The second season of Hacks ended with Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) reclaiming her relevance and success with a smash-hit, self-funded comedy special cowritten by her protégé, Ava (Hannah Einbinder). But the finale closed with a bitter twist: rather than reward Ava for helping resuscitate her career, Deborah fired her. “You’ve got your own mountain to climb,” the comedy legend told the dumbfounded writer, explaining that she should take advantage of the momentum to build her own résumé.
Given that the Emmy and Peabody-winning Max series centers on Deborah and Ava’s complicated relationship, it’s no surprise that the women reunite early in the show’s third season, which begins streaming in May. “Deborah and Ava are the secret sauce in the Hacks recipe,” Smart says in a recent phone call. “They fill gaps in the other one’s life that they don’t even realize, or certainly don’t talk about necessarily.”
Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder.Courtesy of Max.
Jean Smart.Courtesy of Max.
It is a surprise, however, that their reunion involves the famous Tom Cruise coconut cake. (As People magazine once explained: “The true mark of ‘making it’ in Hollywood isn’t an Oscar or a billboard with your face on it. It’s getting a coconut cake from Tom Cruise.”) Season three, which opens about a year after Deborah taped her special, finds the comedian and QVC queen operating at such a high altitude that she receives the dessert as a gift from the superstar.
“We’ve heard about the Tom Cruise coconut cake for a really long time,” Jen Statsky tells Vanity Fair during a separate Zoom with her Hacks cocreators Lucia Aniello and Paul W. Downs. “We talked extensively about what the the path would be to getting them back together. The cake’s an interesting intersection of their interests—it’s a marker of Deborah having made it, and [symbolizes] external recognition by her peers. And it’s pop-culture-specific, which interests Ava.”
Without spoiling the specifics of the reunion (or the cake), Aniello says that the show’s writers spent a lot of time brainstorming how to get Ava and Deborah together again in a way that wouldn’t feel clichéd.
“We try to bring them together in a way that deepens their relationship,” says Aniello. “It’s a truce, you could say. They’ve made up in a way that becomes another yarn in the tapestry of their relationship.”
There’s a caveat to Ava’s return to Planet Vance, though. The young writer worries that she won’t ever be able to break free of her former role as Deborah’s employee and assistant; that she won’t be able to work with Deborah, only for her. The new episodes also address the shades of toxic codependency in their relationship.
Megan Stalter, Carl Clemons-Hokins, Mark Indelicato, Paul W. Downs.Courtesy of Max.
Jean Smart.Courtesy of Max.
“We start to deal with boundaries and how they’re going to work together,” says Downs. Adds Statsky, “It’s something we talked a lot about as we wrote this season—their power dynamic, which is at the heart of the show.” The show’s cocreators have always described Deborah and Ava’s bond as being “a dark mentorship between this woman and her writer,” says Statsky. “And as they grow closer, the boundaries become blurred, and it becomes a question of, ‘What is this?’ It’s a boss-employee relationship, but it’s also a deep love and friendship. We’re exploring how complicated that can be this season.”
“Power in general is something we explore in different ways,” adds Aniello. “Deborah trying to gain power, how she acquires it, and how other people around her react to that. It’s one of our favorite things to [discuss].” (Deborah’s CEO Marcus, played by Carl Clemons-Hopkins, has had his own power struggles with the boss, but is back on the frontlines again at the start of the new season, helping her expand her empire.)
Viewers might think that Deborah would be satisfied by her special’s massive success, that it might soothe her 24/7 drive. But that is not the case. “This character is defined by being a dog with a bone,” says Downs. “So very shortly into this season, she finds something else that she’s hungry for. And in a way, it is what drives her this season.”
Adds Statsky, “She finds another goal to work towards that is her hardest challenge yet.” Smart tells me that Deborah’s success “renews her drive—the good parts of that drive and the bad parts of that drive. It ends up revealing things about Deborah that aren’t necessarily the most positive parts of her, and that causes an interesting interaction between her and Ava. I never thought we’d see her in the light that we see her.”
The pitfall of being married to your work, as Deborah and Ava are, is that there is not much time left for a romantic life. In the new episodes, Statsky says, “There isn’t actually even time for romance. There’s just time for sex.”
