Rise up, “Hacks” hive!
The beloved HBO series has officially won the 2024 Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series for its long-awaited third season. “Hacks” stars Emmy winner Jean Smart and Emmy-nominated actress Hannah Einbinder as an aging (yet still iconic) stand-up comedian and her writing partner.
Smart has won an Emmy, SAG Award, and Critics Choice Award for playing Deborah Vance; Einbinder has been an Emmy, SAG Award, and Critics Choice Award nominee for her turn as Ava Daniels.
Shockingly, this is the first year that “Hacks” has won the coveted Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy. Both Smart and Einbinder were also nominated at the 2024 awards show.
Fellow nominated comedy series included “Abbott Elementary,” “The Bear,” “Only Murders in the Building,” “Palm Royale,” “What We Do in the Shadows,” and the respective final seasons of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “Reservation Dogs.”
“Hacks” is created and showrun by Emmy winners Paul W. Downs, Lucia Aniello, and Jen Statsky. The series is executive produced by Downs and Aniello via their Paulilu banner, Statsky via First Thought Productions, as well as Emmy winners Michael Schur via Fremulon, David Miner for 3 Arts Entertainment and Morgan Sackett. The studio is Universal Television, a division of Universal Studio Group.
Co-creator Downs famously also appears in the series, along with Megan Stalter, Carl Clemons-Hopkins, Kaitlin Olson, Christopher McDonald, Mark Indelicato, Rose Abdoo, and Lorenza Izzo.
Guest stars for Season 3 included J. Smith-Cameron, Helen Hunt, Christina Hendricks, Christopher Lloyd, Dan Bucatinsky, George Wallace, Tony Goldwyn, and Aristotle Athari.
Actress Einbinder told IndieWire that she was “crying” while first viewing the jaw-dropping Season 3 finale.
“Jean and I have been going back and forth since Season 1, but this feels like something different,” she said. “It just felt like this new energy that was so crazy. It feels tonally so different but still so grounded in the reality of the show. We watched it over and over.”
Einbinder added that the series is centered on the shared “comedic love language” between the central duo.
“The lengths a person will go to justify maintaining a relationship with someone because they make each other laugh. That’s something I’m very familiar with, and that’s something that I appreciate being represented in this way,” Einbinder said. “Because we’ve seen, ‘Oh, we have such passionate romantic chemistry, and so we excuse everything.’ And it’s very rare that we get to see a dynamic where humor is the thing that will excuse any bad behavior. That is something that we as comedic people, comedians, comedic actors, whatever, we really experience that.”
“Hacks” was greenlit for Season 4, which will go into production in September 2024.
“It is the most charmed experience that an actor could ever hope for [in] a safe work environment, which is not the norm,” Einbinder said. “Every person who works on our set is funny and cool, like every department, and the creators of this show are egoless and loving and collaborative and supportive, and they’re my friends and they’re my family now.”