Hacks Season 3: The Show That Keeps Getting Sharper

Hacks has a problem that most ongoing television does not have: it keeps getting better. Season 1 was a specific and sharply-written two-hander about Deborah Vance, a veteran Las Vegas stand-up, and Ava Daniels, the millennial writer who comes to work for her. Season 2 was a road-trip expansion that deepened both characters without diluting the show’s central tension. Season 3, which aired in May 2024, is the season where the showrunners (Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky) fully committed to the show as a long-running dramatic comedy rather than a lean limited series.

A year out, the commitment was right. Hacks Season 3 is the best season of the show, and the show is one of the best comedies currently on television.

What the season does

Deborah, coming off her successful comeback special, is being considered for the late-night hosting job she has wanted her whole career. Ava, who left Deborah’s employ at the end of Season 2, is now working as a writer on a critically-acclaimed sketch show in Los Angeles. The season brings them back together under a specific professional framework: Deborah hires Ava back as head writer for the late-night campaign, and the power dynamic between them shifts in ways the show handles with a new level of sophistication.

The season’s central question, which I will not spoil in its late-season resolution, is whether Deborah will actually get the hosting job and, if so, what she will be willing to do to keep it. The dramatic engine is professional ambition at a specific late-career moment, and the show is clear-eyed about the ethical compromises such ambition requires.

Jean Smart, still

Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance is, at this point, one of the most fully-realised characters in contemporary television. Smart has played Deborah across three seasons with a specific commitment to the character’s ongoing moral development. Deborah, in Season 1, was abrasive and self-protective. Deborah, in Season 3, is abrasive, self-protective, and increasingly capable of a kind of ruthless calculation that the earlier seasons did not fully ask Smart to play.

The scene in the season finale, in which Deborah makes a specific professional choice that will have direct consequences for Ava, is the most morally significant thing Deborah has done in the show’s run. Smart plays it without flinching. The character is the character. She does the thing.

Hannah Einbinder, catching up

Hannah Einbinder, who has been the show’s second lead since Season 1, grows into fully equal dramatic weight in Season 3. Ava has, across the show’s run, been a character whose millennial register (therapy-speak, moral intensity, performed emotional literacy) has sometimes read as the show’s straw-man stand-in for contemporary young writers. Season 3 gives Ava a more complex moral arc, one in which her specific ethical instincts collide with her specific professional ambitions, and Einbinder plays the collision with increasing confidence.

The showdown scene in the finale, between Ava and Deborah, is the best-acted exchange in the show’s history. Einbinder holds her own against Smart across a five-minute dialogue scene, which is not nothing.

The ensemble around them

Hacks has, across three seasons, built an extraordinary supporting bench. Carl Clemons-Hopkins as Marcus, Deborah’s long-suffering chief of staff, gets a Season 3 subplot about his own professional aspirations that the show handles with care. Paul W. Downs (one of the showrunners) as Jimmy, Deborah’s manager, continues his specific line of half-pathetic half-competent Hollywood-agent work. Megan Stalter as Jimmy’s assistant Kayla, a character who could easily have been a one-note comic figure, has been allowed to develop into a specifically-drawn supporting personality across three seasons.

The Stalter-Downs pairing in particular has become one of the most reliable sources of pure comedy on contemporary television. Their scenes, which usually consist of Kayla saying something absurd and Jimmy attempting to professionally process it, are the show’s clearest link to its half-hour-comedy DNA.

What the show has become

Hacks began as a show about an intergenerational female friendship across a professional gap. It has, across three seasons, become a show about the specific costs of Hollywood ambition at different career stages, about how women maintain professional power inside a still-male-dominated industry, and about the ongoing negotiation between older and younger generations of feminist political instinct.

Nothing about this expansion has been heavy-handed. The show has stayed funny. It has kept its half-hour comedy rhythm. It has maintained the Deborah-Ava dynamic as its structural core. What has changed is the weight of the ideas the show is willing to carry within that framework.

The finale question

The season’s final episode ended on a specific cliffhanger that I will not spoil. Some reviewers, at the time, found the cliffhanger manipulative. I think, a year out, that the cliffhanger is earned, specifically because it forces the viewer to confront a specific moral question about what Deborah is willing to do that the show had not previously forced the viewer to confront.

Season 4, which is in production as of this writing, will have to resolve the cliffhanger. The resolution will define whether Hacks remains the show it has been or becomes, potentially, a harder and more complicated show. I am, characteristically, rooting for the harder version.

Watch Season 3 across a long weekend. The season runs nine episodes and rewards being watched in relative proximity. Pay attention to Einbinder in the finale. That is the performance that should have won.