Jean Smart may be a four-time Emmy winner for Hacks alone, but at the end of the day, she’s also a mom, and nothing is going to be more exciting to her kids than their favorite internet celeb appearing on her show. Enter Trisha Paytas in Hacks Season 5.
**Spoilers ahead for the first five episodes of Hacks Season 5, now streaming on HBO Max**
In the newest episode of the HBO Max comedy series, Deborah (Smart) is recruited by her daughter, DJ (Kaitlin Olson), to go on an all-celebrity version of The Amazing Race, alongside notable names like Drew and Jonathan Scott — a.k.a the Property Brothers — J.R. Smith and Richard Jefferson, and, of course, Paytas and her on-screen Race partner, Jordan Firstman. According to Smart, while her job has certainly given her brownie points with her sons — 36-year-old Connor and 17-year-old Forrest — in the past, nothing has or will eclipse the Paytas of it all.
“My 17-year-old lost his mind when he found out Trisha was going to be on the show, lost his mind,” she told DECIDER of Paytas playing herself Season 5 Episode 5 (“D’Amazing Race”). “I wasn’t familiar with her, so I said, ‘What? What?’ And then he told this girl he’s friends with, and she just about fainted.”
In the episode, The Amazing Race kicks off at the Los Angeles Colosseum and sees the other teams racing for charity, while Deborah is singularly focused on selling tickets to her upcoming Madison Square Garden show. To accomplish the first shot with all of the teams, however, the series had to gather everyone at the starting line, which gave Smart the opportunity to cement herself as a frontrunner for mom of the year.
“They both came to the set and got to meet her, you know, and the Property Brothers,” Smart said of the day when they filmed The Amazing Race sequences. It was just another day at work for her, though, especially since another day required her and her own on-screen partner, Olson, to do something way more interesting.
She added, “It was the goat milking scene with Kaitlin that was the highlight, I think, for me.“
Sadly, Deborah and DJ’s Amazing Race dream is not long-lived as they become the first team to be eliminated, failing to milk a goat, carry a wheel of cheese down a hill without falling, and perfect a short dance while wearing clown makeup and garb. It’s while wearing those colorful outfits that Phil Keoghan walks out to inform them that every other team has checked in at the pitstop and that they have been eliminated.
While it’s emotionally devastating for DJ in the moment — she begged her mom to go on it with her as a bonding experience for them after years of ups and downs — it’s clearly exactly what they needed to repair their relationship and position them for a better realtionship overall. For the writers of the show, Jen Statsky, Paul W. Downs, and Lucia Aniello, it also felt like the perfect way to put a cap of DJ and Deborah’s storyline in this final season.
“It just felt really right that this would be something that DJ loved and would be a part of her history,” Statsky told DECIDER, adding it also made sense to them as “a way to close out the Deborah and DJ storyline, like a really sweet way for Deborah to finally see DJ in this new light and finally realize she’s not been giving her enough credit.”
The first five episodes of Hacks Season 5 are streaming on HBO Max. New episodes premiere Thursdays at 6 pm PST.
If you’re new to HBO Max, you can sign up for as low as $10.99/month with ads, but an ad-free subscription will cost $18.49/month.
If you want to stream even more and save a few bucks a month while you’re at it, we recommend subscribing to one of the discounted Disney+ Bundles with Hulu and HBO Max. With ads, the bundle costs $19.99/month and without ads, $32.99/month.