The Blistering Power of an Overlooked Woman

In 2014, six months before she died, Joan Rivers made a triumphant return to NBC’s The Tonight Show, marking the first time she’d been featured on the show since the 1980s. Regal in black sequins and an obscene amount of emeralds, she carried a doughnut pillow with her as a visual gag and proceeded to reduce Jimmy Fallon to hysterics with jokes about her aging vagina. When Fallon broached the subject of her long absence, she briefly broke character. “I was banned for 26 years,” she said. “I pitched constantly. They just didn’t want what I had to show.”

Rivers, who was the first permanent guest host on The Tonight Show, in the Johnny Carson era, had infuriated the host when she signed on to a rival late-night series without telling him first. “I believe my relationship with Johnny was permanently shaped by his feeling, on some level, that I was his creation,” she wrote in her 1991 book, Still Talking, “and so could be taken completely for granted.” Her Fox show, The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers, lasted just seven months, amid scathing reviews. “Maybe Rivers should spend less time at the beauty parlor and more time with her writers,” one critic wrote. “The beauty parlor would appear to be a lost cause anyway.” After the failure, Rivers’s husband died by suicide, and she discovered he’d blown their money on bad investments; TV’s first female late-night host was devastated and considered ending her own life. Her ban from The Tonight Show was so enduring that two subsequent hosts, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien, continued the shutout in deference to Carson.

On Season 3 of Hacks, the Rivers-esque Deborah Vance—played by Jean Smart, as elegant and unnerving as an uncaged tiger—has a different word for what happened to women comedians who got too big for their station: canceled. “They only gave it a name,” she fumes, “after it started happening to powerful men.” The line underscores the particular brilliance of Hacks, created by the Broad City alums Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky—its holistic view of comedy, the way it truly understands all the layers of history that have shaped its central character. When Hacks debuted, the show set itself up as an odd-couple comedy: Deborah, a C-list grande dame living in opulent entertainment-industry exile in Las Vegas, would clash and then ultimately bond with Ava (Hannah Einbinder), a Gen Z comedy writer recently fired for an offensive tweet. The semi-hokey, Boomer-versus-Zoomer premise was immediately redeemed by acid writing and the performances of the two leads, who sparked off each other with genuine crackle. But more compelling still was what Ava did for Deborah’s ambition: She helped unearth a furious drive long buried by failure and injustice and self-preservation. Watching the first two seasons, you could see Deborah awaken again not only to the idea of fame or status, but also to the possibility of making something revolutionary.

[Read: What Hacks proves about Jean Smart]

In its third season, Hacks digs into this setup even further. Deborah, we discover, is back on top after a stand-up special she self-releases and sells on QVC has become improbably successful. She makes the Time 100 list. She’s doing the Macarena with fans far too young to know the ins and outs of her career. (Like Rivers, Deborah was briefly also the first woman hired to host a late-night TV show, but a tabloid scandal got her fired before she ever started.) She’s making audiences laugh without even trying, which is maddening to her, given her ongoing quest for self-improvement. Hacks is typically absurd with the details—Deborah has finally made the list to receive Tom Cruise’s Christmas coconut cake; her “wardrobe” is actually a small aircraft hangar filled with decades’ worth of gowns—but savvy with the plot. At the outset, the show’s central pair is adrift. Ava is off writing for a topical comedy show; Deborah, awash in glory, is ignoring her texts. But they’re soon drawn together by the fact that they just work.

When Deborah is booked to appear on a late-night show and the host calls in sick, she finally gets the opportunity to sit at the desk herself, in a besequined suit that Rivers would have killed for. (Ava, called up for an emergency joke, suggests, “The good news is, we’re saving the network money ’cause I only cost 80 cents on the dollar.”) The scene, as nerve-racking as it is triumphant, brings to mind the long, wearying history of women in late-night comedy, who push and fight to be part of a field that just doesn’t seem to want them. Why are women still relegated to daytime, an outdated paradigm that relies on female viewers being stuck at home folding socks? Why would men not want to watch a woman run her own late-night stage? Why did Rivers, who ended up being best-known for her caustic self-mockery, internalize the idea that the only way she could make people laugh was through her own abjection?

Watching Deborah dazzle during her hosting gig, I found it easier to sense what we’ve been missing. Smart somehow exudes grandiloquence and ease at the same time. And yet: “This network has never hired a woman for 11:30,” Deborah says to her team at one point. “Or anyone as old as me. Or, let’s be honest, a blonde. It’d be easier to get elected president.” That both positions—in prime late-night and in politics—have stayed male territory can perhaps be chalked up to the same reason: Too many people simply aren’t ready for a woman to have that kind of authority. As a satire of the entertainment industry, Hacks is hard to beat. (“They’re doing a bisexual Gumby,” Deborah’s manager—played by Downs—tells Ava. “The working title? Gum-bi.”) But the show’s analysis of Hollywood dynamics is also rigorous, even down to its guest casting. In the new season, the Oscar-winning star Helen Hunt recurs as a ferocious studio head, and the breakout Mad Men actor Christina Hendricks appears as a conservative cable executive with an unusual inclination. In real life, both are extraordinary performers who, despite their efforts, seem to have been typecast out of contention for more wide-ranging roles.

As the season progresses, it quietly considers just how rigged the industry is against artists like Deborah: deemed to have aged out of relevancy the minute they’re finally experienced and confident enough to flourish at the top of their field. For all of Smart’s outrageous charisma, she’s never better than in the moments when she has to communicate the conflicting impulses Deborah feels—her intuition colliding with her heart. The paradox of comedy—and, really, of power—is that the ambition and relentlessness required to be preeminent are the same qualities that many people can’t tolerate when they’re attached to a woman. Before the Fox chair Barry Diller killed Rivers’s talk show, he reportedly tapped on the window of her car one day and told her, “You are the strongest woman I have ever met in my life.” At the time, Rivers wrote, “I took it as a compliment, but now I am not so sure.”