Hacks, Season 3, NOW review - acerbic showbiz comedy keeps up the good work

Dying is easy, comedy is hard, according to the Georgian actor Edmund Kean. Luckily, everybody involved with the much-awarded Hacks understands precisely the creative anguish that top-flight comedy demands, and in its third season the show puts further expanses of clear blue water between itself and the competition.

Constructed on the fraught and frequently hostile relationship between septuagenarian superstar Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her young and ambitious scriptwriter Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), Hacks is a forensic examination of the showbiz life and the showbiz business. The Hacks handbook teaches us, among other things, that to attain the goal of making audiences laugh, performers must be willing to burn the people they love, elbow potential rivals out of the way by any means possible, and sink to any kind of moral depravity if it might get them the job they’ve always craved. Remorse and compassion will not be required (pictured below, Einbinder and Smart).

The objective is, in Deborah's case, to host the Late Night show, a TV institution in Hollywood. A kind of composite of Joan Rivers, Elaine May and Lucille Ball, Deborah has the hide of a rhino, the brain of Machiavelli and the ambition of Napoleon. She has coveted the Late Night job ever since she had it snatched from her grasp 40 years earlier, and she understands exactly how big an ask it is – “there’s never been a woman at 11.30pm on this network, or anyone as old as me, or let’s be honest, a blonde,” she growls, through gritted teeth. “It would be easier to be elected President.”

Deborah’s Late Night quest provides the spine for the season, and Smart’s mercurial, multi-layered and sometimes scary performance remains a thing of wonder. There’s plenty of hilarious and bizarre scenery along the way. Among many highlights is a weekend at a swanky resort where the American Television Affiliates Golf Tournament is being held (Hacks excels at spotlighting the corporate self-importance of its chosen industry). Here, it seems that Deborah’s quest to get the Late Night gig is fatally derailed, but this prompts her into putting on an epic display of pro-style power golf. Network supremo and golf fanatic Bob Lipka (Tony Goldwyn) is vastly impressed, with results that Deborah herself can scarcely have foreseen. Meanwhile, Ava has a bizarre encounter with Christina Hendricks’s character (billed as “Gay Republican”), who makes Ava an obscene offer she can’t accept (Hendricks pictured below).

It’s enough to make you wonder why anybody would want to work in such a business, but Lucia Aniello and her writing team are able to convey its obsessive-compulsive nature and how it sweeps aside anything in its path. This includes Ava’s lover Ruby (Lorena Izzo), star of TV’s Wolf Girl. One minute Ava plans to marry her, the next she’s quit her job with a writers’ agency to leave Ruby and return to work with the cantankerous, utterly self-obsessed Deborah who previously cut her dead. They both understand that they need each other slightly more than they loathe each other.

The stage is littered with collateral damage, not least to Deborah’s daughter DJ (Kaitlin Olson). When Deborah finally accedes to visit the therapy centre where DJ has been in rehab, to award her daughter a medallion marking five years of sobriety, Deborah can’t resist using the occasion to upstage DJ and deliver a miniature one-woman show. Similarly, there’s an unbridgeable divide between Deborah and her sister Kathy (J Smith-Cameron). Just when it seems that a rapprochement is imminent, Deborah finds a way to a destroy the moment. But hey, that’s entertainment.

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