, using her lax policies to get away with things like claiming getting a tooth gem is a reasonable mental health excuse to show up late for work. They’re also adding extravagant food orders to their lunch deliveries for “Mrs. Table,” the title of the episode and the fake name they use when they want to order something “for the table” like, for example, a $72 whole branzino. Ava has been subsidizing their luxe add-ons. This is, indeed, enough to bring Ava to a breakdown that has been building for some time as she has struggled to adjust to the realities of the very difficult new job. She has her aforementioned branzino breakdown (god, Einbinder’s voice breaking on “living wage”…I know I’m fawning over Einbinder’s performance and delivery a lot in this episode, but it’s so extremely warranted)
screams that she quits driving away in rage.
Deborah, meanwhile, receives a comedy award that’s mostly a publicity stunt. Rosie O’Donnell is here, playing herself, apparently an old friend of Deborah’s. Rosie asks how all this happened, Deborah’s recent success and thrust into the comedy limelight again. Did she do ayahuasca perhaps? Deborah gives some pat answer about hard work, timing, luck. “No, you got better,” Rosie says. “You don’t just get better. Comedy is like sports. Nobody starts dunking at 60 years old.” Deborah says she just found her voice. She’s doing her Deborah thing of thinking only about herself. She’s feeling sorry for herself about this fake award and about all the stupid lifeless video content she has been forced to create throughout the episode, like pretending to catch a bag of Fritos thrown by Mariska Hargitay. And feeling sorry for herself means she isn’t thinking about the people around her who make her great, who have helped her start dunking late in life. (As a side note, I love this apt comparison of comedy to sports as a writer-athlete myself — there’s so much overlap between the two, and creative pursuits require just as much discipline as sports, even if they aren’t always valued on the same pedestal as athletics are by society. Like when people suggest AI can replace writers, I wanna be like CAN AI REPLACE YOUR FAVORITE ATHLETE, BITCH?!)
Deborah comes home from her award ceremony to an empty house. Damien is away retrieving bear piss to combat the coyotes. Josefina is gone to help DJ deliver her baby, a reminder that even when it comes to the role of motherhood, Deborah is constantly hiring out the labor of her life. It’s just her and her corgis. Only, just one corgi greets her at the door. Earlier in the episode, Josefina reminds Deborah to close the doggy door so the dogs can’t get out while she’s away, given the coyotes. I knew that couldn’t just be a throwaway line. Deborah sees her other dog on her security footage, having a standoff with a coyote. She runs out and throws her award, scaring off the coyote and scooping up the dog, who seems alright, but it was a close call. “I should have protected you, I should have protected you,” she echoes, prompting me to shout at my screen: WELL, YOU BETTER GO SAVE AVA NOW.
And indeed, that’s exactly what she does. Jimmy and Kayla are also on the lookout (“Have you seen a lesbian ginger?” Kayla asks a random person at The Americana). Deborah decides to drive around Silverlake looking for, I don’t know, an Ava-coded establishment? Well, she finds one! It’s Girl Twirl: a night of queer line dancing at El Cid, and Deborah’s asks a bunch of LA gays in line if they’ve seen this woman, flashing a photo of Ava. They have not, but one helpful queer suggests Deborah use the Find My app to locate Ava. Of course they have each other’s locations.
The app brings Deborah to the ocean, where she spots a red head walking out to sea. Deborah thinks it’s Ava, who cannot swim, and swims out to save her. The image of Deborah Vance diving headfirst under a wave in a fur coat will forever live with me. It’s not Ava though, just some girl going on a chilly night swim to train for the polar bear plunge. Ava is on the shore, walking on the beach.
“Yeah, I’m not suicidal, I just wanna die,” Ava tells Deborah in yet another great line reading from Einbinder. “I’m not actually gonna self-harm, okay?” she continues. “And if I was going to kill myself, I wouldn’t do it Virginia Woolf-style and walk into the freezing ocean. I’d do pills or wear a suicide vest on Watch What Happens Live,” Deborah finishes the last part of the sentence in unison with her, suggesting this topic has come up before.
The two sit together at a seaside seafood shack, and Ava explains that she just got in the car and drove after her freak out, ending up at the beach, which she admits is very “first thought” during a breakdown. She tells Deborah she quit, but Deborah says she can’t. She’s the youngest head writer in late night history. In an industry full of ups and downs, she’s up right now, and she has to stay there. But Ava feels like she sucks at the job, like Deborah was right, it was never going to be the right fit for her. Deborah assures her that the only reason she’s failing is because Deborah set her up to fail. She wants another change, even though she knows she doesn’t deserve one. She promises to make it up to Ava, prompting this emotional exchange:
Ava: Don’t say that, please don’t say that, because when you say that I want to believe you, but you always let me down.
Deborah: I won’t this time.
Ava: I can’t trust you.
Deborah: I understand why you feel that way, but I’m begging you. What do I have to do? Run back into that ocean? Because I will.
Ava: Even if I did come back, I don’t know if I can do the job. I don’t even know your voice anymore.
Deborah: You are my voice.
Finally, the thing Deborah was too up her own ass to say to Rosie comes out. You are my voice. Deborah could not have gotten late night without Ava. She could not have revitalized her career or grown from her offensive comedy past without Ava. The intimacy of this declaration, that Ava is inextricable from Deborah’s voice, is difficult to define. While I don’t pretend to believe Deborah and Ava would ever become explicitly romantic or sexual in their relationship, I also don’t want or need that, because what they do have is far more compelling and complex, a relationship that’s hard to put into words in the way mentor/mentee relationships (a favorite dynamic of mine, especially when it skews toxic) often are, especially in creative fields. Deborah and Ava’s relationship might not be explicitly romantic, but it contains all the intimacy, intensity, and layers of a romantic relationship, just expressed through a different mode.
And yes, I burst into tears after “you are my voice,” the second time this season has made me openly weep. It doesn’t help that the music cue right after “you are my voice” is the same as the one where Deborah looked out into her studio stands and saw only Ava.
They haven’t patched things over perfectly of course. That isn’t really possible. Ava hates Deborah now, and says as much. But Deborah points out that makes her a part of a vibrant community of Deborah Haters. Most importantly, they resolve to actually work together again, to have fun, something neither of them have been having since the show started. They’re not going to go broad anymore; they’re going to make the show for themselves.
Ava retrieves the bottle of Krug she bought at the end of last season from her car. It tastes like shit now, but it’s still powerfully symbolic of this coming together. Deborah once said the only time she’s lonely is when opening a bottle of Krug. Here they are, sharing it, both still lonely in the lives they’ve constructed for themselves and the ways they’ve put their careers ahead of everything, but together in that loneliness at least. And hopefully this is just the beginning of them starting to make good shit together again.
