“What Happens In Vegas” when Ava and Deborah continue to wage their battle of wills against the backdrop of slot machines and roulette tables? Well, their writers’ retreat quickly goes to hell, they start to realize they don’t have a clear vision of what kind of late-night show they want to make, and they get stopped by the police before being shaken down by the mayor. Sin City, woo!
It goes without saying that none of this stays in Vegas. In their respective attempts to establish their ideal working environments, Deborah and Ava end up saddled with a third who’s even less welcome in their dynamic than Winnie (but at least she’s played by Michaela Watkins) and blame each other for their predicament. The truce the duo established in “Cover Girls” crumbles as they vie for control of the writers’ room, exposing the flaws in their disparate approaches in between hands of blackjack and rounds of shots.
Deborah quickly drops the pretense, pouncing on the writers in the party bus on the way to the hotel. Her idea of an icebreaker? “One thing about me is I love pitches. Got any?” When Ava, who’s doing her best “chill boss” impression, sidebars with her off the bus, Deborah admits she only dubbed the outing a “retreat” because “legally I was advised that I couldn’t take [the writers] into an office on the weekend.” She shows she means business by marching the group past all the diversions Vegas has to offer, leading them to a windowless room in a hotel with refreshments that consist of cantaloupe and saltines. (Even DJ’s AA meeting last season had more to offer.)
Ava’s understandably pissed, because she’s had the rug pulled out from under her so many times while working with Deborah. But even if her boss won’t admit it, Ava actually has a leg up here, having worked in multiple writers’ rooms with increasing success. She’s gone from barely tolerating (and barely being tolerated by) the other writers on staff to being offered the head writer gig on the in-show Last Week Tonight analog. She has more experience working in a collaborative environment than Deborah does, so her suggestion that they all get to know each other before diving into the work seems sound.
Despite being the one to call this latest truce, Deborah still won’t follow Ava’s lead. She pretends to go along with Ava’s agenda while pushing her own, and this deadlock effectively shuts down the room. ”You haven’t exactly created the warmest environment for creativity,” Ava says, telling Deborah that she hasn’t given the writers anything to go on. Although Deborah kicked things off with a rousing speech on how the host is the most important element of a late-night show, ending with her signature bawdiness (“So how do we make millions of people want to go to bed with me?”), she sees the process as a one-way street, in which the writers pitch and she approves or rejects their ideas.
That might have worked when it was just the two of them, but we see how unproductive this approach is when the group is bigger and the stakes are higher. Deborah relents, but on her own terms, agreeing to give the writers “the weekend of their lives right before I grind their bones to dust.” The bacchanalia that follows is boilerplate, though the car-to-bus drug delivery (complete with 12-year-old cans of Four Loko) is a nice touch. We do get a closer look at Ava’s management style, as she uses this playtime to shore up support among her staff. But now it’s the writers—Gordon (Grover Whitmore), Carla (Katy Sullivan), Brian (Matt Oberg), Eliot (Gavin Matts), Nate (Danny Jolles), Samira (Jasmine Ashanti), Melanie (Holmes), and Rose (Sandy Honig, who directed Hannah Einbinder: Everything Must Go)—who aren’t giving Ava much to work with. They seem to respond more to Deborah, who takes them racing in actual race cars and pours sushi and booze down their throats. They don’t bother to let Ava know when they head to the strip club. Even though this wasn’t how she planned to do it, Deborah still manages to take advantage of being on her own turf.
I always find it revealing when Ava spends time with people her own age, or closer to it. She’s not as adrift among her generational cohort as Only Murders In The Building’s Mabel (who I am begging to fill out at least the fringes of her social network with some people her age), but she does seem more awkward around other millennials than she does with Deborah. That might speak to how all-consuming her relationship with her boss is; her ex-girlfriend Ruby (Lorenza Izzo) sure seemed to think so. The lack of connection with her writers could also point to Ava’s own abrasiveness—or in this case, how she’s sanded down her edges in an effort to be a good boss. Deborah calls her out on this early on, telling Ava she’s “giving them too much,” mimicking her forced geniality. Though the brainstorming among the writers isn’t as funny as you’d expect from a room full of comedians played by comedians, the scenes in which Ava tries to curry favor with them hint at another uneven work dynamic. (This girl is such a glutton for punishment.)
But one obstacle at a time: Deborah and Ava still don’t have an opener for their premiere episode, and they remain at odds over how to run the room. Ava thinks Deborah’s being “unreasonable” in her expectations of the staff, but Deborah insists she’s just being realistic about the demands of the job. “I’m being tough because the job is tough,” she says, detailing the grind of working on a late-night show. “I need people who can keep up,” Deborah says, implying that she still has doubts about Ava. They manage to continue this heart-to-heart from the back of a police car during the aforementioned stop:
Ava: So much for our truce, huh? God, I was so stupid for thinking you could move past anything.
Deborah: It’s hard to move past getting stabbed in the back.
Ava: Well, I did. And now I’m just trying to focus on making the best show possible, which is why I did this in the first place.
What’s telling here is that Ava and Deborah both frame what they did as the best choice for everyone involved, but I think Ava’s the only one who actually believes that. Deborah knows she offered Ava a raw deal when she tried to make her the “woman behind the man behind the woman.” That compromise might have kept them together, but it would also have kept Deborah on top, which is where she likes to be when it comes to Ava (ahem). Meanwhile, Ava’s methods were questionable, but the result was that they both got their dream job. She admits to Deborah that she thought their preexisting bond would eventually smooth things over, but that’s clearly not happening tonight—though at least Mayor Pezzimenti (Lauren Weedman, who manages to steal the show) keeps them out of jail.
Back at the hotel, the ideas begin to flow, as usually happens when Deborah and Ava clear the air. They come up with a solid premise for an opener, in which Deborah, having been in late-night jail for four decades, makes her own Shawshank Redemption-style escape. It’s not exactly lightning in a bottle, but it’s a step forward—which is immediately followed by Rob pushing them two steps back with the news that their “disruptive” behavior in Vegas has garnered them their very own HR chaperone (that would be Stacy).
Following a snappy premiere, the introduction of all these new characters in “What Happens In Vegas” takes some of the wind out of the show’s sails. But the episode is also more than just the nth round in Deborah and Ava’s back-and-forth. Even though she bragged to Kiki (Poppy Liu) about “domming” Deborah by blackmailing her for the job, Ava seems ambivalent about emulating her boss, possibly because she doesn’t see what she’s doing in that light. She thinks she has the right reasons for doing bad things, which keeps her conscience at ease (for now).
Stray observations
- • Favorite exchange:
Deborah (to one of the new writers): “If I only get one chance, so do you.”
Ava (to Deborah): “This is famously your second chance!”
- • Much has been made about how Deborah’s second chance weighs on her. And yet, although Ava tells Deborah that, at the very least, they need to tell the staff what kind of show they’re trying to make, they never actually do that, which isn’t a good sign. You just know that Winnie’s going to bring them back to Earth soon.
- • “That was her last day in America.”—Kiki, on the blackjack dealer who steered Deborah wrong on a single hand. Sounds like those pranks in the premiere were actually Deborah taking it easy on Ava.
