Hacks season 2 review: Comedy should be meaner

It’s okay to be mean in some comedies. HacksThe HBO Max series “The Comedy of Deborah Vance” (Jean Smart), about an aging comedian and her uneasy partnership with Ava, her reluctant, millennial joke-writer, is a great example. It’s a comedy about two women that strongly disagree but are forced to work together by circumstances. This resulted in a steady stream of jokes: Deborah would effortlessly roast Ava, and Ava would sputter and flail while trying to update Deborah’s outdated feminism in vain. In locking horns, the pair would individually ponder ideas of progress, and how their culture has continued to fail women in much the same ways Deborah was familiar with, in spite of Ava’s wider feminist lexicon. The tension was Hacks compelling, and it’s always in danger of collapsing for a very simple and understandable reason: It all falls apart if the two leads start to like each other too much.

“Meanness” in this context is a source of tension, which all comedies need to survive. Like in season 1, there’s always going to be the generational tension between Ava and Deborah, but that’s the least interesting version of Hacks — the generation gap is extremely well-trod comedy ground, and at its best HacksThis is a way to approach complex subjects and work with subtler topics. From Ava’s perspective, it’s a workplace show about how to work with a boss that hates you and you literally cannot escape. From Deborah’s perspective, it’s about a fight to be taken seriously without caving to the pressure to remain likable at all times. They paint together a picture about femininity through its two white leads.

[Ed. Note: Minor spoilers for season 2 follow]

Their complicated relationship is retold in Season 2. Deborah travels to Las Vegas for the first-time after many years. Ava accompany her as she works on new material. Ava’s angry email to producers, asking for details on Deborah, a show she was making, is threatening their new and cozy relationship. Ava also provided dirt that Ava would be happy to share.

Photo: Karen Ballard/HBO Max

You can take a break for a while Hacks is content to ignore this tension, mostly getting by as a hangout comedy showcase for Smart, whose prolific, decades-long career in television isn’t as underappreciated as her character’s, but absolutely could stand to be a little more acclaimed. Smart’s Deborah is a complex performance. She portrays a woman trying to rediscover her ambition and accepting the fact that there are still a few spaces in this world. At the same time, Ava is trying to turn over a new life and be less of a self-centered jerk, even if she’s not quite sure what that looks like — and that pesky email continues to haunt her.

Eventually, Ava’s email does come to light and Hacks begins a very funny running gag of Deborah willfully antagonizing Ava out of revenge — putting an antique dresser in front of her bunk on the tour bus, refusing to let her poop in the bathroom, throwing her kombucha out the window — but road trips have a funny way of bringing people together. That antagonism isn’t sustained for very long.

Only six of the original episodes were available for Critics. Hacks 10-episode second season, so there is plenty of time for this relationship to change multiple times, and it’s to the writers’ credit that such dynamism is clear. Deborah is part of the story from the road trip. She confronts how the world changed while performing the same show every night. Now she’s out and about, performing for crowds that hate her, running into people she wronged, drinking in the kind of bars she hasn’t set foot in for ages. While it’s fun to watch her be mean to Ava, their animosity — which is entirely one-sided at this point — still drives them both to change. Deborah’s meanness is layered; at times a defensive response to years of being mocked by an indifferent, sexist world, and at others an extension of her own ignorance, which Ava reminds her of, in her own annoying way.

This is why the central relationship between in and out works. Hacks so compelling. It speaks to something that’s true but rarely expressed in TV comedies, which need tension to thrive but can’t have TooMuch of this was done out of concern that it might make a series unsustainable. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible: The pleasure of watching HacksIt is the manner in which the show examines the possibility that a person could be forced to change because they are hated as much by someone they care about.

Two episodes from the initial two seasons of HacksYou can now stream them on HBO Max. New episodes will be added on Thursdays.