Best TV of 2024: Hacks season 3

It's rare for a TV comedy to reach new heights, but in retrospect everything was leading to this season

I’m never going to be immune to shows that engage cleverly with the concept of creative success, so Hacks is obviously like high grade crack for me. And in season 3, after a perfect first season and a still solid second season, the show actually shifts gears and takes off to explore that concept at a deeper and more interesting level than the premise of the original series.

There is this question around not only “what is success?” that links all the way back to the title of the show - what makes a “hack” exactly? How does that differ to success? Is it perception? is it personal drive? - but also what success is worth. It’s something I find deeply interesting, and in a year where I’ve reached some new personal goals that I’ve been working towards for a very, very long time, I find it a fascinating story.

The show’s demographic odd-couple premise is such a clever way to approach this mission around interrogating creative success too - we get two ends of the spectrum of a career, with hungry and relatively new Ava Daniels contrasted to the success and dissatisfaction of the established Deborah Vance.

**some minor spoilers follow**

At the end of season 2, Ava had guided Deborah into a new realm of creative experimentation, helping her write an immensely successful comedy special that both moved away from more “hacky” jokes, and used deeper material from Deborah’s life to elevate her away from being considered a hack. In many ways, you could have ended the show there - superficially, she’d reached the end of the arc established in the first episode of the show. They end with Deborah cutting Ava loose, ostensibly for a tough-love reason, making her go out and achieve her own success. It’s all wrapped up quite nicely, and they didn’t particularly need to continue the story - or so I thought.

In season 3, both Deborah and Vance have reached a new plateau of success, and the question becomes what to do with it. For Ava, that’s taking a risk and following passion, that could be seen as illogical - she’s on a path already, why jeopardise that? For Deborah, it’s also about risk - now that she’s dragged herself up, does she dare to dream about attaining a milestone she’s always wanted? Unlike the previous season, Hacks season 3 takes on all the energy of a heist film, when it becomes about campaigning to get Deborah as the host of the late night show that she’d failed to achieve earlier in here career. The most compelling part of this story is the FEAR, the knowledge that she could reach for this and come short again, and have to live with that.

Season 3 also continues the great tradition of being absolutely loaded with genuinely funny jokes. Part of that risk that the show writes about so well is inherent here - imagine the pressure of writing a show about two funny comedians and then not sticking the landing with the jokes? I think one of the funniest episodes of this season is called Par The Course, where part of the host campaign means that Deborah plays golf with a bunch of execs to try and impress them - which ends with Deborah realising that they’ve given the job to someone else, and she goes full Galadriel dark queen on them. Ava’s plot is also perfect during this episode too.

The show is also just gorgeously queer, without any real point or agenda behind it, which I adore.

There’s also a great episode where Ava and Deborah accidentally go hiking and get lost, which I think is a great example of how they managed to go deeper in this season - by giving more space for the main character’s relationship, rather than shying away and trying to go ensemble like many other shows do. By literally stranding them together, we’re given a beautiful (and still funny) recalibrating of their relationship and an upheaval of the traditional power dynamics.

Which leads us to the finale. The status play between Deborah and Ava has always been one of the driving energies of the show, and where much of the humour comes from. Watching is change has been part of the character growth for the both of them. Ava clawing her way to small victories over Deborah have been gratifying, Deborah humbling herself to ask Ava for help or to rely on her, has often been both funny and touching. But oh my god, that season 3 finale is the best status shakeup I’ve ever seen, and ends a brilliant season with more than just a flourish - it paves the way for a necessary fourth season.

GOD I LOVE THIS SHOW. I love the fact that each season it gets more dangerous to continue reaching for a higher, more nuanced type of success, that it seems like it doesn’t want to settle, to challenge itself.

It’s a show that not only explores success, but continually asks itself what success will mean for itself.

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Patrick Lenton is an writer and author, and editor of Nonsense Newsletter. His new book ‘In Spite of You’ is coming out in 2025.