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Reunited and it feels so... weird.
Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) haven't spoken in months, and they haven't seen each other since Deborah fired Ava in the Hacks season 2 finale. But a year later, that all ends in the season 3 premiere (May 2 on Max) when they have a chance run-in — as seen in Entertainment Weekly's exclusive clip from the episode, above — at the Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal.
"It was interesting at the end of season 2 to think, how is this going to come back? How is this going to resolve? And people thought, oh my God, the show's over," Smart tells EW. "I thought [co-creators/co-showrunners Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky] did it brilliantly, the way they got them back together. Even though it was fairly quick, it felt completely real to me because it is like when you run into somebody that you haven't seen in a while — at first Deborah's being sort of polite and distant and driving Ava insane." Courtesy of MAX Einbinder says the awkwardness is a hard turn from the "kinetic energy" audiences are used to seeing between the two. "Them having tension and there being something unsaid between them is so foreign to their dynamic," Einbinder explains of the scene, which eventually extends beyond the confines of their elevator ride. "It was interesting to play that with Jean, even though there are obviously subtle moments in Ava's dialogue where she is saying as much as she possibly can to kind of dig at the situation and reference what's happening there." How to reconnect the two was the "biggest challenge of the season," according to Aniello. "We knew that we didn't really want to make a show with them apart too much, but you didn't also want it to feel like we got them back together immediately. And the emotional fallout of what we set up at the end of season 2 wasn't paid off. So we felt like one year later helped us in a lot of ways because we got to say, here's what happened in the break."
Statsky says season 3 gave the writing team a chance to "show different shades of this relationship. You've never seen it quite be like this between them. We also wanted it to feel a little bit mysterious for the audience." Creating that mystery, she admits, even felt weird during the writing process. "And then you're like, oh, it's supposed to feel weird," she recalls, laughing. "That's intentional."
The moment, it turns out, is a small part of the season's bigger theme: "Deborah's quest for late-night and a reckoning between Deborah and Ava," according to Downs (whose Jimmy is still managing both Deborah and Ava's careers alongside Megan Stalter's Kayla). With two Emmy-nominated seasons under their belt (plus a handful of wins, including directing, writing, and two Lead Actress awards for Smart), the showrunners say they still feel pressure to deliver the goods — but for season 3, it's a little different.
"There's confidence in terms of us knowing the characters, being able to do things with the characters we hadn't done, going deeper in relationships with them, but I do think that pressure to always make it surprising to the audience and better for the audience is always there," Downs admits. "We, as audience members, feel that when we watch our favorite shows. If you watch a show that you love and then it's not as [good], or it's the same, you want it to keep you leaning forward and make you excited and surprised. So that's the bar for us every year."
Hacks season 3 premieres May 2 on Max. Watch the exclusive clip of Deborah and Ava's reunion above.
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