Max’s Hacks may have just finished out its third season, but the show has never felt quite so energetic. In Season 3, young comedy writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) and legendary comic Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) are no longer adversaries, obliged to work with each other for one reason or another. When the show began, Ava needed work so desperately that she agreed to write for Deborah, despite Deborah’s pushing back against Ava’s “woke” comedy. And by the time they became fond of one another in Season 2, Deborah kept Ava on the hook with a lingering threat to sue her, after Ava broke her NDA.

But in Season 3, Deborah and Ava are as close to equals as they’ve ever been. Not only that: They’re friends. Watching that prickly friendship develop has made Hacks a blast to watch since it began in 2021, and enlivened the series with an emotional undertone that is strong enough to prop it up even in its (few) weaker moments. And after last week’s excellent penultimate episode, where Deborah saw firsthand how far her comedy has grown since Ava came into her life, one would expect Hacks Season 3 to finish on a warm, tender note.

How I love to be proven wrong! The Season 3 finale finds Deborah and Ava at odds once more when Deborah finally gets a second shot at her dream job: hosting a late-night show. It’s the goal that she and Ava have been running toward all season, but now that she’s clinched it firmly in her Deborah Vance-brand, shea butter-lotioned hands, Deborah is reluctant to give Ava the head writer spot she deserves. The decision sparks another fissure between the two, at least until Ava sees an opening to repay the blackmail that Deborah held over her head in Season 2. The narrative turn in the finale’s last moments is Hacks’ biggest whiplash moment yet, and a testimony to how invigorating television writing can be when it’s done right.

In last week’s episode, Ava told a reporter writing a profile on Deborah that, despite seeming tough, the comedian really just has high standards that she expects everybody to live up to. “If you meet those standards, she’ll take care of you,” Ava said. In the published profile, Ava was quoted as saying, “A ‘hack’ is someone who does the same thing over and over.........

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