Bosses on Deborah’s Deadly Cliffhanger, What’s Next With Ava and Vegas Return for Season 5 (Exclusive)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Hacks Season 4, Episode 10, “Heaven.”]

After Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) gave up her dream to defend her comedic integrity and head writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), Hacks‘ Season 4 finale explores the aftermath. When your dream dies, what’s to do next? Go to “Heaven,” of course.

In the episode, Deborah returned to Las Vegas for some solitude, but when she was called to help old flame Marty (Christopher McDonald) pick out a suit, he suggested she take a trip to Hawaii, where he owns a hotel, for a brief respite. Deborah seemingly took up Marty’s offer and invited Ava to join her, but upon landing, it was revealed that Deborah had the plan rerouted to Singapore.

It turned out that there was a loophole in her no-compete contract in which a translator could perform her stand-up set without issue. So, Deborah and Ava set up shop at a luxurious Singapore-set resort where they lived it up and put on shows with the help of a translator. The only issue? Deborah became complacent and wouldn’t work on new material; she fell into a pattern of drinking and partying, even going so far as to fall asleep on stage during her act, which led Ava to put her foot down.

The women who had come so far in their journey this season found themselves at a professional stalemate with Ava opting to leave Singapore, while Deborah planned to stay behind. When Ava woke up the next morning to alarms and phone calls, Jimmy (Paul W. Downs) was frantically trying to find out if a TMZ report suggesting that Deborah was dead was actually true.

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Thankfully, this wasn’t the case after Ava raced through the resort to Deborah’s room. She noted that publications like TMZ tend to prewrite obituaries, and hers was probably accidentally published. But her issue wasn’t with the prematurely published obit, it was with the content of the article. Determined to strengthen her legacy, Deborah informed Ava they’d both return home. But what’s the next move in Deborah’s career after conquering late night?

It’s a question that’s a bit too early for showrunners Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky to answer. But, “The only thing that’s going to lead your obituary is the greatest accomplishment of your career. And so to figure out what that is, post getting your white whale of late night, is not only a challenge for Deborah, it’s a challenge for us as writers. But we have a plan for it,” Downs assures us. “It’s just something that people have to wait to see.”

Just how far are Deborah and Ava into her 18-month lock on the non-compete contract she’d signed with late night, though? “Oh, they’ve been in Singapore for eight months,” Downs reveals.

“They’ve been in Singapore for a bit,” Statsky confirms.

“Which is part of the reason why Ava is like, ‘We really need to go. We’ve been here for a long time, and this is beautiful and amazing, but it isn’t real life, and we need to get back,’” Downs points out. “So they have tackled a good chunk of [the 18-month period], but there’s still a lot more to go, which is an interesting predicament for someone like Deborah Vance, who is addicted to work.”

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How quickly will Deborah be getting back to work? “We’re not doing much of a time jump,” Downs reveals of Season 5, exclusively. “[Deborah]’s getting home, and we’re not doing a time jump. She’s got to deal with what she’s got to deal with.”

“It doesn’t pick up exactly where we leave off,” Aniello adds, noting that the continuation won’t be like the scenes that closed Season 3 and opened Season 4, which spanned only minutes.

Shooting in Singapore was certainly a new experience for the crew, as Statsky shares, “Singapore was such an inviting, wonderful place to shoot. I had never been to Asia. A lot of the crew had never been to Asia, so it was really remarkable. It’s really cool when you get to do four seasons of your show, and you get to take your characters that love and put them in strange places. And so I think it was really cool to see Deborah and Ava in a new place experiencing new things.” As viewers saw in the finale, the pair took in the sights, sat by the pool, partook in karaoke, and even took a boat ride.

In the opening scenes of the episode, Deborah’s return to Vegas was slightly somber, but don’t count out her hometown for the future. “I think you can take the girl out of Vegas, but you can never fully take the Vegas out of the girl. And so we are excited to have [Deborah] return there, not only because it’s where we began the show, but also because so much of our ensemble orbits in that world,” Down teases. “We certainly will go to other places, but we’re excited to have Vegas be a real big part of [the show] again, too.”

Along with the return of Vegas will come the return of familiar characters as fans got a taste in this finale, particularly with Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) and Marty. “We are very excited to see back in Vegas, in Deborah’s orbit, the people that are home to her and are really important to her, and that she may have been away from this season. So yes, there’ll be more of them that will be along with the ride,” teases Stasky.

As for whether the Deborah-Ava collaboration will continue? After all, Deborah did point out she’s one of Ava’s only friends. According to Aniello, “[Ava] has flirted with other jobs, she worked at On the Contrary, and I think she’s in a position where she’s really come to terms with knowing that the work she’s done with Deborah is the thing she’s most proud of. And while certainly we plan on exploring what that means in Season 5, I think she has really come to terms with, this is her creative number one. And I think that she is good with that.”

In other words, Ava and Deborah’s creative partnership is far from over. What will they do next? Stay tuned to find out, and don’t miss Hacks when it returns with Season 5.

Hacks, Season 5 Premiere, TBA, HBO Max