Smart stars in HBO Max’s ‘Hacks’
There are actors you’ll watch in everything they do. And Jean Smart is one of them. But I may take a raincheck on “Hacks,” streaming today on HBO Max.
Smart has been so good in so many things for so long, you almost forget she was in “Designing Women” way back when “Murphy Brown” ruled the Earth. Very few actors can go from sitcoms (“Frasier,” “Samantha Who?”) to terrifying thrillers (“24”) and dark dramas (“Fargo”). She now holds her own on HBO’s “Mare of Easttown” as Kate Winslet’s acerbic mother.
Not made available (to me, at least) for review, “Hacks” offers a virtual allyou-can-eat buffet of things I can’t stand. Las Vegas and comedies where characters complain about the “hard work” of comedy top the list.
Smart plays Deborah Vance, a veteran comic of more than 2,500 live shows in the gambling mecca. But when management finds her act growing stale, they bring in a young writer, Ava (Hannah Einbinder), to punch up her jokes. Good examples of deadly shows where characters discuss the mechanics of joke-writing are “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” and “I’m Dying Up Here.”
If the plot sounds familiar, it’s because it closely resembles the 2019 Amazon comedy film “Late Night,” starring Emma Thomson as an out-of-touch host who is mentored in youthful topics and racial diversity by an aspiring unknown (Mindy Kaling).
› ESPN Films presents “144” (9 p.m., ESPN), a documentary look at the 2020 WNBA season conducted under quarantined circumstances that came to be known as the “bubble.”
The film offers first-person interviews with players living in isolation with each other and playing a steady schedule of games televised but without fans in the stands. It also chronicles the political radicalization of athletes during a season of racial and political unrest and documents how turmoil on the streets reverberated inside and outside of the “bubble.”
› What do you get when you blend SpaceX, the privatization of celestial travel and the showmanship of Evel Knievel? Discovery+ streams “Homemade Astronauts,” profiling a group of DIY Wernher von Brauns out to lift themselves to the edge of space via rockets, balloons and other gadgetry cobbled together in backyards and funded by ever-expanding credit card debt.
› It’s interesting to note that “Titanic” (7:30 p.m., Starz) star Kate Winslet is now a grandmother in HBO’s excellent “Mare of Easttown” (also streaming on HBO Max). How long will we have to wait for Leonardo DiCaprio to play a grandpa? It might be a while.
› A 17th-century plague and witch hunt offer the backdrop to the 2020 shocker “The Reckoning,” streaming today on Shudder.
OTHER HIGHLIGHTS
› Ben is deceived on “Manifest” (8 p.m., NBC, TV-14).
› There’s something catching on a two-hour “Grey’s Anatomy” (8 p.m., ABC, repeat, TV-14).