‘Hacks’ delivers Jean Smart in a starring role
THERE are two kinds of comedians, according to Hacks: old-school standups, the kind that rely on artfully crafted one-liners and ba-dum-chhh punchlines, who roam the stage while they perform; and contemporary, disgustingly cutting-edge performers, who sit on stools, ruminating in cadences that just barely sound like jokes.
Hacks – in which a disgraced young comedy writer winds up working for mega-successful Las Vegas comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), who’s been cashing in on the same routine for years – hammers home early and often that Deborah sits (or rather, stands and paces) squarely in that first category of comedian. She’s old guard rather than vanguard.
Smart won the Emmy for her portrayal of Vance, at the ceremony on Sunday. Her first for a starring role.
Since 1979, Smart, 69, has shone in small roles, in supporting roles, and as a member of ensemble casts. Just as familiar as her face – to anyone who has watched TV or movies in the past 40 years – are Smart’s dazzlingly deadpan line readings, her come-hither drawl, and her signature sharp cackle.
But Hacks, which has been renewed for a second season, is a rarity: it capitalises on the impressive momentum Smart has created in the last halfdecade, with an array of ensemble roles as mysterious, disillusioned women – and it lets one of the most recognisable faces in Hollywood, one of its surest bets to wring a stellar performance out of a small or supporting part, seize a true starring turn.
Smart's reign – as the queen of guest and supporting roles – began in 1986, when she first appeared on the hit sitcom Designing Women as Charlene Frazier, the sweet-natured office manager at the show’s central interior-decorating firm. It was the Atlanta-set series that familiarised audiences with Smart’s convincing Southern purr, which, today, is instantly recognisable in Smart’s voice role on Netflix’s animated series Big Mouth, as the soothing-but-sinister purple cat known as Depression Kitty.
After five seasons, Smart left Designing Women and spent the following decade working steadily in supporting film roles and TV movies. In 1995 and 1998, she landed co-starring roles on sitcoms that were each cancelled after
a single season. Smart later triumphed, though, with back-to-back Emmys in 2000 and 2001 for her recurring gueststar role on Frasier as Lana Gardner, Frasier's high school crush who resurfaces in his adult life as a beautiful divorcée. The performance showcased her dizzying ability to transform from alluring to annoying and back again.
She earned two more nominations in 2006 and 2007, for her portrayal of first lady Martha Logan on 24 (in which she first appeared on-screen, seconds before dramatically dunking her face into a sink and delivering what the New York Times called “perhaps the most memorable character debut in 24 history”), and won her third statuette in 2008, for her supporting role as the titular amnesiac’s beleaguered mother on the sitcom Samantha Who?
The Jean Smart-aissance that we’re seeing in 2021, however, began about six years ago, with Smart’s Emmy-nominated supporting turn on FX’s Fargo as Midwestern crime boss Floyd Gerhardt. In 2017, she appeared in what would be her first of three seasons as melancholy therapist Melanie Bird on
Legion; the following year she was a cult-favourite part of the cult-favourite film A Simple Favor; and she then became an instant fan favourite on 2019’s Watchmen as the mean, sexy superhero-turned-FBI agent Laurie Blake, at one point acting opposite a giant blue sex toy. Smart described Laurie Blake to The Washington Post at the time as a complicated person “living a very lonely life”.
Smart’s ubiquity hasn’t gone unnoticed, especially this spring – when she was briefly appearing on two hit HBO series at the same time. Just ahead of the debut of Hacks, Smart delighted audiences with an equally heart-rending and riotously funny performance as the nosy, iPad-addicted Helen Fahey, matriarch of a multi-generational Pennsylvania family in Mare of Easttown.
“It’s one of those essential truths of TV ... that if you need a tough-as-nails broad, you hire Jean Smart,” wrote Vulture’s Jackson McHenry.
“Smart has the voice and the timing to play a stern matriarch, and whenever she’s on-screen in Mare of Easttown, she wrenches away the spotlight like she’s grabbing a juice box.”
If the last five years or so allowed Smart to showcase how well she can play warm, cold and hot, Deborah Vance in Hacks is the role that brought it all together. Deborah is, in alternating turns, as tough and casually callous as Floyd Gerhardt, as beguiling as Laurie Blake, and – in the last few minutes of the season – as gruffly tender as Helen Fahey and as charming as Charlene Frazier.
“Jean signing on to Hacks was essentially the creative equivalent of being given a limitless production budget,” show creators Lucia Aniello, Paul W Downs and Jen Statsky wrote to The Washington Post.
“Jean’s range is endless, which meant the possibilities for what we could write for Deborah were endless. She is so incredibly gifted in both her comedic and dramatic acting, that there was no joke we could write that she couldn’t land perfectly, nor was there an emotional moment she couldn’t make incredibly grounded and affecting.” | The Washington Post
¡ Hacks airs on M-Net on Fridays at
10.30pm.