Hacks Recap: The Heart of the Matter

God, I love a montage of people getting work done. And I mean working working, not “getting work done” in the Real Housewives tradition. It’s so satisfying! Ava’s efforts involve moving around the index cards with jokes and sketches (tag your favorite; mine is “Desert Island DILFS”) and squeezing the stress ball so hard that it explodes its gooey blue innards all over her hand. (This genuinely horrified me; I do not believe we were meant to know what lives inside a stress ball.) Deborah’s prep entails weighing herself repeatedly, eating Polly Pocket portions at every meal, and getting so serious about exercise that she’s doing the thing with ropes where you, like, wiggle them really hard. (Have any of you ever tried this? Is it what my arms have been missing?) I’m no expert, but I think she’s going to need a little more protein if she wants those workouts to give her results.

The wigs are ready, but is Deborah? During dress rehearsal, she has a panic attack. A hot medic arrives, and, don’t worry, Stacy is also here. As Deborah lies supine and humiliated on the couch and Stacy, per the network, supervises, Ava tries to make her boss feel better. Deborah is in denial. She’s never had stage fright, okay? “Not EVEN after I performed in front of Saddam Hussein, and that was AFTER I rejected his advances.” Alexis Rose could only dream of leading such a storied life.

Also, Merrill Markoe has arrived. She’s a late-night icon (among other legacies, she created “Stupid Pet Tricks”!), and Ava worries that it will be “weird” that she, Ava, is so young but has the leadership role. Merrill could not give a shit. Ava’s gig, she says, is “a job for a lunatic.” Merrill has life figured out: three-day weekends in both directions, dogs in the office whenever she is. I have so much to learn from her. We all do.

The big question at the heart of Hacks is whether we must be lonely at the top. The behind-the-scenes reality of Hacks disproves the popular belief that success has to cost you the most important relationships in your life (as you all know by now, the show is helmed by married couple Paul Downs and Lucia Aniello and their best friend/wedding officiant Jen Statsky). But they’ve populated their fictional world with characters who don’t know how to trust that love and glory can coexist. Deborah has lived her life as if isolation is her natural state, the toll she pays to reach the peak. She doesn’t trust intimacy enough to be vulnerable for any extended period; she has talked herself into accepting her misery as the cost of doing business. Meanwhile, as her star rises, everyone in her orbit is confronted with smaller-scale versions of this same conundrum. Jimmy’s talent is too hot to have dinner with him anymore, or so she thinks — I loved his chagrined delivery of, “Famous people should eat with other famous people” — while Ava’s writers are only pretending they’re excited to have dinner with their manager; Deborah assumes she’ll be dining with Winnie and her guest, Randy Newman (interesting choice to prove that you’ve got your finger on the Zeitgeist), but ends up at a table alone, saved from her solitude by Damien, the only person in her phone who can’t say no to her and doesn’t have anything better to do.

But I’m getting ahead of myself! First, Winnie’s orders: Deborah is going to that handsy cardiologist. In the waiting room, be still my heart! (get it?), is THE Carol Burnett! In the Hacks-verse, Carol met Deborah at the opening of Planet Hollywood. Deborah gives Carol her flowers and admits she’s been struggling with performance anxiety for the first time in her life. Carol gives her this excellent advice: Pick one person in the audience and do the show just for them. I cannot believe how emotional this made me! Carol! I also loved her little neg on the way out about Deborah’s Lifetime movie from the ’80s. What a LEGEND.

It’s showtime, everybody. Josefina is here to clock, via Ava’s hug, that Ava is “starved for human touch.” Kayla is here to assert her new status by hazing her underlings. Jimmy is here to be turned down for yet another dinner because Ava has plans. (“Writers should be with other writers. Like Didion and Babitz.”) I love that Jimmy is encouraging Kayla to read women writers, though I’m not sure if I think Didion or Babitz would be her speed … maybe Sex and Rage, though? Please leave your literary recommendations for Kayla in the comments!

Deborah’s opening-night fit is gold and sparkly. She looks like a winner. She cannot take in any of what’s going on around her — Diana the psychic’s counsel to step with her left foot first; Jimmy’s assurance that his dad in heaven is proud of her — because she is on the verge of having yet another panic attack. Not to be that person, but that would be sooo bad for women :-/.

The crowd is so warm and, for once, Deborah seemed genuinely humbled. Just as she’s about to come undone again, she channels the wisdom of Carol Burnett and zeroes in on her beloved blackmailer. What a lovely shot of Ava alone in the studio. All goes well; tune in next time for Shaboozey and Nancy Pelosi!

But Deborah’s high quickly comes down when she gets stood up by both her dining companions: Randy hasn’t eaten in public since 1988; Winnie’s kid threw up 100 gummy bears (“He’s so annoying”). Ava’s evening also deteriorates, as her exhausted staffers only want the espresso part of the espresso martinis if they have to be out at all.

At first, both of their nights seem to escalate in potentially joyful ways: Ava meets a hot couple at a sex shop where she purchases an emergency dildo so her car won’t get towed, which does not work actually, but isn’t the real journey the hot couple friends we make along the way? Deborah’s dinner confab improves from “anyway, that’s how Hitler knew he lost” once she discovers that Damien has never had alcohol before. Boozed up, he illuminates the gay dating scene in L.A. for her. It’s so competitive! He needs an ass the size of a house and all that body hair he had lasered off in his 20s!

Deborah needs to feel adored, so it takes very little arm-twisting on Damien’s part to get her to a gay nightclub (despite his transparently transactional motivation), where she is greeted as a superstar. I was worried this would backfire in a “you’re a public figure now” way, but instead, things go sideways in a more slapstick direction: Deborah accidentally does poppers while dancing in a go-go cage, slams her head against the bars, and winds up in the hospital.

Because Deborah hadn’t updated her emergency contact yet — a Freudian mistake? — Ava is summoned to Cedars-Sinai. And because the TV in Deborah’s room isn’t getting a signal, Ava sneaks her downstairs to the waiting room where they can watch the show together. This means we get to hear more of the monologue — I loved the joke about how if her mother were alive today she’d say, “You’re wearing that?” — and see Deborah bond with a fan, who, fun twist, believes the devil is real and living inside him. Cool!

Deborah cries after watching the part of the monologue where she encourages little girls watching that they can one day host a late-night show, and when the title card at the end dedicating the episode to the victims and first responders of the wildfires came up, I got very emotional, too! (The location they used to film Deborah’s mansion, which was in Altadena, burned down in the Eaton fire.) If you want to contribute to the Altadena Community Preservation Fund, you can do so here.