The actor Jean Smart began her acceptance speech at the Emmys tonight with a request: “Just the men stay standing,” she said to the applauding crowd before her. “The girls get to sit down.”
She had just won her fifth straight award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for her role in HBO Max’s Hacks, about the tender and testy friendship between an unfiltered comedy legend (played by Smart) and an anxious Gen-Z comedy writer (Hannah Einbinder). As she clutched her statuette, Smart acknowledged the squeezing and taping and blister-inducing heels that had likely gone into her female peers’ glamorous award-show getups. Her well-dressed colleagues in the crowd, she joked, must be muttering, “She’s not that good”—as in, not so talented as to merit a standing ovation that required maneuvering in uncomfortable gowns.
Smart’s downplaying of the moment recalled a move her Hacks character, the acerbic stand-up comic Deborah Vance, would pull. But it stood in sharp relief to the fact that the actor had just hit a milestone: She had not only tied for the most acting wins in Emmys history (eight), but she also became the first actress to win for each season of a series. (Hacks wrapped its final season in May.)
Landing that achievement for a character such as Vance feels particularly appropriate. Smart played her as a gutsy, hard-headed, and occasionally vulnerable elder statesman of comedy, who’d erected walls around herself in her fight to be taken seriously in a male-dominated medium. Her win, for a role that embodied the difficulties of being a woman who refuses to placate those around her,parallels her character’s arc; it also calls to mind how difficult it has been for someone like Vance to earn that level of industry success.
Smart, notably, was not the only actor honored this evening for playing an uncompromising woman. Rhea Seehorn, who took home the award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, portrayed the fiercely independent author Carol Sturka in Pluribus, whose stubbornness in a newly dystopian world is laced with grief. Kate O’Flynn won for her supporting role in the comedy series Widow’s Bay as Patricia, a government bureaucrat whose ill-advised attempts to fit in make her a town pariah. And Allison Janney clinched a Supporting Actress trophy for The Diplomat, in which she played the United States president Grace Penn as a particularly shrewd political operator.
The actors that played these distinct characters are “linked, not ranked,” as Seehorn said in her speech, quoting the late Gloria Steinem—a nod to the women’s shared lineage as industry colleagues, rather than awards competitors.
But Smart’s enduring charisma as Vance, and her character’s notable refusal to quit, also enabled her to make this history. In Season 1 of Hacks, much of the humor stemmed from the intergenerational mismatching between Vance and her new joke writer, Ava Daniels, who begin working together at an inopportune time in both of their careers: Daniels has been deemed persona non grata in Hollywood, while Vance is collecting checks from casino gigs in Vegas. Both of them eventually manage to find an uneasy rhythm together—but Vance’s professional drive, which often took precedence over the feelings of her closest collaborator, was the show’s engine.
Over the course of the next four seasons, Smart revealed Vance’s vulnerable side, even as her character kept up a steady stream of barbed commentary: In her many decades in the industry, Vance had huge opportunities wrenched from her hands—most dramatically her short-lived late-night show, which she spent decades striving for but ultimately abandoned amid studio pressures. But even that move was a testament to the comic’s devotion to her convictions, no matter how unpopular they might make her. By rewarding Smart several times over for this role, the Emmys seemed to recognize something deeper in her performance—and the worth of the woman she so impressively brought to life.
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