Chris Vognar May 10, 2021Updated: May 13, 2021, 6:07 pm
Jean Smart in the first episode of “Hacks.” The comedy series is set to premiere Thursday, May 13, on HBO Max. Photo: Jake Giles Netter, HBO Max
It’s hard to be a woman in show business in “Hacks,” the stinging new comedy series premiering Thursday, May 13, on HBO Max. Comedian Deborah Vance (the sublime Jean Smart) is looking at a reduction in her Las Vegas residency as the a cappella group Pentatonix moves in to take her dates.
“I’ve got two buckets to fill,” the casino owner (Christopher McDonald) tells her. “Idiots and people in their 20s.” Meanwhile, entitled 25-year-old comedy writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder) has tweeted the wrong thing about the wrong senator and lost her sweet TV deal.
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For Jean Smart, stand-up comedy’s been a longtime dream ever since she first saw Phyllis Diller cracking jokes on television but she was always afraid to try it herself. In HBO Max’s new comedy
Hacks, she gets to do the next best thing: Play one on TV or maybe it’s
the best thing, considering there’s no live audience to bomb in front of. “It was a little intimidating,” Smart admits, “[but] it’s great because the audience we’re doing it in front of. were paid to have to laugh. And that’s the audience you want!”
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HBO Max series Hacks a triumphant return to sitcoms for Designing Women star Jean Smart
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Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) doesn’t spare the glamour as she readies for a stand-up performance in “Hacks.”Jake Giles Netter /HBO Max
Jean Smart starred in “Designing Women” and won Emmys for her work on “Frasier” and “Samantha Who?”, but that all may have been just a prelude to the new HBO Max comedy “Hacks.”
Smart plays the uproariously irreverent lead in the new 10-episode series, which serves up a main course of laughs with a side of poignancy. It’s from Michael Schur (“The Good Place”) and three of the writers behind “Broad City,” Paul W. Downs, Lucia Aniello and Jen Statsky,
Smart, who plays a fading stand-up in the HBO Max dark comedy, and costar Hannah Einbinder also talk their strange friendship.
âI just think that the characters are very unusual,â Smart teases. âThereâs nothing stereotypical about them or the relationship. I think it constantly surprised us⦠and thatâs the fun of it also, theyâre funnier than most. Theyâre juicy.â Itâs through their humor that Deborah and Ava will find common ground, but it isnât easy at first.
âThese circumstances and these women and their individual lives are incredibly unique,â Einbinder shares. âAnd it is split tonally between comedy and drama, so you really are getting both of those areas with these characters that you maybe you donât often see together.â