For most of its history, the first rule of Late Night Club was: you do not talk about women hosting late night.
The second rule of Late Night Club: you do not talk about older performers hosting late night.
To which the creators of the hit HBO Max series Hacks are clearly replying: we don’t need no stinkin’ rules about late night.
In Season 3 of Hacks, Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance—a 70-year-old woman who has been out of the Hollywood mix for years in the garish exile of a Las Vegas hotel—defies the odds and somehow wins a shot at a comeback as the host of a network late-night show.
Unlikely? Sure. But bring it on says the show’s triumvirate of creators: Lucia Aniello, Jen Statsky, and Paul W. Downs.
“We knew from the beginning of the show that we would set up that this was Deborah’s white whale,” Statsky tells LateNighter of the latest season’s late-night plot twist. “And eventually she would get it.”
(*Spoiler alert!*) In the Season 3 finale, Vance does indeed win her shot at her own late-night series—a once-lost hope after blowing a previous show in the wake of a brutal divorce.
The creators, who spoke with LateNighter via Zoom, acknowledged the slim prospect that Vance’s character—even with a spectacular performance from Smart—would be of interest to a network in search of a new late-night host. But they had carefully laid the groundwork over the first two seasons, during which Deborah—under the influence and with the help of Ava (played by Hannah Einbinder), a creative young writer—reworked her mothballed comedy style, then fashioned a breakout comedy special and milked that for scores of endorsements.
When a guest appearance on a late-night show turns into a guest-hosting gig, Deborah appears on a network’s radar thanks to her aggressive manager Jimmy (played by Downs), who gets executives interested.
“My character makes a very legit pitch because the audience late night has knows who she is,” says Downs, who just scored his first Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series Emmy nod for the role. “It is such a noisy, sticky choice.”
“In the end, it’s wish fulfillment,” adds Statsky.
Which is what we’ll see play out in Season 4 as Deborah and Hannah take on the woman/age stereotypes and go for it in late night.
Of course, late night itself is in a radically altered state, as the creators understand. All of them are TV veterans, and all have backgrounds in stand-up. Statsky wrote for Jimmy Fallon for two years on his first post-SNL late-night incarnation, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. The creators granted that today’s late-night shows have different relationships with stand-ups, and comics getting their big breaks thanks to a five-minute late-night set are a much rarer event than in the previous century’s Johnny Carson days.
But they pointed out that Einbinder is on the show because of a late-night shot doing stand-up on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. (She was also just nominated for her third Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series Emmy for the role.)
The creators watched hundreds of auditions for the part of Deborah’s writing partner Ava; Einbinder didn’t even have an acting tape. (She does happen to be tangential late-night royalty because her mother is one of SNL‘s original Not Ready for Prime Time Players: Laraine Newman.)
Smart, who won Emmys as Outstanding Lead Actress for the show’s first two seasons, is not associated with late night nor stand-up, but she has to convey authentic comic chops in the performance scenes—and she nails it.
“What’s so brilliant about Jean is she is such a present actor, present in the moment,” Aniello, who directs many of the show’s episodes, says. “As someone who has directed her, it definitely feels like she has complete command as a performer. So being able to drop into a credible stand-up felt natural, and it was never anything we had to work on.”
The easy real-life comparison for Deborah Vance is Joan Rivers, who broke out as a brassy stand-up, thrived as a guest host, then wiped out quickly with The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers, which aired on the then-nascent Fox network for just one year. The creators acknowledged Rivers was an inspiration, but cited others.
“We basically pitched an amalgam of iconic women,” Downs says, citing Elaine May, of Nichols and May fame, because Deborah first worked as part of a duo with her husband. “She’s got a little Lucille Ball, because she went through a public divorce. She’s got a lot of Debbie Reynolds, because she was maligned by that ex.” And then there’s Phyllis Diller, who played “a caricature of herself,” as Aniello put it.
But, of course, Rivers is the closest model. And what occurred with Rivers—thanks to network executive machinations—will play a part next season when Hacks explores what it’s like to start up a network late-night series.
“Getting that job for a woman her age is almost impossible,” Downs says. “But even harder is launching a new late-night show and keeping it on the air… Joan used to say: there are a lot of vipers out there. And there are a lot of vipers for Deborah.”
That sounds pretty dramatic. But in the new world of how you define a comedy series on contemporary television, Hacks does not obfuscate its intentions. As Downs put it: “We are a comedy show about comedy.”
That isn’t always clear anymore among shows labeled “comedies.”
Many of the eight nominees in the crowded Emmy category of Outstanding Comedy Series fall somewhere on a scale between laugh-centric and laugh-curious.
The favorite in the category, as it was last season, is The Bear—a show that barely offers a few minutes per episode in pursuit of out-loud laughs. That unquestionably estimable FX on Hulu series set a new record this year for nominations for a comedy with 23.
Does it matter if The Bear is really a comedy? No, because it’s a half-hour (more or less) long and that’s essentially how the Emmys determine what a comedy is.
Hacks, of course, is doing pretty well for itself, having racked up an impressive 16 Emmy nominations this year, including one in that elusive Outstanding Comedy Series category.
If anything, next season promises to be even more comedy-centric because Vance will be seen at work—delivering a monologue, comedy desk pieces, and all the other trappings of late night. The show has even tapped Merrill Markoe, a late-night legend who served as Late Night with David Letterman‘s first head writer, as a consultant.
Will Deborah Vance be a hit when she bags her white whale? The show’s creators aren’t offering up any spoilers—though they did originally pitch the series for a five-year run. And maybe it’s instructive to note: Ahab got his hooks into Moby-Dick, but that’s the last anyone saw of that guy.
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