‘Hacks’ EPs on the ‘rocket fuel’ of Deborah’s ‘near-death experience,’ Ava’s growth, and if Season 5 is the last one
WARNING: The following story contains spoilers about the Season 4 finale of Hacks, "Heaven."
The reports of Deborah Vance's death are greatly exaggerated.
Season 4 of Hacks concluded Thursday with a prematurely published obituary for Deborah (Jean Smart), but a fake death was exactly what she needed to feel alive again. "Heaven" begins with Deborah mourning not only the end of her late-night show but her career for the time being due to the 18-month-long non-compete clause in her network contract. Marty (Christopher McDonald) tells her to enjoy not working for the first time in her life and decompress at his resort in Hawaii. She invites Ava (Hannah Einbinder), but it's clear Deborah has something else up her sleeve.
They land in Singapore, where Deborah has booked dates at a casino, because she has figured out a loophole: She is not violating her contract if her material is translated into non-English languages because the translator would be performing, not her. It works, and they are in heaven, but the honeymoon period soon ends for Ava, who becomes concerned about Deborah's constant partying and lack of ambition to work on new material. When she brings this up to Deborah at a boat party, Deborah gets defensive, and in a cruel mirror image of the Season 2 finale, she tells Ava that she's done nothing with her life, and that she's 29 years old "and I'm your only friend. Isn't that weird?" "You're drunk and you're trying to hurt my feelings," Ava says, before they mutually agree for Ava to leave the next day.
Ava wakes up to missed calls from Jimmy (Paul W. Downs) and Kayla (Megan Stalter), the former of whom informs her that TMZ is reporting Deborah is dead. Ava dashes to Deborah's suite, where she finds her very much alive... and then subsequently annoyed by the obit, which says she killed the Late Night franchise and uses the R word ("retired"). But that's just the fire Deborah needs to get out of her stupor. She starts packing to go home. "That will not be how I'm remembered," she says. "That will not be my legacy. I'm no quitter. We have some rewriting to do."
"We've actually had the idea for the obituary leaking and this misprint since Season 1," Downs tells Gold Derby. "We always were looking for the right place to have that be sort of rocket fuel for the character to sort of be — it's almost like a near-death experience, you know?"
The original place for the obit fiasco was not the Season 4 finale, mostly "Heaven" was not the initial finale. The ninth episode, "A Slippery Slope," in which Deborah gives up the show for Ava, was going to be the season ender, with the events of "Heaven" earmarked for the Season 5 premiere.
Below, Downs and his co-creators and co-showrunners Lucia Aniello and Jen Statsky explain the decision to rejigger the end of Season 4, the inspiration for the premature obit, earning misdirects, whether the just-announced fifth season will be the final one, and if Conan O'Brien — very much not dead in the Hacks-verse — will be in Season 5.
Gold Derby: Paul, we spoke a couple weeks ago, and you said Episode 9 was originally the finale and the Season 5 premiere was going to end with the premature obit. What were the conversations like about making the change, making this the finale, and ending the season with Deborah reborn and motivated again?
Paul W. Downs: I think what we wanted to do was sort of get off the runway. We really wanted to, I think, explore what it was like for her moving through the grief of losing Late Night. We've actually had the idea for the obituary leaking and this misprint since Season 1. We always were looking for the right place to have that be sort of rocket fuel for the character to sort of be — it's almost like a near-death experience, you know? We'd really wake them up. And we were like, "Oh, it's so much more fun to just do that now, so we can hit the ground running in Season 5." We've talked about this a lot in press that we've known sort of these big tentpoles, but where they fall in the series is kind of up to the story of the season. And we have such a great writers' room that helps us break story that it was like, why wait? Why not just do that sooner and let that pay off now?
You guys have been working on this for 10 years and had the obit idea so early. What was the inspiration behind that?
Jen Statsky: Honestly talking about that since Season 1, it was taken from the story of Alfred Nobel, who had invented dynamite, and then his obituary was mistakenly published and like, "The Merchant of Death Is Dead" was the headline. And it made him realize how his invention had been used to kill so many people and brought so much pain to the world, and it really made him change the course of his life and and and established the Nobel Peace Prize in his will. And we always thought that is such a fascinating story, such a fascinating thing that could only happen to a famous person who has their obits prewritten, ready to go for when they actually do pass. So we always thought it would be so interesting for Deborah to have to encounter and see what would be said about her and her legacy, especially for someone so interested in legacy, so career-focused, so, like, her work and her career is her lifeblood. And so we knew since Season 1 we wanted to do that story, and then this just felt like the perfect place to place it, to lift her up, and reinvigorate her into Season 5.
And was it always going to be TMZ?
Lucia Aniello: I guess it maybe was?
Statsky: I don't know if we were that specific, but then once it came time to write it, it was like, "OK, it'll be TMZ."
Downs: It might have been even in the episodes when we pitched the show.
Aniello: I think it was. I think it was one of the episode examples.
They're usually so on top of deaths, so they got this wrong.
Aniello: I know. We're gonna — yeah. [Laughs]
You guys are always so good with the misdirect. When I'm watching the show on the first run, I always feel the tension between the two possibilities of what could happen, like the ocean scene and Episode 6, the "Is Deborah really going to fire Ava?" moment in Episode 9, and now here with the obit and if she's really dead. How do you guys approach these sleights of hand that they don't feel cheap and instead feel earned?
Aniello: I think that we so often operate in gray area in the show in terms of, like, we never want one person to be totally right or one person to be totally wrong. And so because of that, I think that we're able to kind of set up story misdirects in a way that hopefully feel realistic. For example, you've seen Deborah throw Ava under the bus before and so that's not necessarily something that you're shocked by, and then we try to just set up misdirects that aren't so dishonest. I think that they're misdirects that feel like we try to make them as grounded as possible. And I think that that is an attempt to make those misdirects feel real and grounded because sometimes you can see it going either way because there isn't black and white in the show, and there isn't black and white in storytelling or in the world. So we really do try to operate in that place where you could see any of these characters making any choice and understanding it.
Downs: It's almost like when I watch TV, especially because we write TV and make TV, it's so easy to be like, "This might happen," you know what I mean? It's so easy to call what's going to happen, and I find it so exhilarating when I'm watching something and I am surprised. So I think it's one of the reasons why we employ sort of the ambiguity. And we try and deliver on surprise turns because it's so fun and so satisfying and it's really hard to do, especially as you get to know characters and you get to understand how their minds work. It's just a fun way to watch TV, so I think we just want to deliver on that experience for the audience.
Statsky: You hope you've laid the groundwork, like Deborah's been drinking too much and she is in a very unhealthy place, so you do get a sense that this could be true. Episode 9 — you've seen four seasons' worth of the back-and-forth of these two. Will they show up for each other? Will Deborah show up for Ava really? So you imagine she could be firing her. It's sleight of hand that has to be grounded in something honest and true, or else the audience, I think, does smell that it feels kind of forced, right?
Yeah, as Ava was running to her room, I thought of "Bulletproof," when she said to Deborah she will die alone. I was like, "Are you guys actually carrying this out right now?"
Downs: Right, and that's very specifically why we have her on the boat say, "I don't want to leave you alone," because we were like, "Oh, these are all little breadcrumbs that would make one think this could have happened." Because there's a world where Deborah and Ava are sitting together and they get a notification and they find out about this obituary, and it could obviously energize Deborah in the way that it does, but it's just so much richer to live vicariously through the characters and to feel what they're feeling.
Why Singapore?
Downs: We really wanted them to be in a place that was far from home. We knew we needed a place that had other languages, so she could actually do this loophole of having a translator perform. But the other thing we really wanted to do is return to a casino. We found that very poetic that she would be performing at a casino somewhere. And the truth is is that all of those things — to find a casino in a place where English isn't necessarily a primary language — there weren't a ton of places. But then Singapore stuck out for us because it's so beautiful and so lavish, and it felt like the exact kind of playground where Deborah would want to lick her wounds, where she might want to get lost, or she might want to escape the loss of her late-night show. Because it is like, there is caviar, there is Rolex stores, you know? There are the finer things that Deborah would, would probably use to distract herself.
SEE Hacks renewed for Season 5 ahead of Season 4 finale
I love the two contrasting montages that are both really sad ultimately. You have depressed Deborah in the beginning, just drinking her feelings, grieving, and then the Singapore one with the "Dreams" cover, which starts happy and then gets sad and kind of bleak with how lost Deborah is. What was it like putting those two together?
Statsky: I mean, credit to Lucia for directing the episode. Those montages are two of my favorite things we've ever done in the entire series of the show. I don't know if you wanna talk about the song in the first montage.
Aniello: Yeah, "Wish You Well" is a song by Emma Louise, and she recorded the whole album with her voice pitched down to sound like a man. And so we thought that was a fitting metaphor for the way that Deborah's had to alter and change the way she goes through the world, to be more adaptable, and more palatable to the to the masses. So that song is is one that we really loved. And then the other sequence —
Downs: Can I give you credit for something? I think one of the reasons that that montage works — obviously Jean does so much even without dialogue, and she's so compelling in that montage — but it was really thrilling for me to watch. She did the director's cut, and initially there was dialogue because she was getting voicemails during that. And so she chose this song and put it to music, and it was like so much better than I had imagined. When [Deborah's] walking through that tchotchke souvenir shop in the middle of the night, it reminded me in a way of of some of the stuff that we did in the very first episode in the pilot of the show when you see Deborah alone. And there was just something about the lensing in that and the way it was shot and the music and Jean's performance, and I was like, oh this is a hit. Anyways, sorry, so the second one!
Aniello: I think what's nice about that sequence is the storytelling aspect of it. Ava, you see so on board, so willing to do whatever, and then just becomes scared, honestly, for not only how much Deborah is disassociating and drinking, but also how she just doesn't seem to have the the Deborah Vance fight. And that Deborah Vance's fight is the thing we love. It's what everybody loves about Deborah — that fight and that grit and that determination. And when she doesn't have it for her own performing especially, that's what scares Ava the most.
You can see her concern and how nervous she is to broach the topic with her.
Aniello: She also, I think, understands that she's grieving, but she's trying to get her out of it with saying, "Let's go work on material, let's figure it out, let's move on, let's move forward." And the fact that Deborah isn't wanting to move forward in the way that she almost always does is really disheartening for Ava. In that last scene on the boat, I think it is [Deborah] not wanting to move through that stage of grief and not ready to move on to the next stage of grief, and Ava being so desperate for it. And Deborah then deciding to be critical of Ava, but Ava doesn't react in the way that I think Deborah wants her to. She kind of just takes it, which we do think is some serious character growth for Ava, that she just is like, "I see what you're doing, and I'm not going to debate you. I'll let you work this out however you need to." But I think she says that speech she does with love. And so for us, I think that that was something that we were writing and rewriting and rewriting until we shot it. And it's a it's a beautiful performance from both of them. And then of course it sets up that exciting ending of of Deborah excited yet again about the biggest challenge of her life potentially.
Deborah reminds me of an athlete. She's always trying to prove herself, doesn't wanna retire, and goes through slumps for whatever reason and gets unmotivated, but they just need that spark again.
Aniello: Yup, absolutely.
Statsky: And she has that spark now.
The show is renewed for Season 5. Is this gonna be the last season? You guys have always said you had a five-season plan.
Aniello: We've always said that, yes. We absolutely know how we want to end the series, and it's always been the same as when we originally pitched it. I think we are still working towards this being the last season. That being said, we haven't broken the season and figured it out. We have a very supportive studio and network that have always let us make as many episodes of the show per season as as we feel is appropriate for the story of the season, so that's why we've done not 10 [episodes] every season. Sometimes it feels like eight, sometimes it feels like nine, sometimes it feels like 10. We do have still quite a bit that we want to cover in the season. Right now it's five, but we can't say for sure.
Downs: Right now it's five, but right now in this stage of breaking, we have too many episodes in one season.
So Part 1 and Part 2? Five seasons and a movie?
Statsky: [Laughs] I dunno!
Downs: We've been so lucky that, like Lucia said, HBO Max has let us do what is appropriate for the story. The tentpoles have always stayed the same. It's just where they happen has changed. The ending will be the same. We considered her getting late night in Season 3 when we were first mapping out the show and it ended up being Season 4. We also talked about it being half of Season 4 and then it became the whole season. So all of these things, even though we always know where we are ultimately building towards, they do shift during the writers' room process.
Statsky: We know the ingredients. It's just a question of where in the recipe will they go.
Aniello: Yeah, that's good.
I like that analogy. Well, have you booked Conan as a parking attendant? I listened to the podcast, Paul.
Statsky: [Laughs]
Downs: We haven't yet, but, yes, I was just on his podcast and I did say, "We'd love to have you on." Then he did share his phone number and said, "Let me know."
Aniello: Don't be surprised.
Downs: We wanna have him.
Deborah's rewriting her legacy, so she needs to go on his pod.
Downs: Literally, yes.
Aniello: Good pitch!
All four seasons of Hacks are streaming on Max.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.