🎧 'Hacks': How to Keep a 'Toxic Relationship' Fresh (and Funny)
Star Hannah Einbinder and co-creator Paul W. Downs take me inside the hit's enduring fight, four seasons in. Plus: Tom Oyer on new Oscar rules
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The most recent episode of Hacks ends with a dedication to the victims of this year’s Los Angeles wildfires as well as the first responders. Hacks was in production when the fires broke out and lost one of the show’s key locations — the Altadena mansion that stands in for the SoCal home of Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance. The episode is titled “I Love L.A.,” partly thanks to Randy Newman, who makes a cameo as a guest on Deborah’s late-night talk show. But according to Paul W. Downs, who directed the episode and also plays the beleaguered agent Jimmy, it was always intended to be a tribute to Hacks’ home city and the people who actually make it run.
Before the fires broke out, Downs tells me on this week’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, “ We had already planned to do the montage at the top of the show that documents how getting something like this off the ground happens.” That montage, showing the set builders and costume designers and other works on Deborah’s show, actually features members of the Hacks crew. ”We were going to highlight members of our crew, so our construction team and the wig maker who actually makes Deborah's wigs, and our art department and our set dressers. There's so many people in the crew that are featured.”
Hacks has always primarily been an L.A. production, even in the earlier seasons set largely in Las Vegas. But now that Deborah is hosting a late night show, the series has embraced its home even more. “There's always been L.A. sprinkled throughout the show, but this season really does focus in on it,” says Hannah Einbinder, who co-stars as Deborah’s head writer and frenemy, Ava. “I think it does accurately depict L.A. as our creators see it, as we experience it.”
Season four of Hacks finds Ava and Deborah’s relationship at a new low as they play rude pranks on each other in private — “rude but never mean," says Downs, "because rude is fun and mean isn’t” — while pretending, in public, to have a functional relationship at their high-stakes late-night show. The series has always thrived on the love-hate push-pull between the two, and Einbinder has come up with the perfect way to describe it.
“The audience is our third in our toxic relationship,” she says. “ They are roped into our dynamic.”
I talked to Downs and Einbinder about that dynamic and how to keep it fresh four seasons in. They offer up great advice for filming a TV show on a real backlot, including what to do with the tram full of tourists who spot you — or don’t.
Hear it all on this week’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, which also includes a conversation between me and awards expert Tom Oyer in a deep dive into the new batch of Academy Awards rules announced last week. Tom worked at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for more than 15 years with a focus on Oscar voting rules, so he knows better than anyone just why there are so many of them — and how the new ones could impact next year’s winners.