Probably the key to the quality of comedy Hacks (HBOMax) Be your dialogues. The long talks between a veteran stand-up artist, Deborah Vance, with a life full of success, money and glamour, who begins her slow artistic and vital decline, and a young screenwriter, Ava, fired from the series she was working on for being impertinent, with a short life full of insecurities, sentimental failures and lack of money, they are a display of ingenuity and vital wisdom.
Confronting two characters, two styles and two concepts of the world, gives a lot of play if you have talent. That was perfectly understood by Miguel de Cervantes, and several centuries later, by some dialoguists from television series. Suffice it to recall the excellent dialogues between Sandy Kominsky and Norman Newlander of Kominsky’s method.
Deborah Vance, from that Disneyland for adults that is Las Vegas, and apparently the majority of monologists, has that point of sarcasm necessary to entertain. She does not reach the acidity of Lenny Bruce but it is not easy to reach the top, as Bob Fosse splendidly taught us. Ava, for her part, longs to be able to use her trade in tasks considered more demanding, but the truth is that they complement each other and need to survive, one to not give in to the audience and the other to pay the bills from her.
The two seasons of Hacks They also allow us to better understand the ins and outs of the entertainment industry, the secondary characters that surround the star, such as the unforgettable road manager or the secretary of his representative, his addictions and the harshness of a world of entertainment in which the standard is not ingenuity but the number of seats that are filled every night.
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