Ava (Hannah Einbinder), left, and Deborah (Jean Smart) have both grown tremendously since we first met them in Season 1 of Hacking at Max.
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Ava (Hannah Einbinder), left, and Deborah (Jean Smart) have both grown tremendously since we first met them in Season 1 of Hacking at Max.
Max
It's pretty sad when you find yourself pointing to a third season of an Emmy-winning show as an example of streamers keeping something running for quite a while. And while many of us feel like “everything is getting canceled so quickly!” there is some nuance about how true that really is. Part of that depends on how you handle the thorny issue of the “limited series.”
But boy, sometimes it does seems as if everything is canceled very quickly. And in that environment, see Hacking Returning for a third season that may be the strongest yet, it's a reminder that good shows, if given the chance, often pay off over time in ways that couldn't be realized in their first, most popular, premise-defining and character-defining series.
We first met Ava (Hannah Einbinder), a young comedy writer who thought she was terribly cool and terribly progressive, when she reluctantly started working as a writer for Deborah Vance (Jean Smart). Deborah was slowly starting to freeze up during her long-running casino gig, and she felt like she needed something new – not that she was really willing to listen to Ava that much. The two women have been through a lot since then, including a few estrangements (Ava wrote a terrible note about Deborah to people who wanted to destroy her; Deborah punched Ava in the face for calling her a hack; no one is perfect). At the end of the second season, the two broke up after Deborah found new success and realized that Ava needed to start working on her own career.
So as the third season begins, we naturally see Deborah enjoying a new kind of success as a more interesting artist, but also a… maybe we could say “cooler.” (She just did a Super Bowl commercial!) Meanwhile, Ava is writing for a good comedy show. Will their fate bring them together again? Naturally. We know this. But what makes Hacking What's interesting at this stage is that Ava and Deborah remain themselves, but they've been influenced by the things we've seen happen to them since the beginning of their relationship. The Ava we know now would never approach Deborah with the arrogance and contempt she did in the first season, and the Deborah we know now would never treat Ava as callously as she often did back then.
They have also evolved professionally. There's a good scene early in the new season where Deborah realizes that popular success has made it extremely easy to get a laugh without trying very hard. She doesn't actually have to be good – just as she didn't in Vegas, when her audience quietly accepted her material. But now that she's done all the work she's done, she has a greater interest in being good; it upsets her to receive the kind of adulation she once thought she wanted. This scene suggests that being a hacker isn't so much about being bad as it is about not caring if you're good.
And Ava is less grasping now, less aware of the comedy world. The joke about her being 'cancelled' after a tweet is all but over, and that's a good thing, because there's not a drop left to wring out of that idea.
This kind of thing, characters growing and changing, is far from revolutionary. It's the very reason serialized storytelling exists in the field of character-based comedies, as opposed to pure joke factories. But you usually can't achieve these kinds of changes with one season, or even with two runs of six or eight episodes. What you see now Hacking is the advantage of even a small a little patience, to give a few characters time to spend time together and apart and be influenced by each other.
Jimmy (Paul W. Downs) and Kayla (Megan Stalter)
Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/Max
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Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/Max
It also ensures that things that may be a little out of balance at first change. When Hacking started, my biggest hesitation was that I couldn't do it scaffolding Ava. It's not that she wasn't nice (Deborah actually wasn't either). But Ava was so obnoxious and so arrogant that it transitioned to a place where… I didn't care. I wanted her fired and gone forever. It didn't help that she rarely seemed funny enough to be a good comedy writer. Whether it's that I'm coming to understand her better, or that the show and Einbinder are presenting her a little differently, Ava seems more like Deborah to me now: flawed and messy and sometimes consumed by ego, but plausibly talented and essentially decent.
I also love the dynamic between Deborah and Ava's agent, Jimmy (Paul W. Downs, who co-created Hacking with Jen Statsky and Lucia Aniello) and his assistant, Kayla (Megan Stalter). Despite Stalter offering a dynamite performance, Kayla initially came across as a bit pathetic, begging for Jimmy's attention with a kind of vulgarity that he responded with annoyed disgust. But especially since Jimmy left his agency and he and Kayla went it alone, they've become a truly cooperative couple. lotJimmy understands that his assistant has talents and abilities that go beyond her devotion to him.
I have my minor complaints about the third season, most of which contain “but” statements: I could definitely have done with a little more of Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins), but what the show gives us works very well. I'm not sure if they needed a “students and cancellations” story later in the season, but they do a good job with it once they get there. And there's a creative decision made towards the end of the season that I know I'll debate with people who love this show, but I'm intrigued by how it does or doesn't fit into the season.
Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins)
Eddy Chen/Max
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Eddy Chen/Max
This is all good though. It's tough and complicated, and that comes from a kind of breathing space that you don't get when you do a show of eight half-hour episodes. The result is that a show that is always funny, thought provoking and full of wonderful performances, is also a more compelling people story this season.
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