When Hacks reached its final season, production designer Rob Tokarz found himself looking backward. Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) was confronting the legacy of the career she had built, while Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) was beginning to shape her own future.
For Tokarz, that meant creating spaces that could carry the weight of Deborah’s past while setting the stage for Ava’s next chapter. That challenge came into sharp focus with episode 4’s “Who’s Making Dinner,” which revisits the sitcom that made Deborah famous. Tokarz and his team had to create the world of a fictional television show that had supposedly been part of the pop culture zeitgeist for 50 years.
Before going into how he approached designing Deborah’s signature show, Tokarz explained: “We didn’t have a lot of backstory on the show, actually. A lot of it is just a couple of lines here and there in Season 1.”
With so little established history, the art department had to imagine what a decades-old sitcom retrospective would actually contain: from photographs and costumes to the pieces of set dressing that might have survived over the years. Tokarz built a backstage area, camera alley and audience seating, allowing the production to shoot both the fictional show itself and a retrospective about it.
Like most iconic sitcoms, there needed to be a standout pièce de résistance. And in this case, one that became central to Deborah’s memories was the sitcom’s yellow, flowery couch. Tokarz wanted to find something distinctive enough to become an instantly recognizable part of the fictional show’s history, and, in a surprising turn of events, the team found an embroidered retro couch on Facebook Marketplace, owned by a family in Pasadena. “It’s really spectacular in person; it’s all embroidered and the colors are fantastic,” Tokarz said with a laugh.
In addition to nostalgia, the couch also serves a storytelling purpose, triggering a flashback to a happier time between Deborah and her ex-husband and co-star, Frank (George Kareman).
To showcase Ava’s influence on Deborah’s life, Tokarz’s team created custom wallpaper for one of her sets, developing 10 different prints before settling on the appropriate pattern, scale and colors. They knew the space would return in the finale, where it would be given a new treatment. “We wanted to feel like it was a passing of the torch from Deborah to Ava,” Tokarz said.
Learn more about the production design builds featured in Hacks Season 5 in the video above.
