![]() Jane the Virgin, a telenovela with an abiding interest in the twists and turns of romance, dedicates much of its attention to the complicated relationship between Jane and her mother. Maleficent, a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, reimagines the transformational capabilities of “true love’s kiss” as familial rather than romantic. Others offer that reclamation for family relationships. Some of the shows do that with friendship, among them Insecure, Broad City, and PEN15. Hacks is part of a revival of shows that apply the tropes of the rom-com to the possibilities of nonsexual relationships. ![]() It understands how many ways there are for people to be coupled. The image is a tidy encapsulation of Hacks. The show’s camera lingers on the result of their compromise: The younger woman and the older, the one outside the bathroom and the other inside, lightly holding each other’s hand. ![]() Neither woman is enthused about this imposed togetherness. Having had surgery, Deborah needs a constant companion-even when she uses the bathroom. Deborah spends a few days at a ritzy plastic-surgery spa, for an eye lift, and brings Ava so that they can spend the recovery time working on new material. But the rom-comic nods in Hacks can be subtler, and more poignant, too. Is a misunderstanding resolved when one character makes a splashy gesture to prove her affection for the other? You bet. Hacks takes a fusty old standby, the marriage plot, and gives it a timely new twist: It is a rom-com that is dedicated to the romance of work.ĭeborah and Ava, having met cute through their manager’s orchestrated twist of fate, develop a relationship that proceeds exactly as you’d expect a rom-com to: First the two resent each other, and then they grudgingly accept each other, and then they come to respect each other, and finally they come to need each other. It is a comedy that is asking serious questions about where, and how, people might find fulfillment in their life. HEAD BALL 2 HACK DEB PROFESSIONALHacks takes the familiar tropes of that genre-meet-cutes, misunderstandings, grand gestures-and applies them to a professional partnership. Alternately dark and light in its humor, the show is sometimes a bleak psychodrama, sometimes a lively satire of the entertainment industry, sometimes an intergenerational character study, sometimes a classic workplace comedy. Hacks, which recently concluded its first season on HBO Max, defies genre. His broader idea, though, doubles as the premise of the show: that both women, the Boomer and the Zoomer, might have something to teach each other-about writing, about comedy, about life. His pitch is that Ava might help Deborah punch up her stale act. The two share an agent who suggests, in a flash of insightful desperation, that Deborah hire Ava as a writer. Ava is an up-and-coming comedic writer who, because of an offensive tweet she posted, has been rejected by the Hollywood establishment. Deborah, a pioneering comedian in the Joan Rivers vein, has stalled in her career: A Vegas residency that finds her performing the same set, show after show, has brought her wild wealth and creative stagnation. ![]() The women of Hacks come together because they both need something from each other professionally. Hacks, like several other recent works, expands the notion of what it means to be a couple in the first place. Deborah is Ava’s boss that complexity is awkward, and also the point. ![]() Hacks’s version is more complicated-and only in part because Deborah and Ava aren’t interested in each other romantically. In the earlier versions, the desire is romantic. The difference is the means of the togetherness. They make clear that these people who are separate would rather be together. The scenes all do elegant narrative work. If the scene seems familiar, that might be because it is an ironized version of the famous scene between Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally-which was itself a riff on the famous scene between Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in Indiscreet: the phone, the night, the interplay of intimacy and distance. Burns, in this relationship, are a form of tenderness. “Well, you certainly have the complexion,” Deborah murmurs in reply. “I think I could play a dead body,” Ava muses. Both are watching Law & Order: Criminal Intent. The two comedians, one in her 70s and the other in her 20s, are chatting on the phone late one evening, Ava from her Las Vegas hotel room and Deborah from her Vegas mansion. A scene midway through Hacks finds the show’s protagonists, Deborah and Ava, in bed together-but not in bed together. ![]()
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