Who’s Making Dinner?
Season 5
Episode 4
Editor’s Rating
4 stars
****
Photo: HBO Max
Remember in the mid-2010s, when we were having a whole cultural thing about whether comedy actually needed to be funny or if it just needed to say something? The Nanette news cycle, which (sorry to rudely bring up the passage of time; I know most of us don’t want to count pandemic years) took place almost ten years ago, but this episode takes Deborah on a similar journey to what feels like the only, obvious outcome: Yes, comedy has to be funny! In fact, if it isn’t funny, no one is going to listen to or care about the big something you have to say.
I would add a corollary to this: you can let anger fuel your comedy, but it can’t crowd out your comedy. But Deborah’s bitterness is eclipsing everything. Her new material, wherein she is atop the “persecution pyramid,” is not landing with anyone. Despite Deborah’s insistence that comedy is supposed to “make people uncomfortable,” Ava pushes back that it is also, would you believe, supposed to make people laugh.
The gang is headed to the Paley Center for a 50th anniversary celebration of Who’s Making Dinner? In the world of Hacks, this is the groundbreaking sitcom Deborah created with her late husband, Frank, who swindled her out of a creator credit by sweet-talking her into letting him have the solo writing credit on the premiere (“you take the second one!”), which cut her out of the founding narrative entirely. Deborah’s relationship — with Frank, with the series, with her own legacy — is a volatile, unsteady thing, where pride and resentment, gratitude and hunger, are always battling it out.
With the gag order in place, Deborah can only attend the event as a beautiful, silent guest of honor. She’s doing what she can to let pictures speak louder than words by photoshopping their old pictures, with Josefina’s help, to yassify herself and make Frank look worse. And just in case you need the stakes of the season spelled out for you one more time, she tells Ava that Bob is just like Frank, another man trying to “erase” her: “That is why the Madison Square Garden show has to be historic!”
Good news for Ava: An exec, Jessica Duncan, looooved her Mall Girl script! Ava goes to the meeting full of optimism, only for Jessica (Caitlin Reilly, a.k.a. Girl Who Is “Going To Be Okay”) to follow up her gushing praise of Mall Girl with the caveat that, because it’s “so original and specific, obviously, we can never make it.” Ah, well, it’s taste clusters all over again! Nice to see they can still get their swings in on David Zaslow’s HBONowGoMax. Jessica will buy whatever TV show Ava wants to make, with the standard parameters, a list that feels very The Other Two-coded. “Diverse — queer counts! But NO limited series.” Ava spends much of the episode doing something that will make all writers think I’m in this picture and I don’t like it: pointing at random objects and people and asking, “Huh, is this a show?”
At the Paley Center — the site of Kayla’s bat mitzvah; no, she isn’t Jewish, but her theme was “Anna Faris” — Jimmy has an overly-friendly greeting from Beth (PEN15’s Anna Konkle), which Randi and Kayla immediately clock as (per Kayla) “being sexual at work.” Jimmy’s attempts to keep things professional only arouse Beth further, until he attempts to clarify that his interest is strictly business and antagonizes her instead.
Meanwhile, Deborah wanders through the exhibit, having flashbacks to the complicated, validating, infuriating, special experience of making this show with the man she thought she loved, who told her she was brilliant and funny, who was always flirting with other women on set right in front of her. She shakes herself out of it to introduce Ava to Eddie, who in the Hacks-verse was the director of the Who’s Making Dinner? pilot and who is so glad to see Deborah still has a sense of humor despite her widely-reported “mental troubles.”
Through him, Deborah learns that an unaired interview with Frank is airing tonight. Once the special begins, she finds out that the stage on the WB lot where the show was filmed will be renamed “the Frank Vance Stage.” Again, for everyone who is not paying attention, this means “Frank Vance will be forever enshrined in Hollywood history.”
Deborah is SPINNING OUT. Can they turn off the livestream so she can speak?! Evidently not, but speak she does, and her bits that did not land in the living room bomb before this audience. Everyone is very uncomfortable. At least they all think she had a menty b and are maybe just happy to see her out and about? While the Who’s Making Dinner clip rolls, Ava finally gets a good idea: A reboot of this very show, built around the grandkid of the central couple, who inherits the single-family home but has to live with roommates. “Downward mobility,” she says, “but funny!” (I feel like this is kind of the premise of Adults, except that it has no IP? But whatever, it’s not supposed to be original! If it were original, Jessica wouldn’t be able to buy it!) Deborah doesn’t have the rights, but Jimmy is looking into it. Stay tuned!
While Deborah licks her wounds from bombing very, very hard, the Frank interview plays. He says what Ava has been saying all along, but it hits harder from him because Deborah is sexist (sorry, I kid, I kid): “We weren’t trying to be groundbreaking. We were making a show about our relationship. And the only reason people even paid attention to it was because it was funny.” And why was this show funny, Frank? Deborah! “She was always the funniest person in any room.”
I love how Deborah is leveled by this praise. It’s worse, really, than an insult would be, because that would give her something to push back against. Instead, she is left feeling like something is wrong with her for still needing to hear that compliment from that man. Ava gets it: “Sometimes there’s just one person you want to impress.” Before Deborah can let that sink in, she is taken away by the cops for violating her restraining order — despite Ava’s insistence that Deborah’s speech wasn’t funny enough to count as comedy.
In her cell, surrounded by her fellow rabble-rousing women, Deborah works the room. Her bits about what everyone is in for wins all the girls over in what almost feels like a fantasy sequence — the people yearn so hard for third spaces that we’re romanticizing… jail?? — but also makes me wonder if Deborah’s next move is a Johnny Cash-style tour of state penitentiaries. By the time she makes bail, she’s won a room full of fans, including that girl who punched a police horse. Deborah pays everyone’s bail, and I would love to see someone do the math on how much money she would need to have in order to live as she does in the show. How rich is she?
Together with her girls in lock-up, Deborah has learned a valuable lesson that Ava has been trying to teach her for the duration of this episode: People will remember her if she makes them laugh. Yes, duh! Well, at least now we know what we’re doing!
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