Jean Smart and the ‘Hacks’ EPs Weigh in on Deborah’s Big Emotional Stand for Ava and That Lesbian Cruise

Hacks Season 2 threw a major wrench in Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and Ava Daniels’s (Hannah Einbinder) budding friendship last week. After working non-stop to bury the fact that she had drunkenly sent off a bitter email that would expose Deborah as a bully and narcissist to the world, Ava owned up to her betrayal in Hacks Season 2 Episode 2 “Quid Pro Quo.” Deborah reacted normally, by throwing crystal geodes at her traitorous employee, and then by suing Ava. (Ava believes the lawsuit is a bit; Deborah says it’s not.)

That all being said, the hit HBO Max show doesn’t wallow for long in Deborah’s ire. By the end of Hacks Season 2 Episode 3 “Trust the Process,” Deborah has (sort of) forgiven Ava. When Deborah’s tour manager Weed (Laurie Metcalf) — note that’s a nickname that Pete Wentz gave her — mistakes Ava’s father’s ashes for a tennis ball canister full of trash, Ava understandably freaks out. Deborah demands that Weed turn the bus around, thereby setting the tour behind schedule, so they can circle back and look for Ava’s father’s ashes in the garbage.

“Deborah is self-centered and she can be rude, but I think she puts herself in that position and can’t even imagine what it would be like. I can’t imagine anybody being so heartless as to not help [Ava],” Jean Smart told Decider of the sequence. “Even though my work is everything and she’s screwing up my schedule, it’s just such a devastating thing that happened. Funny though, from a tennis can.”

“And she loves Ava. Bottom line is she loves Ava and she can’t just continue and let her just suffer. Even though she hates going to funerals, she shows up at the dad’s funeral because she wants to make [Ava] feel better.”

It’s a moment that once again shows us Deborah’s softer side, but it also helps propel the plot forward. Rather than keep Deborah and Ava at odds for the rest of the season, we’re able to see them joke and connect as soon as Hacks Season 2 Episode 4 “The Captain’s Wife.” That episode takes Deborah to unfamiliar territory: a lesbian cruise.

Hacks co-creator and showrunner Jen Statsky told Decider that plopping Deborah and Ava onto a lesbian cruise came early during discussions about Hacks Season 2.

“We always do a blue sky writer’s room period very close to the end of the season and that idea came up and we all loved it. It was so fun,” Statsky said. “We always want [new storylines] to feel new but also have it feel Hacks in its tone in that there’s this quiet long conversation between Ava and Deborah where they’re getting into the nuances of sexuality and their experience with it, but also it’s very big and fun and joyful.”

“And there’s a dingy,” Hacks co-creator, showrunner, and star Paul W. Downs added. “We knew when we were going into it that there was going to be a dingy and we thought, ‘Okay, we’ve got to do this one.'”

“Was not easy to pull off the dingy but we did pull it off,” Hacks co-creator, showrunner, and the episode’s director Lucia Aniello said.

“No, it was a challenge to shoot on a cruise ship during a continued global pandemic,” Downs said.”

Statsky said, “That was definitely production wise our most challenging episode to shoot.”

Jean Smart said, “We jumped through a lot of hoops to even get onboard the ship and the ship was docked. We never took the ship out onto the ocean.”

“That [episode]’s gonna be a classic, I think. it’s just so fun. It’s just out there,” Smart said. “It was fun because we got lucky. It was an absolutely gorgeous two days so you felt kinda like you were on one of those cruises. I said you need one of those steel drum bands playing. People getting little cocktails and walking around in bathing suits and shorts, it was just a lot of fun.”

“And then we shot the interior of the ship all over the city. They went to great lengths to find a restaurant that would look like it would be on a cruise ship or a bar that would look like it was on a cruise ship and that was really really difficult for them to do. I think they did an amazing job, and then of course the set designers went to work and did their stuff to make everything believable. And the theater! The theater looked like one of those big theaters on a cruise ship so they just did an incredible job.”

Still we don’t know for sure if Deborah’s lawsuit against Ava is a bit or not. As far as we know, their friendship might be healed, but that doesn’t mean the litigation has been thrown out the window like Ava’s kombucha….