Thinking back on the range of mentors I’ve had throughout my career, I’ve concluded that most fit into two categories. The first belongs to the nurturers: people who invested energy and care into helping me improve my craft, guided me through the nuances of office politics, or lifted me after a career faceplant. A second, the helpers, is a muddier designation.
Many nurturers are also helpers who, among other generous acts, advocated for my hire or recommended me for prestigious gigs. But some helpers also taught me valuable lessons on how not to behave by, say, undermining me when speaking to other more senior colleagues or critiquing how I spoke, dressed or showed emotions in the office — including a time I burst into tears after receiving news that a loved one had died.
Relating to the relationship at the heart of “Hacks” is a lot easier when you’ve lived it, including some version of the fourth season’s vicious tug-of-war between late-night host Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her head writer, Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder).
Hannah Einbinder and Danny Jolles in “Hacks” (Jessica Perez/Max). Some have found their naked spite off-putting, but even when Deborah sued Ava in a past season, their affection was still palpable. I’d argue that same affection remains this season—what we’re witnessing now is what it looks like when two people who love each other also hate each other.
The pain Deborah inflicts on Ava is at once very personal and notoriously endemic to the entertainment business.
Deborah, you see, is a helper, and Ava is constantly learning the wrong lessons from her. When Ava aids the comedy icon in securing her long-coveted broadcast late-night gig, and Deborah tries to deny Ava the head writer position she’s earned, Ava extorts the job out of her — which is precisely what Deborah would have done in her clunky boots.
Then Ava reverts to their old dynamics, turning inside out in her efforts to make the best show possible. Only this time, Deborah deflates every suggestion. No, really. When Ava brings two celebratory balloon bouquets to the writers’ room at the top of the sixth episode, “Mrs. Table,” Deborah stabbity-stab-stabs her lovely idea to death. “This is an office, not a bowling alley,” she fumes.
“Hacks” co-creators Lucia Aniello, Jen Statsky and Paul W. Downs, who spoke with Salon in a series of video interviews before the fourth season’s launch, know their heroines are caught in a poisonous cycle. They also know that energy peters out over time. “One thing that we continue to explore this season is: at what point does Ava say, ‘This is too much,’ and at what point does Deborah say, ‘I’m being honest here, and this is truthfully what I have; you know how I feel,’ and how much Ava should trust that?” Aniello said.
“In toxic relationships, you keep repeating the same cycle,” Statsky agreed, “And the truth is, a lot of times the only way to handle it is to get out. And so we are really playing with the idea of, should she [meaning Ava] pack her things and go home?”
Ava comes screamingly close to doing that at the peak of “Mrs. Table.”
Jean Smart in “Hacks” (Kenny Laubbaucher/Max). The pain Deborah inflicts on Ava is at once very personal and notoriously endemic to the entertainment business, a Darwinian factory that demands round-the-clock creative labor. This is especially true of late-night shows and their punishing grind, with which Statsky has some familiarity, having worked as a writer for “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” Viewers who follow late-night have some knowledge of what pressured environments they are in, either by reputation or, in some worst-case scenarios, via shocking reports.
There is plenty of honesty in “Hacks”‘ portrayal of the abusiveness that can happen behind the scenes of shows like Deborah’s. “I do think there is something that is really tricky about the pressure cooker and the time crunch and feeling like, ‘Oh my god, we’re running out of time,’ that makes it a very difficult work environment,” Statsky said, “and that is what we wanted to portray this season, that both Deborah and Ava would be feeling this tremendous pressure, but would also have very different management styles about it.”
Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
In 2022, Statsky described Ava and Deborah’s bond to NPR’s “All Things Considered” as a “dark mentorship,” and that has culminated in this fourth season.
For the first five episodes, Ava and Deborah snipe and jab at each other while struggling to keep the show they’ve worked so hard to secure on the air. But their work styles are very different. Deborah applies force and threats, and isn’t above humiliating Ava in every forum possible. That includes asking Ava’s ex, a rising starlet, to joke about the painful circumstances of their break-up during their televised interview.
Ava, meanwhile, is determined to treat her writers well by cultivating a supportive environment, including subsidizing the network’s measly $9 per diem out of her own paycheck. Her generosity doesn’t dissuade her subordinates from icing her out of group conversations and taking advantage of her kindness by ordering expensive branzino at lunch under the name, you guessed it, “Mrs. Table.”
When the weight becomes too much to bear, as Aniello hinted may happen, Ava flies off the handle and quits, loudly, shrieking at the top of her lungs while barreling through the studio lot’s security gate.
Hannah Einbinder in “Hacks” (Kenny Laubbaucher/Max). Given the way “Hacks” blurs the lines between Ava and Deborah’s professional and personal relationship, it’s easy to forget that this is a show about workplaces and professional guidance. Ava and Deborah may be a worst-case example, but in the fourth season, Downs’ people-pleasing Jimmy LuSaque Jr. and his partner Kayla Schaefer (Meg Stalter) exemplify a better senior-junior colleague partnership.
Technically, they’re equals now that these childhood friends have joined forces to hang out their own shingle after jumping ship from the management company their fathers created. But Jimmy has more professional client management experience, while Kayla acts from a place of wild confidence that Jimmy is learning to navigate. Still, Kayla has knowledge about the current talent marketplace that Jimmy doesn’t, having been raised to cater to old Hollywood clientele. We see them learning from each other, to the benefit of Deborah’s struggling show.
“At times, the question is, are they going to choose each other?”
After all, it’s Kayla who recruits Dance Mom (Julianne Nicholson), whose hokey performances become a recurring feature on Deborah’s show.
“There is sort of a bizarro version of Deborah and Ava in Jimmy and Kayla,” Downs said. “They’re also in this sort of workplace that they’ve created, and they have a similar, I would call it boundary-breaking dynamic.”
Stalter, who partnered with Downs during his interview, added that in a lot of ways, Jimmy and Kayla’s friendship mirrors that of Ava and Deborah’s. “But they do have something that the women might not have yet, which is this undying loyalty and at least commitment to each other.”
“I think a lot of the show is we’re seeing Ava and Deborah be kind of soul mates, and they drive each other, right?” Stalter continued. “And it feels like at times the question is, are they going to choose each other?”
This possibility finally dawns after Deborah speaks with Rosie O’Donnell at an industry event. When O’Donnell asks her how her comedy improved at this stage of the game, Deborah credits her hard work, timing and a lot of luck. Ava’s name doesn’t cross her lips.
But O’Donnell knows that’s not the truth. She’s lived the story of women in the entertainment business, too, and knows how quickly people who don’t foster the right talent slam into a dead end.
“No,” she says. “You got better. You don’t just get better. Comedy is like sports. Nobody starts dunking at 60 years old.”
Deborah’s nagging anger prevents her from citing Ava even then. But for a moment, O’Donnell’s ability to see through her ego’s camouflage makes her reconsider her pettiness.
Many tainted workplace relationships between women preceded “Hacks” on TV. FX’s “Damages” riveted audiences with its escalating battles between Glenn Close’s legal shark Patty Hewes and her supposed acolyte, Rose Byrne’s fresh-out-of-law school Ellen Parsons. For five seasons, Patty pecks at Ellen’s heart until nothing remains but scar tissue.
Lifetime’s “UnREAL” casts Shiri Appleby as a romance reality show producer whose boss, Quinn (Constance Zimmer), pushes her to commit more extreme and unethical contestant manipulations in the name of ratings.
Those shows made the lack of consideration in those working relationships front and center, while other series like “Younger” and “The Bold Type” went the other direction by featuring understanding and even collegial relations between female bosses and their employees.
What Deborah and Ava have, meanwhile, amounts to some sinister blend of nurturer and evil helper, like a boss who slowly introduces poison into his team’s morning coffee, hoping they’ll build an immunity to it.
If anyone were to take that cup after knowing there’s arsenic in the sugar, it’s Ava. “For us, so much of season three was Ava being a bit of Deborah’s lap dog,” Aniello said. “She left everything kind of to go help her on this journey, to try to get the show.”
This turned out to be a bit of foreshadowing. In a symbol-heavy fourth-season subplot, Deborah has been confronted by coyotes roaming her exclusive neighborhood. She worries more about the threat they pose to her corgis than she does about Ava’s well-being at the office. In the way of many humans, Deborah treats her pets the way she would treat the people in her life if so many hadn’t betrayed her.
When Deborah returns home late to find one of the dogs being attacked by one of her neighborhood’s predators, she intervenes and saves him, weepily repeating, “I should have protected you . . . I should have protected you.”
Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
This close call switches our corrosive helper into a nurturer. Ava, she’s told, is unreachable, so Deborah calls on Jimmy and Kayla to help her scour Los Angeles to find her. Deborah’s search takes her to a beach where she follows what turns out to be a stranger into the surf, fearing her protégé intends to drown herself. But the very dry Ava finds Deborah, as she always does, and the veteran finally gives her mentee what she’s needed.
“The only reason you were failing is because I set you up to fail. I’m sorry,” Deborah tells Ava. “Give me another chance, please. Even though I probably don’t deserve one. . . I promise I’ll make it up to you.”
“Please don’t say that,” Ava replies. “Because when you say that, I want to believe you, but you always let me down . . . I can’t trust you.”
“I understand why you feel that way, but I’m begging you,” Deborah says. “What do I have to do?”
Ava replies just as many of us would, by wondering whether she could even do the job Deborah is begging her to return to. “I don’t even know your voice anymore,” she says.
“You are my voice,” Deborah tells her, perhaps three seasons too late.
Ava lets that sit in silence for a beat or two, then drops the truth: “But I kind of hate you now.” At this, Deborah displays a rare moment of self-awareness, telling Ava that lots of people do. “You’re part of a vibrant community,” she jokes.
If you have been some version of Ava or Deborah in your working life, then maybe you understand how rare it is for these two to find a way back to what they saw in each other in the first place — that is, a mutual challenge, and a chance to have fun for the first time in a long while. The pair toasts their relationship restart as friends and professional partners, sipping the bottle of Krug champagne that Ava purchased the moment she knew she was going to betray Deborah.
Ava sweetens the moment by telling her mentor that this token is something they should have shared a long time ago. Since it’s been sitting in her trunk for months, it tastes awful, as any drink meant to wash away a too-long lingering bitterness should.
New episodes of “Hacks” stream Thursdays on Max.
