Hacks season 5 recap: Avorah lives, AI must die

Not long after this fight (it’s hard to tell the passage of time, I’d kill for an expository “we only have six months until the Garden!”), Deborah meets with Graham, ready to sign away the rights to the work she did before partnering with Ava. Like so many AI proselytizers, though, Graham’s high on his own supply, and he tells her soon she’ll be able to outsource joke creation to QuikScribbl, too. Deborah, looking only slightly insulted, demurs: “I like doing the work.” When she points out that “using that shortcut makes [a joke] something else, it makes it not art,” Graham loses his patience. He yells that he’s just trying to make her life easier, but she thinks he and his ilk are trying to solve the wrong problems. “Why are you trying to optimize the creative process?,” an exasperated Deborah asks. “That’s one of the things we’ve actually figured out.” Here, we hear Deborah’s words, but the timbre sounds an awful lot like Ava’s. If the latter half of season three and first half of season four showed what Ava looked like after years of being under Deborah’s influence, “QuikScribbl” demonstrates the effect she’s had on her boss. 

Hacks makes its statement on AI’s encroachment into the entertainment industry in bold letters. In past seasons, the show’s brain trust might have been more subtle in relaying this message, but final chapters are always an interesting combination of big swings and limitations. Even though it won’t be trained on Deborah’s work, QuikScribbl will still move forward. At least we won’t have to see it, and at least Deborah and Ava are on the same side. In fact, the second course in this week’s offering, “Montecito” (B+), sees them get closer than ever, and the show indulge in some of its most blatant fan service—not that anyone’s complaining.

The inciting “incident” is both silly and serious, like so many Hacks setups. Deborah is understandably nervous about the Madison Square Garden show—she and Ava still haven’t worked out the opener—and she’s been having classic anxiety nightmares: teeth falling out; realizing you’re naked at an important event; being mocked by an infinite number of J. Smith-Camerons. The decision to opt out of AI training is nothing compared to figuring out what to wear for the Garden show, so Deborah brings in the big gun: her psychic, Diana (Polly Draper), who describes a white outfit that Deborah interprets to be the Bob Mackie jumpsuit Carol Burnett wore in the final episode of her long-running variety show. Mackie himself gives Deborah the bad news: An old rival, power lesbian Kelly Kilpatrick (Cherry Jones, hell yeah), snagged it at a charity auction. Deborah’s going to have to eat crow—with the aid of lunchtime mimosas—to nab her psychic-approved look.      

It’s always illuminating to see Deborah with her contemporaries or other women in power. In season two’s “Retired,” we met Susan (Harriet Sansom Harris), whom Deborah screwed out of an opportunity, a betrayal that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Winnie Landell (Helen Hunt) was poised to be a champion, but Deborah saw her as a foe, so she had her fired. When they first meet up for lunch, Kelly has no interest in playing nice. She sees Deborah for who she is—someone who once described her TV show as “The L Word if it stood for ‘lame’” —or so she thinks until Ava walks up like a concerned girlfriend, gently chiding Deborah for forgetting her phone and drinking caffeine so late in the day. Kelly misinterprets their familiarity, believing that Deborah is gay and keeping her relationship with Ava under wraps. “No wonder you’ve been so bitter and frustrated and jealous all these years!” 

Jen Statsky took the helm for the first time in “QuikScribbl,” but it’s her fellow series creator Paul W. Downs who leads this return to Deborah’s discomfort zone—and I don’t mean that because, for the first time since “The Captain’s Wife,” she’s surrounded by queer women. (And we saw how well that went for her.) Much as she’s made room for others, Deborah still prefers to be at the higher end of a power dynamic, and when she heads to Montecito with Ava as pretend-wives so she can convince Kelly to sell her the Carol Burnett jumpsuit, she knows she’s not in control. It’s Ava who, once again, “speaks the language,” parsing varieties of lesbians with Kelly’s ballerina-beekeeper wife Monica (Leslie Bibb, having a blast as the wild card in this Sapphic retreat), and easily reframing the story of how she and Deborah met to sound like a meet-angry-turned-meet-cute. She’s having fun at Deborah’s expense and flirting with Kelly’s hot trophy wife (who inspired Black Swan, apparently), but Ava is also once again worrying that Deborah’s keeping something from her. Of course, Deborah is withholding something but it’s not what Ava assumes, and Ava and Deborah are both keeping something big from Kelly and Monica, whose combined candor is at odds with all of the lies told by the other “couple.” 

Like any good comedy of manners, “Montecito” is rife with sexual tension and misunderstanding, plus a smidge of extortion. It also turns Ava’s dream from “Tunnel Of Love” into a reality, if only briefly and under less-than-ideal circumstances, as she and Deborah make out to cheers from Monica and Kelly. Ava, smarting from what she thinks is another betrayal, then goes out of her way to make Deborah uncomfortable around their hosts, cracking jokes about pillow princesses and revealing way too much about their made-up sex life. She momentarily reverts to a past version of herself, mistaking bluntness for vulnerability and questioning her standing in Deborah’s life. Downs and writers Guy Branum, Andrew Law, and Bridget Parker have great fun with this weekend of hidden motives, tracking Ava through Kelly’s mountain hideaway as she, wouldn’t you know it, just keeps bumping into Monica. Deborah has learned a lot from her relationship with Ava, platonic though it might be, and she comes clean after a fraught night of negronis and hot tubbing. The reason she wasn’t able to pick Ava up from urgent care after she was hit by a self-driving car is because she was having a mass removed. Deborah’s got a clean bill of health now, though, so she makes up with Ava and then owns up to her lies, but Kelly isn’t buying it. She parts with the jumpsuit, but as Ava and Deborah walk away, the now true believer sighs, “At the end of the day, I’m rooting for them.” See, the world’s a big enough place to hold Ava and Deborah’s creative partnership and the much sexier one that comes up in fanfic. 

Stray observations

• • I promise to give Jimmy and Kayla more of their due next week, but for now, I have to compliment the ongoing complementariness between the A(va and Deborah) story and the B story. Schaefer & Lusaque face an ethical dilemma of their own this week: Sweep a hit-and-run confession from a potential client, Bruno Fox (Sean Patton), under the rug, or get him to own up to it so the family of the deceased can have “closure.” They make the right decision but it still ends poorly, as Daddy Schaefer cuts Kayla off. We’ve witnessed what Jimmy’s had to endure to work with Kayla, but this is our first time seeing what it costs her to be by his side.  
• • Bob Mackie designed more than 17,000 looks for Burnett’s show, including the white dress, not jumpsuit, she wore in the opener for her big finale. 
• • I obviously recognized the ruby slippers, but I’d love for someone more versed in Hollywood fashion to tag all of the famous clothes and shoes in Kelly’s closet.  
• • It’s hard to pick a favorite Ava line this week: Paired with a baseball bat, “I’m a DSA member!” is already an all-timer. But she also resorted to her ongoing medical mysteries—”Did you know that redheads actually need more anesthesia during surgery?”—to flirt with Monica.   

Danette Chavez is The A.V. Club’s editor-in-chief.