Hacks fans have waited five seasons and six years for a kiss between Deborah (Jean Smart) and Ava (Hannah Einbinder), and that moment has finally come. And it was everything we could have wished for.
**Spoiler alert for Hacks Season 5 Episode 7, “Montecito,” now streaming on HBO Max**
In the latest episode of the Emmy-winning HBO comedy, as Deborah sets her sights on procuring a particular outfit to wear for her Madison Square Garden show — choosing to pay homage to Carol Burnett by wearing the Bob Mackie-designed white two-piece suit she wore in the finale of The Carol Burnett Show — she realizes that she must cozy up to the outfit’s current owner, Kelly Kilpatrick (Cherry Jones), a stand-up comedian who hates Deborah’s guts.
Things start to look up, however, when Kelly — an out and proud lesbian — mistakes Deborah and Ava’s relationship for romantic and invites them up to her home in Montecito, where the ruse gets the best of them. While Deborah is deeply uncomfortable pretending to be gay, even in the name of fashion, Ava is more than willing to play it up to Kelly and her wife (Leslie Bibb), which is how we finally get a major smooch out of Ava and Deborah. And apparently, no one was more excited about it than the stars of the show themselves.
“I think when I read it, I couldn’t believe it. Like, they didn’t tell me anything about it. I wasn’t going into the script with the idea of the logline of the episode. They just were like, ‘Have fun, have fun reading.’ And it was outrageous. I typically read the scripts, like, alone in my room and I was screaming, I like, threw my phone at one point.” Einbinder told DECIDER in a sit-down interview at the beginning of the season. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is happening.’ It’s so crazy. So good.”
“Well, this apparently is something that they have been wanting to do for years,” Smart added, “It wasn’t fan pressure, it’s something that they thought would do because it is classic classic conflict comedy.”
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Smart also said of the storyline that she found it delicious for the roles to flip as Deborah, “who’s often the aggressor and the one calling the shots,” has to bend to the will of Ava in order to get what they came for. She said playing a tone of sudden helplessness and being at the mercy of others only made for an even more interesting dynamic between their characters to examine.
According to the show’s creators, Jen Statsky, Paul W. Downs, and Lucia Aniello, it was always the intention to get Deborah and Ava to this point, although the how and the why was always in question. For them, it’s certainly not a situation Deborah would willingly go into, so it had to be something juicy and worthwhile.
“We’ve been talking about it for a long time,” Aniello said of having Ava and Deborah lock lips in the show. “I think we considered doing it earlier, but we kind of felt like, oh, well, Deborah, wanting to have an outfit for this big performance feels like a justification for why she would put herself through that storyline.”
To take it even a step further, it also mattered tremendously that these two have a real, rich history between them by the time that the moment would come. For years, fans have been begging to see a moment like this or any acknowledgement of the faction of the internet that saw Avorah as a potential couple, so it needed to have legs to stand on and a believable relationship between these two women. It’s vital that Jones and Bibb’s characters could see them as a pair and that took five years of laying the groundwork.
“Earlier, I think it kind of would have felt a little bit like jokey or schlocky or something. But now, we had five seasons of stuff to pull from. So when they have their argument, you know, Deborah’s like, ‘Oh, I didn’t hit her, I wouldn’t hit her,’ Ava’s like, ‘Well.’ Or the fact that she [Deborah] has sued her or like all these little callbacks about things from their relationship,” Aniello added.
“Also, their relationship is so obviously so thorough and has so much history that it makes it so much more convincing to Cherry and Leslie’s characters that they are in a relationship, which they are. So yeah, that’s why it felt like it was worth waiting for.”
Couldn’t agree more.
The first seven episodes of Hacks Season 5 are now streaming on HBO Max. New episodes premiere on Thursdays at 6 p.m. PST.
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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.