By Kilian Melloy

A recent Hacks Season 5 press event was a celebration of an iconic comedy that’s entered its home stretch with its fifth and final season. But also, the event, moderated by Rebecca Ford, was the panel discussion version of a group hug as cast and crew processed their grief over the show’s end. Even Ford was moved to admit, “Guys, this is the most emotional panel I’ve ever moderated. I did not see this coming.”

“It’s also funny,” interjected series star and showrunner Paul W. Downs, who, among other duties, plays Jimmy, the agent for series protagonist Deborah Vance. “It’s really funny. It’s just like Hacks.”

“It’s queer joy, it’s queer agony as well!” said co-star Hannah Einbinder, who plays the show’s other main protagonist, the up-and-coming writer Ava. Like her character, Einbinder identifies as part of the LGBTQ+ community. “We’re three-dimensional,” she declared, “we have it all.”

The new season, premiering on HBO on April 9, sees Deborah paying a price for the integrity and courage she displayed last season when she chose to sacrifice her late-night talk show rather than throw Ava under the bus. Her defiance earned the wrath of media bigwig Bob Lipka (Tony Goldwyn), a presence so powerful in the entertainment industry that his whims can elevate careers or erase them. Legally gagged, banned from performing, and facing just such erasure of a lifetime’s worth of projects on the streaming services Lipka oversees, Deborah plots her return, her revenge, and a PR coup, all while wrestling with the question of what her legacy will be.

That last part feels important. At the end of Season 4, Deborah was falsely reported by the tabloids as being dead. The new season picks up in the midst of the grief and chaos prompted by the erroneous story. The snafu has Deborah reexamining her past accomplishments, the ways in which she has been denied the credit she deserves, and her best options for her future.

Series co-creator Lucia Aniello described the shock of the mistaken reports as crystallizing the themes of the season overall, saying, “When she’s kind of faced with this reporting of her death and in her mind, misreporting of her legacy, I think it really puts into focus, like, ‘Okay, if this is what they’re saying about me, what do I want this to say about me? And how do I want to be presented to the world next time this happens?”

Deborah cycles through a number of possible answers to the question, some of them epic in ambition (at one point she strategizes about how to achieve EGOT status) and some (like a Vegas residency) engineered to replicate and outstrip past successes.

“It is about what we set out [to do] in the very first episode,” Downs added, “which is, you know, your legacy and what you leave behind, because we’re leaving behind a series, and we’re thinking about that for ourselves and for our characters.”

The final season boasts a healthy smattering of surprising cameos (no spoilers!) as well as roles for its popular recurring cast, among them Kaitlin Olson, Johnny Sibilly, and Mark Indelicato. The season also gave the creative team one last chance to act on ideas they’d been thinking about for years.

“There’s so many episodes we’ve been wanting to do for a very long time,” Aniello said, “and it was kind of like, ‘Well, here’s your last chance to do it.’”

The must-dos on that wish list? Reliably outré, hilarious, and poignant by turns: Ava dating a magician-slash-sex worker. An autograph convention exploring Deborah’s network of “Little Debbies” fans. And, rounding out Debroah’s backstory, flashbacks to the production of her breakout sitcom “Who’s Making Dinner” in an episode that Aniello described as Deborah “reflecting on that time in her life and her relationship with [late ex-husband] Frank, and what she wanted out of that relationship and what she never got, and then kind of tying that up.”

The team noted that some storylines had to be earned through years of character development. One cheeky episode sure to delight fans drew on the full weight of Deborah and Ava’s complicated relationship. “We were able to take so much of their history and infuse it into [the episode],” Aniello explained, “and it makes it seem like, ‘Oh my God, this is a long relationship they’ve been having, clearly, because all of this history they have.’ But had we done that earlier, it just wouldn’t have worked.”

As with fellow beloved HBO Max series The Comeback — which also premiered its final season recently — Hacks Season 5 includes a storyline about the dangers AI poses to creative professions. Where that was a central theme to The Comeback’s season, on Hacks it’s more akin to a short, sharp shock — and a potent one, at that. The panel’s fury was palpable.

“We can only obviously speak for ourselves,” Statsky began. That said, “That episode reflects how we feel, which is… there’s this massive push by tech to optimize every part of our lives. ‘This can be better, you can do this better, you can sleep better, you can walk better, you can think better.’

“You don’t need to optimize everything,” Statsky continued, “because the grit and the struggle is part of the creative process. It’s what makes things good. It’s what makes the things human… if you really look at it,” she added, AL is “benefiting the people that are going to make money from it. So yeah,” Statsky summarized, “fuck it. It’s really bad, and that’s how we feel.”

Downs pointed to broader threats to truth and free speech, noting that “there aren’t regulations” sufficient to the threat and adding that “especially in this season where we’re dealing with the attack on the First Amendment and the attack on free speech and the attack on truth, it is really scary what it can be used for.”

Smart raised another concern, citing a study she said she had read that illustrated the blunting effect reliance on AI has on human creativity. “They said that if you see something on a screen as opposed to reading it on a page — if you read something in a book, your mind then pictures it, pictures what you’ve just read. But if it’s already there in front of you on a screen,” Smart related, “then your mind doesn’t have to take that step, because it’s right there in front of you. They said that part of the brain — literally, where your imagination is — is getting smaller and smaller physically. That’s scary, too.”

Einbinder unleashed her own take-no-prisoners perspective, declaring, “It’s all because the people who make this stuff are losers. They’re not artists. They’re not creative. They’ve wanted their whole lives to be special, and they’re not special. So, they’re trying to rob real creative people of our gifts. And you can’t. Even if you try, you will never be cool. You guys suck. No one likes you. Anyone who’s near you is because they crave power and access over any ethical standard. You are a loser. You will never be cool. And you probably had a rolly backpack in high school. I wanna put your head in the toilet and flush.”

Downs, laughing, offered a defense of sorts… at least to the schoolyard accessory: “Now, I did have a rolly backpack in high school, I’m going to say,” he exclaimed, “so just for those of you who did, some people are OK.”

“Avoiding scoliosis, you know?” Aniello added.

“We were in AP classes,” Downs explained. “We had a lot of books. The books are heavy.”

“Okay, you guys are fine,” Einbinder conceded, “but they did it in a way that I didn’t like. You guys did it in like a theater way, which is cool.”

Einbinder went on to tackle a question regarding the queer undercurrents of the show. “Deborah Vance is such a queer icon,” she pointed out. “I think that is central to who she is.”

Einbinder related the character back to queer audiences’ love of divas: “One of the most amazing conversations that I’ve seen represented in our show about queerness and about queer icons is… at the bar where they’re discussing what it is to love a diva. You know, what it is to see and support someone before they are given mainstream approval, when she is in her Vegas journey, and believing in her.”

Added Einbinder: “I think we have people writing to their own experience. Ava is a product of queer people creating a vivid and authentic character, and when I first read this character on the page, I was like, ‘This is a fully realized human being.’ There are no tropes. There’s no parody. It is what happens when people write to their experience.”

She went on to add: “The spirit of the show is about this underdog, and that is so true to the experience of a lot of queer people, and so it’s just all the way through it.”

Underscoring the show’s authentic queer vibes, the group unveiled a private term of their own invention. “Now, fabulous-dabulous is a new turn of phrase that we started using on set this season,” Aniello disclosed.

“She says it so much at the end of every take,” Megan Stalter, who plays Jimmy’s irrepressible colleague Kayla, put in.

“Fabulous-dabulous is super-fabulous,” Aniello clarified. “And I think that that’s what the legacy of the show ends up being, is fabulous-dabulous… it’s about continuing to strive for joy in every moment, queer joy, and that is what our show, I think, often is striving to do, is to be completely fabulous-dabulous.”

Saying farewell to a favorite show is hard for viewers, but they have nothing on the sense of loss that the cast and crew experience when it’s time to wrap it all up. “I started screaming and crying during the scene,” Megan Stalter said of her final moments shooting the series.

“This is not a joke, it’s true,” Downs said.

“I was screaming and crying,” Stalter went on, “and it was a huge crowd scene, and I think people were worried for me.” Then she offered what might be the perfect analogy: “I said leaving the show was like having a golden fork ripped from my hands and now I have a stupid plastic fork.”

“We had sort of a strange situation in the sense that we shot the final scene of the series before we were done,” Smart stepped in. “So, that was sort of strange, then continuing to shoot for, I think, about another week.”

TV shows, like movies, are often shot out of sequence, but a few days of filming in Paris stirred things up even more. The location shoot led to what Einbinder called “a million little wraps.”

“We wrapped our LA crew and then about 80% of our crew went to Vegas, and then a smaller crew went to Paris, and then we had two wraps in Paris,” Einbinder recalled. “So, I didn’t have a single climactic moment. I think I had a series of moments throughout the season where I just kind of… Yeah, it was falling on me and dawning on me that it was the end.”

For Smart, reality set in bit by bit as sets were wrapped. “The first time it happened, they said, ‘Okay, that’s a wrap, that’s a series wrap on Deborah’s bedroom,’” Smart recounted. “I was like, ‘We’re never gonna sleep in this bedroom again?’ And then, ‘That’s the wrap on the kitchen.’ I was like, ‘Oh my god!’”

Sets are one thing. Wrapping a character is something else. “All of a sudden, the realization of, ‘I’m gonna miss Deborah too’,” Smart said. “’I’m not ever gonna play Deborah again? Well, that’s not possible. I’m going to miss her.’ It’s weird.”

“They do feel like real people to us,” Einbinder agreed. “I kept a lot of [Ava’s] clothes, and it’s funny, because I have them all, like, laying out. And it’s like, ‘That’s my friend’s shirt.’ You know what I mean? Like, I’m like wearing… you know, when, like, someone, you know…”

“Who died,” Smart finished.

“Literally,” Einbinder agreed. “Like, not literally, obviously, but like in some small way, I’m, like, I pick it up and, in my ear, goes, ‘Do-do-do, do-do do.’”

“Our score,” Downs said.

While the team couldn’t discuss specifics about the finale (which was still being edited), they offered some hints about its themes.

“All I’ll say,” Downs teased, “it is like an encapsulation, I think, of what we’ve set out to do with the show, of what we’ve set out to make with the tone of the show.”

As the panel wrapped, Ford reflected on the unexpected emotional intensity of the conversation. “Guys, you’ve got a long press tour in front of you,” she warned.

“I know, we are so tender, you have no idea,” Aniello said.

“Cried in the first interview today,” Einbinder mused. “Y’all thought Cynthia and Ariana were crying? Y’all have not seen tears! It’s about to be crazy!” 

Hacks Season 5 premieres on HBO Max on April 9th.

Watch the trailer: