Paul W Downs on the comedy's final season

Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder may be TV’s sharpest, and most odd, couple but according to co-creator and star Paul W Downs, things are surprisingly a little lighter this time around.

It’s a curious place for Hacks to land.

Since it arrived in 2021, all sharp edges and sharper punchlines, the show has been a critical darling: a deceptively glossy comedy about two women; one a legacy act, the other a cancelled writer — forced into orbit around each other.

It took a familiar odd-couple setup and made it feel new again, balancing brutal one-liners with something far more tender underneath.

The numbers followed: near-perfect reviews, a shelf of awards , and a cast propelled into another league entirely.

And now, it’s ending.

Not abruptly, not prematurely, but deliberately.

Downs says they knew how it would finish long before most people had even heard of the show.

He, alongside co-creators, Jen Statsky and Lucia Aniello, pitched the final episode when they first pitched the series to HBO back in 2019.

Still, knowing when to stop is one thing.

Actually doing it is another.

“There’s always a question of, like, ‘could we do more?’” he tells the Standard.

And the answer, creatively, is yes.

There are episodes they never got to make, ideas that didn’t quite fit.

But stretching it further would have come at a cost.

“Once we got them to the point that we wanted in the finale, it would have been a little bit like treading water… it would have changed, I think, the flavour of the show.”
The distinction matters.

Hacks might look like a sitcom, but it doesn’t behave like one.

Its characters evolve.

They make decisions that stick.

Relationships fracture and rebuild.

Keep it going too long and it risks becoming something safer, flatter — something it was never meant to be.

“And for that reason, we wanted to really leave people laughing and want to go out before we overstay our welcome,” Downs continues.

Even so, walking away isn’t easy.

“It's really hard to voluntarily say goodbye to a show that people watch, because it is very hard, especially in comedy, to break through,” he reflects.

The temptation to continue, to keep the momentum going was always there.

“So, it was certainly something every day we were like, ‘should we be stopping?’ Because we've created a family, and we love everybody that we work with, and would work with any of them in a heartbeat again.

So, there was always a, ‘is this nuts, you know?’”
It’s really hard to voluntarily say goodbye to a show that people watch because it is very hard, especially in comedy, to break through
If Downs sounds measured about the decision, that may be because he’s been living with it longer than most.

On screen, he plays Jimmy, the increasingly frazzled agent trying to keep Deborah and Ava’s careers (and egos) on track.

Off screen, he’s one of the architects of the show’s entire world.

The origins of Hacks stretch back more than a decade, to when Downs and his wife Aniello met at the Upright Citizens Brigade, the breeding ground for a generation of American comedy talent.

They spent years working on Broad City, quietly developing the idea for Hacks on the side.

By the time Broad City ended, they’d had four years to shape it.

That time shows.

From the start, Hacks felt unusually assured - packed with jokes, yes, but anchored by a relationship that only deepened as the seasons went on.

Smart’s Deborah Vance, a Joan Rivers-esque legend clinging to relevance, and Einbinder’s Ava Daniels, a young writer undone by her own online misstep, began as adversaries.

Over time, they became something more complicated: collaborators, rivals, mirrors.

That friction has, at times, tipped into something harsher.

The third season, which saw Ava blackmail Deborah, divided audiences, pushing the relationship from toxic-comic into something more uncomfortable.

But even that turn now feels like part of a larger arc.

Because if Hacks has always been about anything, it’s about what happens when ambition collides with reality.

And at times, that reality has felt uncomfortably close to the present.

Storylines around censorship and late-night television (once heightened for effect) now feel almost eerily prescient.

Deborah’s political controversy, which forces her off air after refusing to cut a joke about a major actor tied to her network, no longer feels far-fetched.

In the years since, real-life late night has started to fracture: The Late Late Show has disappeared from CBS, Jimmy Kimmel has faced temporary suspensions and Stephen Colbert is preparing to step down - officially for financial reasons, though industry whispers suggest something more political.

What once read as satire now mirrors a broader shift, as networks grow increasingly cautious and the shape of late-night television continues to change.

It’s not intentional, he insists but more a byproduct of trying to write something truthful about how the entertainment business works.

“And it wasn't something we were like, ‘oh, let’s explore that’.

It was like, ‘oh, let's just write the story’ – and weirdly, some of those things happen, which is very bizarre.”
If previous seasons leaned into that tension, including the cost of success, the fragility of reputation, the final outing moves in a different direction.

There should be 10 times as many characters over 60 leading shows
It’s still emotional, Downs says.

But it’s also “the sexiest and juiciest season” they’ve had.

A victory lap, in other words, but one that hasn’t forgotten what made the show work in the first place.

“I think people are going to be really happy,” he says, with a nod to the show’s most invested fans.

“You don’t always get what you want, but you get what you need.”
He’s referring, loosely, to the Deborah and Ava and Jimmy and Kayla “ships” that have emerged around the series — but his point lands more broadly.

At its core, Hacks has always been a love story.

Not necessarily in the traditional sense, but in the way all great buddy comedies are.

“Buddy comedies are love stories, you know?” he says.

“It is a love story.”
That idea carries through to the final season, where Deborah finds herself paying the price for choosing integrity over opportunity, navigating a career setback that forces her back into scrappier, less glamorous territory.

There are workaround gigs, publicity stunts, moments of both humiliation and reinvention.

It’s looser, sillier, and crucially more joyful.

Which raises the inevitable question: what does Hacks leave behind?

Downs pauses.

He’s thought about this.

But there’s something smaller, more specific, he hopes for too.

The kind of legacy you can’t measure in awards.

“For me, there are comedies that when I move through my day and I live my life, I'll pass something, or I'll experience something, and it'll bring me back to that one line in that show,” he says.

“So I hope that Hacks does that for people, that it gives them a little bright spot in their day.”
That, for him, is the goal.

A joke that sticks.

A moment that lingers.

Something that makes an ordinary day feel a little lighter.

And then there’s the other legacy, the one the industry still hasn’t quite caught up with.

Hacks placed a woman over 60 at the centre of its story and let her be complicated, difficult, brilliant.

“There should be 10 times as many characters over 60 that are leading shows,” Downs says.

Which is why the feedback that stays with him isn’t about ratings or awards, but something simpler.

Someone once told Aniello that the show had made their daughter think her grandmother was cool.

For Downs, that’s the point.

“What a great thing to give to young women and men,” he says.

“There's a lot of life out there beyond what you maybe see portrayed on the day to day.”
Season five of Hacks airs weekly on Sky and NOW at 9pm from Friday, 17 April in the UK