Hacks, baby. It’s the perfect TV show. I’m sticking to that conclusion, and fortunately, the third season of the Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder hate-love affair shall soon be on the way. Get your chainsaws ready.
How soon? The series not only dealt with that pesky 2022 Hollywood slowdown, but Jean Smart also took much needed time off for a heart procedure. Thankfully, she bounced back, and the reigning curmudgeons got back to work. HBO hasn’t yet announced a specific date, but Spring 2024 is the official release season. On Instagram, here’s the short and sassy word: “Steppin’ on out. Hacks returns this spring on Max.”
What next, though? The second season finale could have actually functioned as a series finale, and it wasn’t clear whether Deborah truly intended to cut Ava loose (“stepping out” might be a cruel tease). Entertainment Weekly spoke with creators and showrunners Jen Statsky, Lucia Aniello, and Paul W. Downs, and they (naturally) did not clarify the situation because that’s what the third season shall do. However, Aniello revealed that Deborah was “legitimately suing Ava” over the NDA violation, and here’s more context:
“We’ve always talked about that the relationship between Deborah and Ava is this kind of dark mentorship, that the relationship is extremely complicated and twisted in some ways. It’s beautiful in some ways and loving, but it’s also twisted. And so for us at the very end, this lawsuit being the thing Ava’s looking forward to as a way to see Deborah, and then that being so sad to her when it goes away was a kind of perfect encapsulation of how complicated and twisted and bittersweet, this relationship has turned.”
There’s no way that Ava and Deborah are done with each other, but we’ll have to wait and see how much “torture” that the mentor will hand the student, sometime this spring on Max.
(Via Hacks on Instagram & EW)