🎧 Jean Smart’s Perfect Exit (Again)

Why five seasons may be her sweet spot — but leaving ‘Hacks’ is more complicated

TAKE A BOW Hacks was always planned to end after five seasons. “The timing felt right,” Jean Smart tells me. (Ankler illustration; JC Olivera/Variety via Getty Images)

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With Jean Smart bidding farewell to a beloved comedy series after five seasons, there is a sense of history repeating itself. On her breakout series, Designing Women — where she played the ditzy but charming Charlene from 1986 to 1991 — Smart also said goodbye after five seasons, though the show went on for two more without her. It makes you wonder if Smart has some kind of sixth sense that five seasons is just the right amount of time to spend with a character. But as she explains, it’s a lot more nuanced than that — and leaving Hacks will likely prove a lot more complicated.

“With Designing Women, that felt very different when I left it because I had just become a mother,” Smart, 74, tells me on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “Being a fairly new wife and a new mom, that was everything I was thinking about at that time.”

Hacks has not only come at a very different time in her life — Smart lost her husband Richard Gilliland in 2021, months before Hacks premiered, and underwent triple bypass surgery in 2023, while filming the show’s third season — but has been made in a completely different way, which makes it even more difficult to leave behind. On Designing Women, Smart says she didn’t necessarily bond with the crew because she spent so little time with them. “When you do a multi-camera show in front of a live audience, like Designing Women, you’re only with the crew for about half a day a week,” she explains. On Hacks, however, which is a single-camera comedy, shot like a movie, “you’re with these people 12 to 16 hours every single day,” Smart says. “You become very, very close. Missing those people, that’s gonna be hard.”

With four Emmy wins thus far for best actress in a comedy, Hacks has given Smart one of her signature roles as Deborah Vance, a legendary comedian and Las Vegas stalwart whose career receives a jump-start when she hires a young writer, Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), to help with her material. Across five seasons, the relationship between Deborah and Ava has ebbed and flowed, and though the final season finds them more simpatico than ever, Smart tells me she was never sure how the friendship would turn out: “I couldn’t really picture exactly how it would end.”

In our podcast conversation, Smart and I get into Hacks’ farewell, and she also shares incredible stories from her earliest days in television. She arrived on the scene in the early 1980s as a theater veteran and booked her first on-screen role in the short-lived sitcom Teachers Only in 1983. Smart says she was shocked by many of the standard operating procedures of the time, like the warm-up comic or the tradition of the actors coming out to greet the audience before taping.

“Someone said, ‘Okay, line up for intros,’ and I said, ‘What’s that?’ And they said, ‘Well, you know, you’ll go out, and they’ll introduce you, and you just bow or smile and wave.’ And I said, ‘Before the show? Like a basketball team?’ I mean, it was nuts,” Smart says. “I called my agent the next day, and she said, ‘You poor baby. You really don’t know your ass from apple butter, do you?’”

Smart repeats her agent’s quote with a perfect Southern accent, by the way — one of many reasons you really have to hear the whole thing. Listen to that and much more on today’s episode, which also includes a conversation between Richard Lawson and me looking at the newly announced Cannes Film Festival lineup, the new season of Netflix’s Beef (premiering this week) and the entire limited series Emmy race (which Beef is poised to dominate again, like the first season of the anthology did in 2023).

And if you’re not already subscribed to Prestige Junkie After Party, now’s a great time since we’re midway through our 2006 Canon miniseries. This week, we’re tackling the movies in a nebulous category we’re calling “They Don’t Make ’Em Like This Anymore” — and trust me, you’ll know them when you see them.