This article was published on June 6, 2024. At the 2024 Emmys , Hacks received three awards including the win for Outstanding Comedy Series. Three seasons in, Hacks , a showbiz comedy built around the relationship between a Joan Rivers–inspired stand-up and a young writer, is an Emmy fixture .
It’s the subject of intense adulation — Thursday nights on the site formerly known as Twitter are filled with people losing their mind over the show’s peppy Hollywood satire . It’s often talked about in prestige-television terms. The Atlantic recently held it up as a show that “breaks the curse of ‘Mid TV.
’” (Not that there’s anything wrong with Mid TV , of course.) This is rare territory for a comedy ..
. or at least for a show everyone broadly understands to be a comedy. I have never found Hacks particularly funny .
Sure, this is a wobbly ground for critique. Comedy is subjective, after all; I may be pathologically humorless, and so forth. But the jokes never struck me as the show’s strength.
Others seem to see the series working at the punch-line-per-minute density of 30 Rock , but to my eyes, the material is contiguous with conventional sitcoms like Everybody Loves Raymond : It’s broad, it’s fine , it’s interior decoration for the real purpose of a sitcom, which is to deliver the coziness that comes with wrapping yourself in a world you’ve grown to love. That sitcom nature manifests in the show’s conservative structure. Ultimately, Hacks always reverts.