Note: This story contains possible spoilers for season four of Hacks.
It’s difficult for any popular TV show to recapture the original, lower-stakes magic of its first season, but there’s a moment early on in season four of Hacks—Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky’s award-winning Max series about Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), a disenchanted millennial comedy writer forced to write jokes for legendary Vegas stand-up diva Deborah Vance (Jean Smart)—that makes it perfectly clear just why the show keeps cleaning up at the Emmys and Golden Globes.
Photo: Courtesy of Max
In the scene, Ava schlumps her way down the escalator at Los Angeles’s Americana at Brand mall (where she just so happens to live), exhaustedly sipping coffee in a camo-thermal-and-basketball-shorts-forward look that Deborah swiftly condemns by telling her: “You know, you’re not funny enough to dress like Adam Sandler.”
Deborah’s relentless and consistently funny bodying of Ava aside, the fourth season of Hacks explores the ever-shifting dynamic between the two women, revealing a new side of Ava in particular that feels genuinely refreshing. In case you’ve already forgotten, season three ended with Ava extorting her way into a head writer job on Deborah’s new late-night show, and seeing her attempt to keep up with Deborah’s decades’ worth of vengeance-getting experience is fascinating, whether they’re in the writers’ room, at a major Hollywood event, or at a strip club.
