‘Hacks’ Season Two Finale: Showrunners Address Deborah’s Surprise Treatment Of Ava & The Way They Wanted to Depict Hollywood
03.06.2022 - 01:51
/ deadline.com
SPOILER ALERT! Do not read unless you have seen the second season finale of Hacks on HBO Max.
Deborah Vance is finally back in Hollywood, but not without sacrifice. In the bittersweet season finale of Hacks, Deborah (the Emmy-winning Jean Smart) gutpunches Ava (Hannah Einbinder) by giving her the old heave-ho in the final moments of the episode. Is Deborah really trying to help Ava with her career or does she just want to stick it to the cynical young scribe? Here, the Emmy-winning writing team of Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky take us inside that moment before addressing the future of Deborah’s Tinseltown comeback.
Deadline: You Gave Deborah a lover this season! Why was that so important to the story?
Lucia Aniello: It gave us an opportunity for Deborah to open herself up just a little, to be honest with somebody who isn’t ordinarily in her ecosystem and for her to say something that maybe she didn’t even realize she thought of. It allowed her to be in the moment with somebody new. It made her see the situation of her [marriage] in a slightly different lens. That led to the moment on stage where she decides to go off book. It’s shifting perspective of her own life. Having this new lover gave her that opportunity.
Deadline: I don’t know if you set out to do this, but it feels like you had a lot to say about the way Hollywood works, particularly in that moment at the management company when the conference room table was surrounded by white young men. Was that by design?
Paul W. Downs: Yeah, it was, down to the people in that room and the attitude of that agency, the collective culture of it. We wanted to represent something that we have observed. We also wanted to underline that not everybody is like that.
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