Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Hacks’ Season 2 On HBO Max, Where Deborah And Ava Deepen Their Odd Frenemieship On The Road

Without a doubt, Hacks was one of the best comedies of 2021, and the only thing standing between it and armfuls of Emmys was the juggernaut known as Ted Lasso. Still, Jean Smart won a very deserved statuette for playing veteran comedian Deborah Vance, who tries to reinvent her career after losing her residency at a Las Vegas hotel. But what set the show apart is that it was — wait for it — actually laugh-out-loud funny, which is something not a lot of streaming comedies can claim. Can Season 2 keep that momentum going?

HACKS SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Picking up where Season 1 left off, Ava (Hannah Einbinder) and her boss, Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) are on Deborah’s private jet after Deborah bombed with the new personal material Ava helped her write. Ava is extraordinarily nervous about the email she sent to the British showrunners, which trashed Deborah, and hope they won’t use the material on their new series.

The Gist: As you might expect, Ava is preoccupied with that e-mail, which she drunkenly wrote after an argument with Deborah where Ava got slapped. But, in their complicated working and personal relationship, that’s old news, especially after Deborah showed up at the funeral for Ava’s dad. But if Deborah gets wind of the e-mail, Ava knows that getting fired will be the least Deborah can do.

Deborah not only has to start planning on doing a club tour to test out her new material, but she has to contend with the fact that her daughter DJ (Kaitlin Olson) is emotional over failed IVF attempts and the fact that her new husband Aidan (Paul Felder) is about to get his kidneys handed to him in his first official UFC fight.

On Ava’s end, she has to find a new place to stay — the Palmetto doesn’t have Deborah under contract anymore — and try get the email killed. However, she just gets in deeper when she appeals personally to one of the showrunners.

Danny (Paul Downs), the agent Ava and Deborah share, is about to blow a gasket, and that’s only half his problems; he is desperate to get his highly unprofessional assistant Kayla (Megan Stalter) reassigned — she can’t be fired because she’s the boss’ daughter.

At Aidan’s fight, he starts off by getting pummeled, but Deborah gets fired up by the taunts by the magician that replaced her at the Palmetto, plus the fact that Marty (Christopher McDonald) is actually dating a woman around her age. She takes the extreme step of going up to the cage to pump up her son-in-law, which motivates her to drag Ava out on tour… that same night.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The second season of Hacks feels like a continuation of its first season, at least at first. But it’s certainly a show that’s much more comfortable with its ensemble and storytelling a year later.

Our Take: Downs, along with his Hacks co-creators Lucia Aniello and Jen Statsky, managed to meld the two main parts of Deborah and Ava’s story by the end of the first season. In other words, by the end of that season, Hacks wasn’t just about Deborah’s continuing efforts to keep her successful career going as her style of comedy ages, and it wasn’t just about Ava and Deborah learning from each other. It became about both, because of how their tumultuous friendship grew. Because of this, the second season feels even more steady and assured than the excellent first season did.

Best of all, it’s still funny, often wickedly so. It’s rare these days to say that about a streaming comedy. But, like last season, we often laughed out loud at the show, with all of the best lines coming directly from the characters and their relationships with each other. Deborah is tough, but can be thin-skinned and has a heart under all of the callouses she’s built up over her decades in the business. Ava is still probably too woke for her own good, and certainly overprivileged, but at least she’s aware of it now.

Seeing more of the dysfunction between the put-upon Jimmy and the incredibly inappropriate Kayla also shows that the creators know what they have in the interplay between Downs and Stalter. Sure, that means that Downs is writing himself into his own show more, but seeing his slick Hollywood agent being constantly skewered by his assistant, who thinks he has some sort of crush on her, were some of the first season’s best scenes.

The person that feels a bit lost in the shuffle in the first few episodes of season two is Carl Clemons-Hopkins as Marcus. After Deborah promoted him at the end of Season 1, he basically chose work over his burgeoning relationship. Now, he kind of doesn’t know what to do with himself, as we see in a scene where he returns a minimal amount of stuff just in the hopes that is ex answers his door. With a lot of the early part of Season 2 showing Deborah and Ava on Deborah’s club tour, we hope that we get to see Clemons-Hopkins’ funnily dry characterization of Marcus get more to do as the season wears on.

Sex and Skin: None in the first few episodes, but we know from the first season there will be at least some of both.

Parting Shot: Before they set off on the road, Deborah and Ava stop by the mural ad for her magician replacement, and Deborah shoots it multiple times with the paintball gun she borrowed from Aidan. Ava, still hoping that Deborah doesn’t find out about the email, is shocked by how accurate the shots are.l

Sleeper Star: We mentioned Clemons-Hopkins, but we also love how Olson has created a pretty well-rounded character in DJ. Her relationship with Deborah is fraught, but it’s also weirdly co-dependent, and Olson shows all of those complications, including the fact that she is finally moving on and doing some actual adulting. Her line about being the wife of an MMA fighter is essentially being the wife of a soldier was one of the funnier ones of the episode.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Deborah wants to know why the arts section of the local paper is, her house manager Josefina (Rose Adobo) tries to protect her from the bad reviews by saying, “Maybe they skipped it. Sometimes that happens.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Hacks loses no comedic or storytelling momentum from its fantastic first season. In fact, it’s more sure of itself than ever, now that it knows how to mine comedy from its characters and relationships.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.