There are fleeting pop culture references throughout the new season of Hacks that seem tailored specifically to make me scream “Ahh!” in delight. They’re sprinkled across the new episodes like a comedic weather event, to the point that watching the series feels like dancing in a rain shower of jokes written just for me. Someone cue up Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten.”
Hacks is releasing two episodes each Thursday, and the first of this week’s installment opens with perhaps the greatest image I’ve ever seen pop up on my television screen: a photo of Jean Smart in-character as Deborah Vance posing with late ’80s-era Oprah Winfrey. I’ve long struggled with the fact that I’m not a person who has “passions” or “hobbies,” per se, unless it’s acceptable to put things like “really love Jean Smart” and “always thought Oprah was neat” in that section of a dating app profile.
“The Roast of Deborah Vance” and “Join the Club,” this week’s genius installments, were love-at-first-Winfrey-sight for me, but also crystallized how much of a level-up this new season has been—and why I’d make the argument that the series deserves to interrupt The Bear’s juggernaut awards run and win Outstanding Comedy Series at the Emmys this year. No other series approaches this level of emotional heft and ballsy Hollywood ridicule without sacrificing its mission to make viewers laugh. And that’s all while accomplishing any piece of pop culture’s most crucial task: catering to my sensibilities specifically.
In the newest episodes, Deborah, a veteran comedian experiencing a career surge, bursts into her writer Ava’s (Hannah Einbinder) bedroom to ask for help on a punchline for a “Mario Cantone is so gay that…” joke, about the gay comedian and Sex and the City supporting player. (The room Deborah bulldozes into, by the way, is her 1987-1992 guest suite, explaining the framed photo with Oprah—as well as ones with Bubbles the monkey and Saddam Hussein.)
There’s a joke about a young male comedy writer exasperated that everyone assumes he’s trying to imitate 30 Rock executive producer Robert Carlock’s comedy style. There’s a running gag about Talk Stoop, the bizarrely mundane celebrity interview series that New Yorkers know because it used to play incessantly on the tiny TVs inside of taxis.
A series of possible film productions in development are listed at one point, including a procedural based on the board game Operation, a spinoff of Beauty and the Beast centered on the love life of the “hot” animated spoon from the movie, and a bisexual update on Gumby tentatively titled Gum-bi. The fact that studio executives listen more to their kids than to anyone else for the temperature on what’s hot is revealed by industry nepo baby Kayla (Meg Stalter), who says that she was present at the sleepover where her friends decided that Tobey Maguire would play Spider-Man.
These are such specific, razor-sharp jokes about pop culture and the business that, after some of them, I nearly missed the next few lines of dialogue because my brain was preoccupied by marveling at a show confident enough to drop these random references. There’s no hesitation over making them, but instead a knowledge that they enhance everything about the episode for viewers, regardless of whether someone had any idea who Robert Carlock or Mario Cantone are. That’s because, as much as it humbles me to admit, Hacks’ comedy isn’t pandering to one specific demographic (such as: me).
It’s a show that has not just faith, but also a certitude that its audience is its partner in comedy and laughter, but also in making broader points. These references are humorous tools employed in Hacks’ greater, more profound examination—and exploding—of the industry’s most exasperating and antiquated problems.
The larger arc of this week’s episodes portrays the arguably unfair efforts Deborah and her team go through in order for her to be a contender for an open late-night hosting chair. Executives systemically dismiss the idea of a woman of Deborah’s age landing the gig, despite the fact that she is the most qualified and the most popular with the target audience, and already proved that she can brilliantly navigate the job’s challenges, following a majorly successful guest-hosting stint.
There are moving, insightful conversations between Deborah and Ava about this—writing that rises far above any pat “ain’t it a shame that it’s so hard for women” dialogue that could easily populate this storyline.
But Hacks isn’t just focused on that one issue. It takes a holistic approach to lambasting the industry.
Its skewering of the predictability, farce, and lameness of celebrity comedy roasts is hilariously timed, following the tedious Tom Brady roast that Netflix recently aired. A scene where Deborah becomes disgusted by the rhetoric of fellow veteran stand-ups she used to admire is TV’s most nuanced and least patronizing evisceration of the Old Boys’ Club argument that wokeness is ruining comedy. (Do you think Jerry Seinfeld will watch?) And the dick-swinging and ass-kissing that provide the pageantry of Hollywood dealmaking with its choreography is depicted in a way that blares the business’ pointless absurdity to the uninitiated, mostly without any overly cartoonish exaggeration.
This is a deceptively meaty show, yet one that still basks in irreverence. I’m struck by how it’s carved a space to feel “important”—without any of the insufferable baggage that comes when that word is used to describe a comedy.
The “Mario Cantone is so gay…” punchline that Deborah and Ava were brainstorming, by the way, turned out great: “Mario Cantone is so gay that, when he was born, the doctor spanked him and he said, ‘Now turn around—it’s my turn.’”
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