The “impossible dream” turned out to be possible on Hacks, but there was never any guarantee that it would last. After an arduous climb, albeit one they mostly made together, to the top, Deborah and Ava come tumbling down “A Slippery Slope” this week in one of the season’s (and the series’) most gratifying entries.
Winnie Landell’s words of advice about the difficulties of staying on top have echoed throughout season four, and they linger even after she gets the boot from Bob Lipka. Ava took them as a warning and threw herself into her work; Deborah, on the other hand, seemed to interpret them as a dare, asking herself what wouldn’t she do to keep her dream job. It took Ava’s breakdown for Deborah to realize she didn’t want to host the network’s version of the show, but she wasn’t prepared to completely close the door on executive meddling. As she notes in tonight’s rousing speech, Deborah believes there are at least some good people on the business side of things. She just misjudged the ones closest to her.
Hacks creators Lucia Aniello (who directs “A Slippery Slope”), Jen Statsky, and Paul W. Downs are always good for a late-season twist or two, but part of what makes this episode work so well is how unsurprising some of the biggest developments are. It’s not that they’re predictable or feel rote, but all the choices are rooted in who these characters are, who we’ve watched them become. That applies to the overall season and really the broader show. We as viewers may initially be shocked to see Ava resort to blackmail or Deborah get her priorities straight, but their actions can usually be traced back to some earlier moment. That’s the art of the callback, and the Hacks team has utilized it to create the show’s most outlandish and most grounded moments. Although I think it’s one of the lesser entries in the Hacks canon, “D’Christening” paid off what seemed like a throwaway joke about the Vatican in the season-one episode “New Eyes” four years later. Deborah only uttered the words “Never forgive, never forget” once in the first season, but they’ve informed so much of what’s followed.
One of the most damning callbacks in “A Slippery Slope” centers on Ava, but it’s Deborah’s past that comes to the fore. Her ego is what got her here, both to the mountain’s peak and back down it. You could say that she asked Bob for that favor—and, watching tonight’s episode, it really does seem like she knew what she was requesting—to protect what she and Ava have built. But she clearly didn’t like having anyone above her, which is why she couldn’t see that Winnie, like herself, was also answering to someone higher up. So, Deborah had Winnie removed, thinking she knew how to deal with a man like Bob and unwittingly lost her protector.
Even if Winnie is somewhat overstating her role when she tells Ava about what really happened while the latter is on a wild-goose chase at the Oscars (where Javier Bardem has a “diva down!” moment offscreen), when Deborah made that flirty late-night call to her boss’ boss, she signed herself up for the losing end of a Faustian deal. Deborah may be good at playing dirty, but her recent opponents have been an impetuous young woman, her widowed sister who’s mostly vanished, and a charming casino owner who’s wilted under the Las Vegas sun. (Christopher McDonald’s Marty is dapper, but hardly a shark.) Dig further into her past and you still won’t find someone like Bob Lipka, who’s already threatened Deborah once this season (but sexily). She couldn’t have imagined just how uneven the quid pro quo would be with a media mogul because, despite whatever indignities her wildly successful confessional stand-up special and the heart-to-hearts with Ava have unearthed, Deborah has been the one wielding the power for the last few decades. She may have had to set up shop in Vegas to have it, but for the last four seasons, Deborah is the one who’s thrown money at problems and called influential friends for favors.
Deborah would be the first to tell you that whatever power she has was hard-won, but for much of Hacks‘ run, she’s had to face up to how she may have abused it in the past or tried to figure out how to wield it responsibly going forward. In season one, feeling ashamed after Ava, well, shamed her for not speaking out about the predatory owner of the Haha Club, Deborah confronted another creepy comic and offered him $1.69 million to quit comedy (not the toughest display, but it’s a work in progress). Reconnecting with her stand-up roots in season two reminded Deborah of how she betrayed a fellow female comedian who was also just trying to make it and that she deprived D.J. of a normal childhood. In season three, she was ready to knock Ava down the same “marble staircase” she bragged about building for her fellow women comics.
You can see the weight of all of these choices on Deborah’s well-dressed shoulders in “A Slippery Slope,” even in the much more lighthearted opening scene, when Katie Couric asks Deborah what advice she has for the young girls out there watching her ascent. Deborah quips about salad dressing, possibly because the experience has grown increasingly tainted for her since she promised to keep the chair warm for aspiring late-night hosts in “I Love L.A.” The episode continues to set Ava (and us) up for disappointment, with Deborah kowtowing to Bob by agreeing to have Ethan Sommers (Eric Balfour) on the show, despite Ava’s objections. There’s a glimmer of hope when Deborah sneaks in a mention of Sommers’ gross behavior during the interview, but when Rob tells her they have to cut that part, she immediately folds. Deborah’s not ready to fight this battle, but Ava inadvertently forces her hand by blabbing about the network pressure to have Sommers on and edit the interview to her old boss at On The Contrary, who just so happens to be working on an exposé about the studio covering up Sommers’ indiscretions.
I’ve been following Deborah’s through-line for much of this recap, but I need to take a beat to appreciate the way Ava is hoisted with her own petard. It’s a thing of beauty. Much as she admires Deborah, Ava defines herself, in part, as the antithesis of her boss. She wants to be fair where Deborah is uncompromising, encouraging instead demanding, celebrating staff birthdays instead of literally bursting balloons. Though she’s helped Deborah through a few debacles, she’s also jumped at every opportunity to look down on her. Back at the Haha Club (in season one), she criticized Deborah for looking out for her career instead of warning other women about the predatory owner. Ava now has a similar dilemma: suppress the story, or potentially lose her job. She at least has the decency to acknowledge that she’s trying to “censor a story about censorship” as she begs Lewis (Aristotle Athari) to omit her comments from his exposé. Lewis tries to appeal to her using her own words: “Didn’t you say that you admire our show for having the integrity to [expose a predator and the media conglomerate covering up his actions]?” “Yes,” Ava yells, “but that was before it personally inconvenienced me!” We could argue about whether Ava has just adopted this kind of attitude because she’s been working with Deborah for so long, but that dark potential has been there from the beginning. Otherwise, her former co-workers would have had nicer things to say about her in season one. I don’t write this from atop my own high horse; I’m just singling out great character development.
Hannah Einbinder has done some of her best work this season, but her flailing around to find the moral high ground here is exceptional. Jean Smart commands the rest of “A Slippery Slope,” though, first with a poker face that gives nothing away about the decision before Deborah—fire Ava, as Bob asks, or lose the show—and then with a heartfelt speech about what being on top has, and will, really cost her. During her monologue for the post-Oscars live show, she recounts her recent actions and the network’s demands, which leads her to wonder “So, what will they ask of me next? Where’s the line?” Previously, when it came to common decency and joke-telling, Deborah declared there was no line. But when faced with losing the soul of her show—cutting it out, really—the line is suddenly all too clear.
Despite Jimmy’s valiant efforts, Bob is able to cut the feed, but not before Deborah gets to the heart of the matter:
“But thanks to Wall Street and big tech disrupting our industry, it’s gone too far. It’s not enough to be number one anymore, or to make a profit, or to even make you laugh. I might be a capitalist pig myself, but first and foremost, I’m a comedian. And I care more about making this show the right way than I care about making shareholders happy. So, yes, this is goodbye.
“I loved going to bed with you every night. Sorry I’m finishing too quickly. This was my dream, and I’m so happy I got it. But the dream changed. And so did I.”
When he catches up to her to threaten her yet again, Bob tells her she’s burned it all down, and he might be right, given that the non-compete clause prohibits her from even looking at a stage. Deborah’s been (wrongfully) accused of burning things in the past, and she dealt with it by owning the laugh, as she advised Mayor Pezzimenti to do, because she assumed no one would believe her or want to hear her side of the story. It took her decades to be proven wrong, as her successful reinvention as a stand-up demonstrated. This time, Deborah made her case first. It could still blow up in her face, but right now, it feels like justice.
Stray observations
- • Up until the big reveal, everything points to Deborah cutting Ava loose: the dig at her sister during the Couric interview reminding us how unforgiving she is, Bob asking if she can really trust Ava, the insistence that she doesn’t really have a choice, shutting down Ava’s access to the lot, even the timing of the storyline (which is so late in the season). I’m both glad and not too surprised that Hacks went the other way, and I think it speaks to the new depths the writers keep finding in Ava and Deborah’s relationship.
- • Jimmy and Kayla both got to be heroes, and they finally settled on a name for their agency. Spin-off when?
- • “I started my career PA-ing for Terrence Malick. I would love to just foster great artists but that’s not the world we live in anymore.” Yeah, I can see why Winnie wouldn’t be satisfied with chasing down the next Carpool Karaoke.
