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Jean Smart Is Finally Getting What She Deserves—and Hacks’ Creators Are Thrilled

Plus more intel from Lucia Aniello and Paul W. Downs, who discuss their HBO Max series’ emotional ending and hint at what’s coming in season two.

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Hacks has been the sleeper series of this spring, the jaded but heartfelt show we didn’t know we needed: a serrated buddy comedy about the generation gap between two female comedians. Along the way, the HBO Max dramedy poked at the underbelly of comedy culture—the misogyny that for decades shaped and limited women’s careers, the question of who gets to be the punch line, and how once-edgy humor hardens into shtick.

The brilliant thing is that it did so while clinching the Smartaissance. On the heels of her winning supporting part in Mare of Easttown, Hacks offered 69-year-old Jean Smart a long-deserved starring role on a TV show, in a world where women over 50 are still often relegated to long-suffering mother or, worse, sassy grandmother parts.

“There’s so much happening now, with rewriting the narratives of women in popular culture, and I just feel like people have finally caught up to Jean Smart,” says Paul W. Downs via Zoom from Mexico, where he is vacationing (between Zoom calls) with Lucia Aniello, his longtime partner. Aniello and Downs created Hacks with Jen Statsky. The trio met in New York’s improv scene and worked together in the writers room of Broad City, where they helped conjure a joyfully anarchic, unapologetically feminist comedy about two 20-something best friends. Hacks is less antic, but does revolve around a similarly odd couple.

A comedy pioneer who almost got to be the first female late-night television host, Smart’s Deborah Vance has calcified into a flashy Vegas fixture. She endlessly recycles her ancient, self-deprecating routines to pay for upkeep on her lavish desert lifestyle—until she collides with oversharing 25-year-old comedy writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), who encourages her to forge a more authentic act out of the trauma she’s been suppressing all these years. “There was a line cut out of an episode about how much the world has changed in the last 15 minutes,” says Aniello. “Recently, things have shifted just enough that people might actually want to hear [women’s truth].”

Hacks walks a tightrope between comedy and pathos, and its first season culminates in a finale that brought as much emotional upheaval on set as onscreen. The funeral scene that brings Deborah and Ava back together was integral to the season’s arc, dating back to the original pitch. The idea was that Deborah would say she doesn’t do funerals—but would ultimately decide to show up to Ava’s father’s service, entertaining the mourners as an olive branch to Ava.

Smart’s own husband of nearly 34 years, actor Richard Gilliland, died just before the scene was to be filmed. “It was very unexpected and then we had this week left of shooting an episode about grief, which was really profound and difficult,” says Downs. “She took time off and we didn’t expect her to come back for a long time. We didn’t want to adjust anything that she didn’t want adjusted.” But Smart did return, as she told my V.F. colleague Sonia Saraiya last month. In some ways, she said, filming the episode was “a good distraction.” The show dedicated the finale to Gilliland.

Continued below.

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