Hacks Review

The dynamic is a classic and the execution is not. Deborah Vance is not a warm mentor waiting to be thawed; she is a hard, unforgiving professional who has survived by being unreasonable, and the show refuses to soften her even when she is being cruel to the only person who understands her. Jean Smart plays that with total control, and Hannah Einbinder is her genuine equal, playing entitlement and talent in the same breath. The material about the business is precise, from the mechanics of joke construction to the economics of a residency to what happens to a woman who was funny in the wrong decade.

Carl Clemons-Hopkins and Paul W. Downs make the management scenes as good as the stage ones. The limitation is structural: every season builds toward a rupture between the two leads and a reconciliation, and by the fourth the pattern is visible in advance. Some of the industry satire is broad. But the writing about ambition, and about what one woman will do to another to get a stage, is unusually unsentimental.