Hacks returned Thursday night for its fifth and final season on HBO Max, and it opened exactly the way you would expect a show about a woman who cannot stand to be forgotten to open, with everyone already believing she is dead.
Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance arrives back at her Las Vegas mansion to find a memorial shrine erected by fans outside the gates.
Newspaper clippings scream her death across the headlines. The fans gathered there are in mourning.
Deborah, being Deborah, is horrified, not primarily by the death rumour, but by what her obituary says about her.
The legacy being written for her is wrong. That is the inciting problem of the final season, and it is a perfect one.
A woman who has spent her entire career fighting to control her narrative now has to watch it be written without her.
The premiere episode is titled “EGOT.” It aired April 9 and is now streaming. The series finale is May 28. There are ten episodes total.
Where Does Season 5 Pick Up?
Season 4 ended with Deborah and her head writer Ava Daniels, played by Hannah Einbinder, stranded in Singapore after Deborah’s late-night show imploded.
Deborah had quit live on air in the Season 4 finale rather than fire Ava, who had accidentally leaked a network secret to a reporter.
The sacrifice cost Deborah her dream job. They went to Singapore. TMZ ran a story declaring Deborah dead while she was there.
Season 5 picks up immediately after. The false death report has taken on a life of its own. Deborah’s obituaries paint her as unstable, irrelevant, and finished, a comic whose biggest legacy is losing her dream job in spectacular fashion and disappearing overseas.
This is not the epitaph she intends to have.
The complicating factor is a contractual one. Deborah is under an 18-month non-compete clause, the result of her exit from the network.
She cannot perform comedy, appear on stages, or do screens. She is legally silenced at precisely the moment she needs to be loudest.
The first episode ends with “Free Deborah!” written across the sky as fans begin to rally behind her.
The whole season is built on that image, a woman who has never stopped performing now forced underground, and deciding that the underground is where the best work happens anyway.
The EGOT Plan And What Comes After It
Deborah’s first instinct is characteristically grandiose. She decides to pursue an EGOT, winning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony.
She already has a Daytime Emmy and a Tony, the latter acquired by putting her name on a Broadway production and writing a check. She needs the Oscar and the Grammy, which are considerably harder to manufacture.
Co-creator Jen Statsky has explained the logic behind making the EGOT the premiere’s engine.
“It just felt so funny that she’d be like, ‘I’ve got it, I just need to EGOT,'” Statsky told Gold Derby. “It’s the loftiest goal, and the way in which she would try to game the system just really made us laugh.”
Deborah maps out a path to an Oscar through a dramatic acting role and pursues a Grammy by targeting a hyper-specific category she believes she can exploit, Tejano music, a lane she reasons no one will contest.
The premiere’s biggest laugh reportedly involves Deborah abandoning a traditional audiobook strategy entirely to record a Tejano song.
There is also an extended cameo from a Pulitzer Prize winner that critics have described as one of the most unexpected in the show’s history, and which presumably involves the Oscar track.
The EGOT plan inevitably gives way to something bigger. The season’s real MacGuffin, the goal that the final ten episodes will build toward, is Madison Square Garden.
Deborah wants to sell it out. For a comedian who was exiled to Las Vegas, who spent decades performing in a city that the industry treats as a retirement home for careers that have peaked, playing the Garden would be the definitive statement.
Not a late-night show, not a Grammy, not even an Oscar. A sold-out night in the most famous arena in America, with no corporate intermediary between her and the audience.
What Critics Are Saying
Season 5 of Hacks launched with a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, matching the show’s first two seasons and closing the book on what is statistically one of the most consistently acclaimed comedies in recent television history. Seasons 3 and 4 both sat at 98%.
Roger Ebert.com called it “the best comedy of the 2020s, one that’s so consistently witty that it often makes the troubled state of TV comedy look even worse in comparison.”
Collider said if there is one word for the final season it is “satisfying,” noting that “seeds are planted smartly for what could be on the horizon for Ava’s career after Deborah’s career crescendos, giving Einbinder’s character an agency and progression that’s more than earned.”
TV Insider wrote that Smart “shines more brightly than ever, raging with barbed wit and unquenchable purpose.”
The one significant dissent has come from The Hollywood Reporter, whose critic Angie Han argued the final season “trades its acidity for sweetness,” becoming in her words “a sugarcoated obituary version of itself.”
Han wrote that the show leans more heavily into sentimentality in its final stretch, stepping back from the biting industry satire that powered its best seasons.
She noted she would prefer to remember the show “as it actually was, mean jabs, and devastating betrayals, and piercing observations, and all.”
That tension, between a show that has always been willing to wound and a final season that may be softening its edges before it goes, is the most interesting critical conversation around Hacks right now.
Whether you read the sweetness as earned or as a retreat probably depends on what drew you to the show in the first place.
What Has Smart Said about The Season?
Smart has been the defining force of Hacks since its 2021 premiere, winning the Best Actress Emmy for all four previous seasons. S
he spoke to The Hollywood Reporter ahead of Season 5 about what keeps Deborah running, and the answer she gave cuts to the heart of the character.
“Debra’s anger and her bitterness, and hanging on to that, and really feeding upon her bitterness, really is what keeps her going,” Smart said. “That kind of bitterness and resentment and trying to get revenge, you know, her motto is that old classic, ‘living well is the best revenge.’ It’s kept her going, but at the same time, she’s paid the price.”
That description of the character has been true from the pilot, and it remains true in the final season.
Deborah Vance is not a sympathetic figure in the conventional sense. She is vain, controlling, sometimes cruel, and completely unwilling to examine the cost of her own behaviour on the people around her.
She is also, because of Smart’s performance, someone you cannot look away from.
Season 5 is reportedly the season where those edges soften slightly, where the costs become more visible and the control becomes harder to maintain.
Smart has spent four years building toward that moment, and critics who have seen the full season suggest she delivers.
What Is Hacks?
Hacks was created by Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky and premiered on HBO Max in 2021.
Its premise was an odd-couple comedy, a Baby Boomer comedy legend and a Millennial comedy writer, thrown together by circumstances neither chose, learning to navigate a creative partnership that neither would have designed for themselves.
Deborah Vance is a woman who built her career in Las Vegas in the 1970s and 80s, performing in rooms where she was the only woman on the bill, writing her own material because the male writers in the industry would not write for her, and accumulating a public persona that has calcified over decades into something that no longer quite fits who she actually is.
Ava Daniels is a young writer whose career was derailed before it started by a tweet she sent, who is talented and politically righteous and professionally adrift.
Together they are insufferable and indispensable to each other in equal measure.
The show has won 12 Emmys across four seasons and Best Comedy Series in 2024.
Its Rotten Tomatoes record across five seasons is among the highest of any comedy in the streaming era.
It ends in ten episodes, concluding Thursday May 28 with what critics who have seen the full season describe as a satisfying and occasionally tearful finale that honours both characters without letting either of them off the hook entirely.
Episode Schedule
Season 5 premieres April 9. New episodes drop weekly. Two episodes air back to back on April 30 and on May 7.
The series finale airs Thursday May 28 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO Max.
