Hacks Season-Premiere Recap: We Can’t Work It Out

Here we are in the aftermath of Baby’s First Blackmail. How’s everyone doing? Mommy and Daddy are fighting. Despite coordinated outfits that would suggest a sort of spiritual team uniform — power blazers, jewel tones — the animosity is radiating off these two. Deborah has all the experience; Ava thinks she has all the leverage and she has a “fuck-ass bob.” (What a season for these bobs!) Their speech is clipped. The music is dramatic. Can you feel that sexual tension? (Just kidding: Hannah Einbinder has already addressed the fans who want Deborah and Ava to kiss.)

To recap: At the end of last season, Deborah — after finally landing her dream opportunity of hosting a late-night show — passed over Ava for the head-writer job, going with a man (ugh) with experience (honestly, fair). Ava, in turn, blackmailed Deborah into giving her the job anyway by threatening to make public her tryst with Bob Lipka, CEO of the conglomerate that owns the network on which her show is airing.

Everybody thinks Ava has overplayed her hand. Jimmy is especially horrified, and not just because he was initially so moved to see that Deborah had the “grace and humility” to hire her loyal lackey after all. He warns Ava that she is messing with a woman who once had someone removed from an organ-transplant list (!). No one, he says, can beat Deborah at her own game. To that, I ask: Okay, but have they ever tried while having this haircut?

Deborah’s first strike in this war is to make it look like Ava committed a humiliating, in-character HR violation involving Ava’s real panties, which have holes in them. I am going to need Ava to level up her lingerie to match the energy she’s bringing with her hair. I love that Deborah moves with almost godlike powers; presumably, she’s actually doing all of this herself since she doesn’t want her secret getting out. The creativity! The strategy! I know she’s wrong, but I must respect the effort. Especially considering this is a woman who probably hasn’t done anything without the aid of at least one assistant since, I don’t know, the Reagan administration. It just goes to show that you can do anything if you set your mind to it and are fueled by a lifetime of unresolved issues and family trauma. Inspiring!

The pantie prank means everybody’s sexual-harassment training gets moved up to today. Run by an always-welcome Michaela Watkins, the meeting is a great place for Ava and Deborah to test the limits of their mutually assured destruction. Fantastic joke density here (“What if someone tells you their pronouns when you did not ask and do not care”). Though Deborah is ostensibly the more vulnerable party, Ava is the one who leaves the meeting, fearing she’s in over her head.

Deborah botches the presser that follows by refusing to respond to ageist, sexist questions with witty banter — a totally foreseeable scenario that Ava anticipated and prepared for, but Deborah tossed Ava’s jokes in the trash. But at this moment, Deborah still seems to have the upper hand. (Also: Are people seriously still asking, Are women funny? I’m not saying there wouldn’t be a handful of questions with that energy, but I do think that particular phrasing feels a little … dated. Christopher Hitchens died 13 years ago!) That said, it’s clear CiCi Heaumeaux — head of publicity and a real test for Deborah’s restraint — and Winnie (Helen Hunt) will be overseeing damage control. It is admirable that Winnie fits this in despite having to go “bond with my kid. Doctor’s orders.”

Ava continues to spiral as Deborah’s superhuman pettiness derails the rest of her workday. Deborah attacks by sending an “anonymous” tip to HR about Ava’s drug use, which results in Ava needing to chug multiple Monster energy drinks so she has enough urine for a pee test. (Ava needs Monster because she “hates water,” which leads to another great moment when the second Monster can rolls toward Ava after she sloshes her first cup all over her leg). Next, Deborah pretends to be Ava’s assistant and schedules a dinner for the writing team at the Boiling Crab so that Ava would have to eat shellfish in the unlikely event she could make it to the dinner at all, which, despite hitching a ride on the lot tour shuttle, she does not.

Marcus, bless his heart, spends much of this episode waiting for a “good” time to tell Deborah he will be leaving her employ because she has to drop her QVC work for her new late-night gig, but there is no such thing as a good time to tell someone like Deborah something she doesn’t want to hear. Upon hearing Marcus’s news (which, not for nothing, made her quite a bit of money), she predictably has a total meltdown. Deborah, always paranoid that she is about to be betrayed — not saying she doesn’t have her reasons — sees treachery wherever she looks and winds up more alone than ever. She is convinced the great tragedy of her life is that she can never expect intimacy and success to go together: “How is it everyone leaves me as soon as I get what I want?” For an exceedingly vain woman, she doesn’t spend enough time looking in the mirror.

So, everyone is in exactly the mind-set you’d want to be in when you’re going to a glamorous party at your boss’s house where “key press” will be in attendance, as well as the aforementioned boss, Bob Lipka (Tony Goldwyn), and, yikes, his wife. Are we on our best behavior? Is Kayla telling a story about the Lenny Kravitz penis video, even though that’s the one thing Jimmy told her not to do? (I also love the little reminders that Jimmy is a nepo baby, this time courtesy of Bob, who remembers that Jimmy’s dad was worried that Jimmy “only hung out with girls.”)

Deborah’s party look is sensational. That coat! Very day-off Mikey Madison. Ava is here in a T-shirt and jeans that — insult upon sartorial injury — smell like pee. But she’s not letting that stop her from networking with the hostess, and she makes sure Deborah sees her chatting it up with Bob’s wife.

Because I am listening and learning, I am taking whatever energy I would have put toward rooting for Ava and Deborah to kiss — which, like, they shouldn’t! — and channeling it toward rooting for a definitely ill-advised but whatever encore hookup for Deborah and Bob. Bob, breezily discussing his neighbors’ open marriage and letting everyone know that he is “happy to take orders from women,” certainly is giving off … a vibe. Does he then do a bait-and-switch to ominously tell Deborah that this secret better stay with them? Is he a Bad Guy™? One hundred percent, but I’m sorry, chemistry is chemistry!!

Deborah and Ava have it out, surely not for the last time, but to end this particular round in the ring, Ava shows Deborah the email she has drafted for her “friend” at The New Yorker (which, if I remember that episode correctly, friend is not the word that reporter would use to describe Ava, LOL). It is a very funny moment with Ava flexing that she could send and unsend an email; Deborah is in disbelief. “You can’t unsend an email!” “You can’t,” Ava taunts her. “You still use Hotmail.”

Ava demands that Deborah declare Ava the victor. Jimmy arrives to remind them that they are in public and to go back on a vow he made himself after his parents’ divorce, which nearly destroyed him: He will be the intermediary so these two can keep their distance. Right on cue, Cici and Winnie pop over to say they’ve landed on the perfect angle for The New York Times Magazine cover story about Deborah: It’s all about Deborah and Ava as creative collaborators.

Under the bright photo-shoot lights, the ladies bicker — “You don’t have a good side,” “At least I still have collagen!” — and I know Deborah wants to be bitchy about it, but Ava looks great. Sort of a Britney-Spears-as-Robert-Palmer-for-Pepsi vibe. Deborah gives Ava what she wants: She admits that Ava won and broke Deborah’s heart. (Not that Ava has said as much, but I do think it’s vindicating for her to hear that Deborah has feelings and that Ava matters enough to hurt them.) She follows it up with this promise: “The second this show is done, I’ll never speak to you again.”

And then, just to troll everybody, the photographer asks them to smush their cheeks together. Real close. Just a little closer. Closer! That’s perfect <3.