'Hacks' review: Final season is funny, melancholy, flawless

WHAT IT'S ABOUT After Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) quits her late night show while she's on the air, she faces the harsh consequences. Frozen out of the business for the next 18 months by a noncompete clause, she and Ava (Hannah Einbinder) head to Singapore where Deborah actually does perform (hey, that noncompete said nothing about having a translator, although the jokes don't quite land the same way). After Deborah starts to fall apart the usual way (booze, karaoke nights), TMZ posts a bad tip that she has died. That's the setup for this fifth and final season. Deborah arrives home in Los Angeles, literally back from the dead, where she and Ava urgently begin to explore the question she 's avoided for so long: What about her legacy?

This fifth and final season wraps next month. 

MY SAY A lot happens over the first 33 minutes of the final season of the most acclaimed (and Emmy-winning) TV comedy of the last six years, but with only 10 episodes left, a lot needs to happen. And what happens here (suffice it to say) is very funny. After securing retractions for all those obituaries, and still shut out of her own profession, Deborah decides that she and Ava need to get serious about that legacy, which really means that her forever-loyal reps, Jimmy (Paul W. Downs) and Kayla (Megan Stalter) need to get serious too. What follows is an antic chase for an EGOT (which also works as a crash course in how awards seasons really work), while Ava, as usual, doubles as sounding board and doormat. "I don't need a yes man," Deborah snaps. "I need no woman to ignore."

And so it goes — the lioness in winter, who must find a way to restore her dignity or at least find a way back in front of the only people in the world who truly matter, the Little Debbies (her fans). As Debbie ruefully observes, "when you're away from the spotlight, you realize what really matters [beat] The spotlight."

Will the spotlight shine once again? Without getting too spoilery here, a particularly famous entertainment venue figures in the fifth season, and so does a certain city. Icons in their own rights and for their own reasons, both feel particularly appropriate and poignant in this last season of big send-offs. "Hacks" is going out with a bang, and that feels exactly right too.

 It's a surprisingly emotional send-off too but "Hacks" never really was a show-biz satire to begin with, so that emotion (and poignancy) feel earned. Hollywood satires want to diminish, but from its 2021 launch onward, "Hacks" understood there wasn't that much left to diminish. As a concept or abstraction, Hollywood was rapidly fading away, like a ghost or hologram, and just another part of the global production economy. Yet this show was an unapologetic reminder of why places like Hollywood and Las Vegas still matter. A valedictory to the sort of monocultural talent — Joan Rivers, as the most obvious example — that doesn't exist anymore and won't ever again, "Hacks" was especially about why the last remaining Deborahs still matter too. (And yes, of course, the Avas — the ultimate fan who loves Deborah for Deborah, which was never as easy as it sounds.)

That's a nice note to end on, and "Hacks" ends on it perfectly.

BOTTOM LINE Funny, melancholy, flawless.