Midway through its fifth and final season, Hacks delivered a passionate rebuke to the use of Generative AI as a means to further creativity. As the reality of what an AI version of her would entail dawned on her, Jean Smart's legendary comic Deborah Vance told a tech bro to shove it, taking the side of human artistry over regurgitated slop. If Hacks' meditation on the power of human-made art had stopped there, it would have been more than enough.
But it didn't.
Since its debut in 2021, Hacks has been one of TV's most consistently brilliant shows, a chronicle of two messy, driven people – Smart's Vance and Hannah Einbinder's comedy writer Ava Daniels – constantly dancing around each other, learning to work together, then love each other, all for the sake of the work. Whatever else divides them, and a lot divides them, these women are united by their desire to make the best possible art, and as the show said goodbye at the end of May, it reminded us how that desire can conquer just about anything. Even death.
SPOILERS AHEAD for the Series Finale of Hacks
The arc of the show's fifth season, its deliberately planned curtain call, is all about preserving and boosting Deborah's legacy. In Season 4 she thought her legacy would be as late night's first female host, until her insistence on creative freedom got her forced out of the job and branded a Difficult Woman. In an effort to bounce back, she set out at the beginning of Season 5 to hit a milestone few comics ever reach: Sell out Madison Square Garden with her return to stand-up comedy at the end of her contractually mandated period of silence.
And she did it! Through a combination of talent, good luck, backroom deals and sheer determination, Deborah sold out Madison Square Garden, while Ava, still supporting her comedy hero and mentor, got a pilot order for her new sitcom. It seemed that everything would end on a high note, even as Deborah's MSG show turned into an impromptu Central Park show when her old network bosses tried to shut her down yet again. Our Hacks emerged triumphant.
Then, Deborah revealed her cancer diagnosis. Her prognosis was not good, the cancer had spread, and her time was limited, so Deborah, always determined to do things Her Way, decided that a medically assisted death in Switzerland was better than a slow decline as the cancer consumed her. The series finale, then, would be her farewell, a fabulous European vacation capped off by her own carefully planned exit from the stage. Ava spent much of the vacation trying to stealthily find the right moment to talk Deborah out of it, eventually resorting to tearful begging, but Deborah wouldn't budge. So, at a Paris train station, the pair shared one last moment to joke together, trying to come up with the perfect punch lines for facing death.
Ava, finally loosening up and prepared to let Deborah go out the way she wants, gets up to use the bathroom, and that's when something wonderful happens. Relaxed, smiling, and free of worry about the future, Deborah pulls out her notebook and writes a joke, a joke so good she has to run and find Ava so she can share it. But it's more than just a joke. It's a reason to live.
"I may not have 30 years," Deborah says, "but I think I have another hour."
And just like that, Deborah abandons her planned death and goes back to work, not because she's afraid or because she's second-guessing herself, but because if she doesn't do it, who will?
There are times when those of us who Make Stuff, even those of us who seem to embody the joy of creation, end up flummoxed by the enormity of the task, or the monotony, or the feeling that inspiration has left the building, never to return. It can be hard to articulate, especially in moments of personal or creative suffering, just why we make ourselves do these things in the face of endless obstacles, which is where Generative AI so often enters the discourse.
We have been sold, repeatedly and often with considerable polish, the idea that it Doesn't Have to Be This Way. You can enter a prompt, watch the words or the image or the feature film materialize before your eyes, and call it your work. You can brainstorm ideas with the help of a robot in your pocket. You can, even without an ounce of experience or trial and error in the field, just hit a few buttons and achieve your dreams.
Except you can't. You can only, as Deborah learns in that AI episode, come up with a bland approximation of art, a cobbling together of everything that's come before, scraped up like sediment. To really make something that's yours, you have to want it beyond doing the mental equivalent of putting Hot Pockets in a microwave and hitting a few buttons.
Is talent required to make good art? On some level, sure. Is charisma, or good looks, or dumb luck? Depending on your chosen art form and the community in which you move, maybe. But there is another factor, more important than all of those, and it's simultaneously the easiest and hardest part: Showing Up.
The history of great art is paved with determination, from our prehistoric ancestors capturing their hunts on cave walls with no road map to artistic success to modern filmmakers crafting entire movies with iPhones because it's what they can afford. You must show up – You, not some vague approximation of your hopes and dreams rendered lifeless by data center-driven code – and you must keep showing up. Hacks, for all its comedic brilliance, is in the end a series about the power of showing up, every day, banging your head against the keyboard or the notebook or the canvas until something works, and in the end, Deborah Vance decides that's more important than anything, even death.
Hacks could have left us with something much simpler, a ride into the sunset for Deborah, whose legacy is secure, and for Ava, who's just beginning to build her own. Instead it left us with a statement of tremendous value in a world growing ever more creatively bankrupt: Show up, do the work, find another hour. And if you keep doing that, if it really matters to you, you'll be able to stare death in its ashen face, and laugh.
Hacks is now streaming in its entirety on HBO Max.
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