Under his air-ups on the stand-ups, Hacks is one of the finest series of recent years. Rewarded on multiple times, especially at the Golden Globes 2022 and 2025, she explores power, transmission and survival reports in the ruthless universe of the show. At the center: the tense and overwhelming relationship between two women whom everything opposes, united by the need to continue to make people laugh – and to exist.
There are entertaining series, others who observe the world with a surgical look. Hacks manages to do both at a time. Since its launch on HBO Max in May 2021, the series has established itself as one of the most singular and intelligent objects of the American television landscape. Under her outside of acid comedy on the stand-up, she questions in depth the relations of power, transmission, loneliness and creation in the world of spectacle-and more, she explores with a rare accuracy the tension between two women that everything opposes, except the urgency of continuing to exist on stage.
Created by Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky, Hacks Follows the explosive meeting between Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), an aging icon of the stand-up relegated to a residence in Las Vegas, and Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), a young talented screenwriter but precipitously ejected from the Hollywood middle for a tweet deemed offensive. The two are at a critical moment of their career: Deborah feels that his audience crumbles, that his word no longer has the same impact, while Ava brutally discovers that the world of television has no room for young women who are too sure of themselves. Their common agent, Jimmy, tries a risky bet: forcing these two women whom everything opposes to collaborate. Ava will have to rewrite Deborah’s jokes, and Deborah will have to agree to open his universe. The rest is only chaos, pride, pain and sparkles of genius.
The interest of Hacks does not reside in a reversal of the situation or a repetitive comic mechanism, but in this unique and unstable link between Deborah and Ava, that the series dissects with a remarkable thoroughness. Deborah, embodied by a smart jeans at the top of his art, is never presented as a sweet or nostalgic mentor. She is hard, brilliant, suspicious. She has built her career alone, in a universe dominated by men, by renouncing tenderness, love, sometimes even ethics. Too many betrayals made her unable to trust easily.
Ava, for its part, embodies a generation that still believes in the power of words, transparency, creative freedom. But she is also arrogant, ill -armed in the face of the brutality of the profession, kneaded by contradictions. What she despises in Deborah – her compromises, her public taste – is also what she wants: a career, a voice, a freedom.
Between them, the series invents a rare relationship on the screen: neither friendly, nor maternal, nor frankly antagonist. A relationship made of clashes, silences, micro-evolutions. They do not become friends. They become essential to each other. It is by the confrontation that they advance. And that’s what makes Hacks So poignant: his refusal to simplify, his refusal of the spectacular.
But Hacks is also an immersion in the concrete cogs of the scene. Through rehearsals, writing discussions, running -in evenings in front of an indifferent audience, the series reveals behind the scenes of the profession of humorist, not in a romantic light, but as a work of goldsmith and strategy. How to make a joke more impactful? What is a personal anecdote worth if it doesn’t make you laugh? When should you choose between honesty and efficiency? Each episode is crossed by these questions, often unanswered, but always anchored in the reality of the profession.
We also discover everything that success requires: personal sacrifices, ethical renunciations, total availability to the public, and above all, an ability to transform everything into a story, even the most intimate pain. Deborah keeps repelling the moment when she really talks about her on stage, and Ava pushes her to this jump, without always understanding the price to pay.
The series also questions, in hollow, the place of women in this environment. Deborah survived where many have disappeared. She had to accept to be “the exception” in a world of men, even if it means reproducing certain logics of domination. Ava, she refuses to submit, but discovers how much marginality has a cost. Hacks Do not judge them, but observes them, with cruel and sometimes overwhelming precision.
The first seasons scan the profession of humorist: writing a sketch, rehearsals, public returns, fear of the flop, long tours, impersonal hotels. Hacks thwart the temptation of idealization. Everything is shown: triumph evenings and humiliations, cruel advice and petty rivalries, sexist looks and commercial requirements. The scene becomes an exhibition place but also of combat, loneliness and strategy. It is not a series on celebrity, it is a series on what to sacrifice to stay there.
And it is precisely season 4, broadcast in 2025, which pushes this look a notch further. Deborah leaves Las Vegas to animate a late show On American television, a dream she had buried, and that she finally gets … when she thought she no longer desired. The series then changes its decor and enters another world: that of generalist television, with its codes, its censorships, its producers, its advertisers, its absurd decisions. We discover how every minute on the screen is negotiated, how the guests are selected, how the jokes are validated (or cuts), and especially how much the public look – now multiplied by social networks – can become a trap.
Because season 4, in addition to revealing behind the scenes of TV, also shows how a woman like Deborah must constantly negotiate her place: being funny but not nasty, political but not too much, modern without betraying her image. The slightest error becomes viral, the slightest expression misinterpreted becomes controversial. And Ava, still present by his side as a co-author, becomes the witness worried about these tensions. Between them, nothing is ever acquired. Their link is transformed: less frontal, more intimate, but always crossed by cracks.
This season is undoubtedly the most cruel, but also the most revealing. She questions the role of women in the media, the obsession with rejuvenation, contradictory injunctions to be “fun” but harmless, “free” but smooth, “inclusive” but profitable. It also shows the growing weight of social networks in the success factory, the way in which each image, each word can be cropped, diverted, recycled against you. Through Deborah, Hacks Auscults an era when visibility is both a weapon and a threat.
From the first season, the series was greeted by criticism. Jean Smart won an Emmy Award for his role, and the series won two Golden Globes in 2022, including that of the best comedy. In 2025, she reiterates the feat: new Golden Globe for the best comic series, new prize for Jean Smart, awarded for a rare intensity performance. To date, Hacks won 92 awards and obtained 192 nominations, an impressive record for a series that refuses all ease.
After four seasons of remarkable artistic consistency, a fifth season has been confirmed, although the broadcast date is not yet announced. The series continues to renew itself, to deepen its characters, and above all to question what it means to make today: at what price, for whom, and until when.
Hacks is therefore not a series “on” the stand-up. It is a series on what stand-up reveals: the loneliness of artists, the violence of the public gaze, the permanent negotiation between what we are and what we show. And at the heart of all this, two women who refuse to disappear, who fight to write, speak, exist – even if it means destroying themselves a little in passing.
Neïla Driss
