June 9, 2022 by Barbara Lippert · Arts & Culture

The Brilliance of Hacks: It’s About Facing Failure through a Female Lens

Barbara Lippert looks at the multi-faceted fabulousness and relatability of HBO's "Hacks."

With its second season now streaming on HBO Max, Hacks is a wildly smart and original intergenerational hate/love story. The premise: After losing her headliner status, a properly nipped-and-tucked, silk-kaftan-clad Joan Rivers’ type comedian (and QVC superstar) is forced to hire a very young, snarky, kombucha-sipping-female comedy writer to help contemporize her act. Cruel jabbing ensues.

As a title, Hacks could cleverly connote both becoming old and professionally stale and/or finding the secrets to improving your life, a cycle of ending and beginning. It’s a spectrum that both characters inhabit in a relationship that the show’s creators, Jen Statsky, Lucia Aniello, and Paul W. Downs, (writers on Broad City) have characterized as a “dark mentorship.”

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