Plus, why Hannah Einbinder’s Ava just can’t quit Deborah, and why the co-creators didn’t want audiences to think she died in the season 4 finale.

Hacks star Jean Smart & Co. on Deborah’s new mission — and their journey to the series finale

Plus, why Hannah Einbinder's Ava just can't quit Deborah, and why the co-creators didn't want audiences to think she died in the season 4 finale.

By Gerrad Hall

Gerrad Hall

Gerrad Hall is an editorial director at **, overseeing movie, awards, and music coverage. He is also host of The Awardist podcast, and has cohosted EW’s live Oscars, Emmys, SAG, and Grammys red carpet shows. He has appeared on Good Morning America, The Talk, Access Hollywood, Extra!, and other talk shows, delivering the latest news on pop culture and entertainment.

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April 9, 2026 8:13 p.m. ET

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Jean Smart on 'Hacks'. Credit:

Courtesy of HBO Max

Deborah Vance is pissed.

On a scale of one to 10...

"A thousand?" asks *Hacks* series co-creator and costar Paul W. Downs jokingly.

Not only has the legendary comedian — played by multiple Emmy-winner Jean Smart — given up her dream, her late-night show, after refusing to cave to media company CEO Bob Lipka's demand that she fire her head writer, Ava (Hannah Einbinder), but now he has scrubbed her on-camera resignation detailing his demand and gone on a smear campaign, telling people she had a total breakdown and has gone crazy. All unbeknownst to her, while she's been essentially disconnected from life while performing standup at a casino in Singapore.

"She's very, very mad," co-creator Jen Statsky tells **. "To be silenced is one thing, but then to have her work taken away and taken off a platform, that is so offensive. It's the thing that matters the most to her. And so she is very, very rips---.

Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder on 'Hacks'.

Courtesy of HBO Max

And Deborah, as Smart notes, is a woman who does not "tolerate the word no." But in this case, "it galvanizes her, as upset as she is. It does feed her. She feeds off her anger and her bitterness, for better or for worse," Smart explains. "It's also a man that's doing it, which also makes it worse for her because so much of her anger and her insecurities stem from her husband cheating on her. There's a reason she never had another serious relationship. She was very young and idealistic, briefly, back then."

Deborah's "core trauma," as co-creator Lucia Aniello describes it, is a focal point of this final season of the HBO Max comedy, which premieres April 9.

"The beginning of this season, her core trauma is being erased, and having her special erased, and her late-night show erased," she says. "So that gets her back on stage even when she's not allowed to. But it's also something that happens, for example, in episode 4; we see that she's very upset about the fact that she feels she never got credit for [her sitcom] *Who's Making Dinner?*, and so she's still angry about it. And so when her ex- husband says she was always the funniest person in the room, she finds herself very taken aback. She's like, *Wow, that still matters to me. Why does that still matter to me?* It's because I do still seek that approval."

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And after dying — well, being incorrectly reported as dead by TMZ — in the season 4 finale, legacy is also top of mind.

"Deborah's whole thing is, her obituary was misprinted in her mind, and she doesn't like the way that her legacy's being rewritten," Aniello says. "So she wants to rewrite her own legacy. For us, that legacy is both what it says in your obituary, but also how you want to live the end or rest of your life. For her, it really is: What matters to me, and what do I want to do and say? It really is about taking your life into your own hands."

While Deborah's fans — the Little Debbies, as they're known — don't discover until the opening moments of the season 5 finale that she is, indeed, alive, audiences knew her fate before credits rolled on that finale rather than ending on a cliffhanger.

"It would've been so hard for people, I think, to process that [she could be dead]," Downs says of the decision to let audiences know she's alive. "But also, I think after giving up this white whale of hers, after giving up the late-night show, she is really disheartened and she's in a dark place. And I think having that energy, that sort of lift at the end of the season and giving us the new goal, meant when we got back to the final season, we were off the runway. We knew what she was doing. She was coming to author her own story, to tell her own story, to take control of the narrative, or to take back control of the narrative. And so I think it just allowed for us to, to your point earlier, tell the most fun and impactful stories we could without having to do extra groundwork."

Hannah Einbinder and Jean Smart on 'Hacks'.

Courtesy of HBO Max

Helping her cement that legacy will be her trusted writer, Ava — who can't seem to quit Deborah despite the horrible things she said to her in the season 4 ender.

"Probably her body," Einbinder jokes about what keeps Ava coming back for more. "Look at me. Do you have to ask?" interjects Smart.

"It's mostly physical," Einbinder confirms, before getting serious about their deep connection. "No, I think that she loves her. The idea of losing her is the most horrifying thing she can imagine, and that snaps her back into the fact that she cannot walk away and that she knows that her behavior is not representative of who she is. It's a bad moment. It's a low moment. It's dark."

"She was drunk," Smart chimes in. "Not that that's a good excuse. It's a reason, not an excuse.... But also, they really are the other person's best friend, and that's a lot."

Einbinder agrees. "They both don't have other relationships like that. It's the deepest relationship in either of their lives."

With that mutual love and respect in check, and their days of butting heads over — this season is spent focused on Deborah's new mission...well, once she settles on it by the end of the first episode. And then, it's a wildly funny journey to the series' finish line, which neither of the actresses knew until they got the finale script.

"I knew right before that, because I had heard a rumor about something that kind of disturbed me," Smart admits. "So I asked, because I never wanted to ask. In six years, I never asked how the show was going to end. I wanted to be surprised, but I was kind of concerned, but then it turned out that that was not in fact the case. Although the ending that they told me they were doing was the last thing I expected, did not expect it at all. And at first I was quite taken aback. But I said, 'Okay, I trust you guys.' And I got the script and I thought it was perfect."

"Stuck the landing," adds Einbinder.

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It's a landing the creators have known since its inception and was part of their pitch to studio executives. All five seasons have been building to the thing Smart wasn't expecting — but leading up to that, they're having a helluva lot of fun in the process, delivering some of the series' funniest moments and episodes.

Jean Smart and Christopher Briney on 'Hacks'.

Courtesy of HBO Max

"Knowing where we were going freed us up to also get to do a lot of the things we've wanted to do for five seasons," Downs says. "We got to do *The Amazing Race,* and we got to put Deborah and Ava in a really intense situation in Montecito [with guest stars Cherry Jones and Leslie Bibb]. We got to do things that have been on our bucket list for a while. It's really a bucket list season."

Including a May-December fling. "We wanted Deborah to date a young, hot rockstar," Aniello adds, referring *The Summer I Turned Pretty* star Christopher Briney's Nico Hayes. "We've always wanted her to have her autograph convention go awry. These are things we've always been talking about. We get to finally do it."

*Hacks* season 5 airs new episodes Thursdays at 9 p.m. on HBO Max.

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Source: “EW Comedy”