Hacks – Yes, And

By: Kelly Kearney

After learning she is back in the running for the Late Show, Deborah concentrates on getting her name and image back into the public’s view with photo shoots, Pride appearances, and collecting an honorary degree from Berkeley. College kids are a new audience for the Boomer comic, and Deborah is not prepared for what happens when they unearth some of her earlier work. In, “Yes, and” viral videos hit cancel culture hard, just as Deborah is about to land her dream role. The timing couldn’t be worse.

More work is always a good thing, unless…

We find Deborah (Jean Smart) dealing with a booking nightmare. Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) coordinated Deborah’s yearly Pride event in Palm Springs, and his friends and her most die-hard fans are looking forward to her appearance. Too bad Jimmy (Paul W. Downs) wasn’t looped into Deborah’s schedule because he booked her at Berkeley to accept an honorary degree on the same day. She can’t disappoint her biggest fan base—through the good, the bad, and the very ugly—like shows in bowling alleys, the LGBTQ+ community has always been there for her. She also doesn’t want to disappoint Marcus, who’s been her loyal friend and employee, and his friends are counting on him to come through with this celebrity appearance. Deborah decides to try to cover both events on the same day by accepting her award at Berkeley and then hopping on a plane to make it to Palm Springs for Pride. Unfortunately, Berkeley doesn’t go as planned, and Deborah is forced to decide between her gay fans, and a possible career-saving public speaking engagement. All of these scheduled stops are to impress the network, but Kayla (Megan Stalter) thinks they should just skip to the good part and post on social media that Deborah already has the job. “The network’s never going to backtrack,” she says, and Jimmy rolls his eyes because forcing their hands seems like the best way for them to choose anyone but Deborah. Kayla has a lot to learn about the business, and as aggravating as it is, Jimmy keeps trying to guide her the best way he knows how.

Cancel Culture Comes to College

At Berkeley, Ava (Hannah Einbinder) becomes preoccupied with her age when she realizes the students do not see her as one of their peers. As she tries to relate to a group of students in the library, she catches them watching a supercut video of some of Deborah’s most offensive jokes. She quickly realizes her boss is about to fall head-first into a generational gap she might not recover from. The jokes in the video are stitched with stand-up sets that would never fly today, and all of it makes Ava and the students cringe. The video is going viral, and now they’re planning to protest during Deborah’s ceremony. To make matters worse, Deborah is also meeting with a widely acclaimed journalist, Meena Elahi (Shakira Barrera), who is doing a special interest piece on the late-in-life glow-up the comedian is going through. Ava loves Meena, but she is clear with Deborah that her work can be very critical and not the puff pieces she might be used to. Deborah tries to hold her tongue and hit the edit button on her personality, as she knows this woman is mentally recording everything she says. Whatever spin she puts on this piece could make or break her chances with the network, so she needs to seem relatable and unproblematic. As she soon finds out, her politically incorrect slip-ups she is known for won’t work in print—or with some groups on campus. At least the frat boys love her—like really love her—and a few of the overly ambitious and flirtatious ones invite her to their party. Shoot your shot, boys; the Dame is game! When Deborah finds out about the viral video, she does whatever she can to soften cancel culture’s blows, and that includes attending the frat party after her appearance at a student improv show turns into a crowd of hecklers calling her a racist. At least the frat boys love her and her epic keg stands (with the help of Ava to hoist her up so her wig doesn’t fall off). She washes her college disappointments away in beer pong and drunk-dancing with Ava, and the two drink the kids under the table. The next day, the hangover is brutal, and it’s made worse by a phone call from Jimmy telling her the network canceled her test show. She assumes they caught wind of the viral video, and now she’s lost her third and probably final chance at late-night hosting. She is also on the verge of losing Marcus, who is left with a group of disappointed Pride fans who were pushed aside after Berkley got messy and Deborah was forced to extend her stay for damage control. Every idea Deborah has to fix the damage that video caused just makes things worse, and no matter how many times Ava tells her to apologize, Deborah refuses. She comes from a generation of comics who live by the unwritten rule of never apologizing for a joke. She can’t make everyone happy, so if someone doesn’t like her jokes, they can choose not to laugh. Deborah just isn’t getting that times have changed, and it is a constant battle she has with Ava, whose big role as her writing partner is to help her comedy evolve into something that can be enjoyed by college kids and her QVC fans over the age of sixty. That’s why Ava tries to impress upon her that those jokes in the video might’ve been fine before, but they are hurtful now to the point that even she wouldn’t do them today.

The Evolution of Deborah Vance

When all else fails—and it does—Deborah listens to Ava and agrees to attend a town hall meeting with the upset students. It’s not typically a part of Deborah’s DNA to sit quietly for a public lashing, but after the students start explaining why her jokes were hurtful, Deborah does the right thing and listens—judgment-free. Her apology, while appropriate, isn’t what they needed; they needed her to understand the effects her words had on them and learn from it. It won’t make up for the pain she caused, but it does prove to the students—and later, to Meena’s readers—that she is willing to listen, and that’s more than most people do in this world. That is how she is described in the special interest piece. There are no excuses for her cringy past, but the journalist found it refreshing that she was willing to leave her comfort zone and her privilege to try and do better. “There is a curiosity in her, and it taps into something more human: our desire to understand each other,” Ava reads, but then pauses as she approaches the quote she was asked to include. “A hack is someone who does the same thing over and over; Deborah is the opposite. She keeps evolving and getting better.” That’s why Meena ended the article by naming Deborah as the best choice for the Late Show. She is not only funny—she is real, and unapologetically so—but that ability to evolve—that’s all Ava’s influence. The look on Deborah’s face says she knows it too, but what does it matter now that the test show was canceled? Not so fast! The viral response to the video gets drowned out by the response from Meena’s article, but that’s not the big game changer for Deborah. That happens when Ava spots Kayla’s tweet announcing Deborah got the Late Show job. Deborah is ready to strangle the young woman until Jimmy pulls up to the mansion with incredible news: Kayla didn’t jump the gun! The reason why the network canceled her test show was because they already knew she was their choice for the job! Deborah Vance is going to Late Night, but right now she is heading into Ava’s arms as the two tearfully embrace, knowing their hard work has paid off. Dreams really do come true!