‘Hacks’ Recap, Season 4, Ep. 5: ‘Clickable Face’

I regret to inform you that we have our first flat note of the season. We’ve got a potentially interesting tug-of-war between two visions — the pragmatic, insecure Deborah, pretzeling herself into a pleasing shape by the data and focus group’s findings, versus the snobbish, insecure Ava, who watches with envy as her former On the Contrary colleagues get invites to the Hill and can’t stop Googling “Peabody submissions deadline.” But we end up spending most of our time picking the lowest-hanging fruit on the modern comedy tree — a TikTok star whose whole thing is doing stupid dances — in a story that goes nowhere.

Deborah’s early ratings were fantastic, but she’s since dropped to fourth place. The network has put together a focus group to figure out how to fix the issue. Deborah needs to have Gen-Z compliments explained to her, though the praise from her peers — an older man who insists Deborah ditch the desk because he wants to see her amazing legs — requires no translation. This is pretty much your standard-issue focus-group scene, with dopey viewers idiotically nitpicking irrelevant details. In fact, the theme of this episode seems to be ordinary people (read: anyone who is not in the industry) behaving exactly the way people in the industry assume they will.

From this group and the data, a diagnosis emerges: Deborah is overperforming with males but failing to hit that crucial demo beloved by advertisers: women 25 to 45. Look, women be shopping: It’s not sexist if it’s backed by data! Jimmy suggests Deborah win over the mom crowd by bringing DJ on the show, which would have made for a much more entertaining half-hour if you ask me!! Instead, Deborah feigns horror at the idea of “exploiting” her precious pregnant daughter for ratings. (Okay.) They decide to find a star who hits with, as LaineyGossip would say, the MiniVan majority, like Jennifer Garner or Kristen Bell, who in the Hacks world, is starring in a live-action Tinkerbell (which in our world may never happen now that Disney is putting its live-action remakes on ice; thank you for your service, Rachel Zegler!).

The only catch with this clickable face is that she’s committed to Kimmel. Deborah handles this defeat in her usual, gracious fashion: by staking out the fancy market where Kristen does her grocery shopping to stage an “accidental” run-in. (Angelenos, help an East Coaster out: Where does L.A. Grocery & Café fit in the bougie grocery ecosystem? A less-crunchy Erewhon? An east-L.A. answer to Brentwood’s Country Mart? Some third thing I don’t know about?)

I love to see celebrities play a heightened version of themselves, and Kristen is very game, from her overly earnest response to Deborah saying they leave their publicists out of this scheduling so as not to bother them — “they won’t be bothered. I only work with people who love what they do” — to her eventual acquiescence, even though appearing on Deborah’s show would require her to skip therapy. “Last week she was telling me I was too nice and have trouble with boundaries,” she says, “so I feel like canceling on her might really impress her.”

But Deborah’s victory here is short-lived. The next day Kimmel corners her in the parking lot, asserting that Kristen is his: “I got full custody when Conan died. I put in my time. I switched to a Samsung phone so she wouldn’t be the only one with green bubbles.” He threatens her with the sort of bullying (it involves horse porn) that sent James Corden running back across the pond. Wow, this writers’ room really hates James Corden. Love that for them.

Meanwhile, Kayla has a plan, and no, we’re not just talking about her plan to get Mary-Kate and Ashley back into acting by starting with Tia and Tamera because “twins listen to other twins.” She’s found this TikToker from Alberta who goes by Dance Mom (Julianne Nicholson! She rules; I’m sorry she didn’t get much to do here), extremely popular with their desired demo, as you may have guessed, given that her handle is literally “Dance Mom.”

I kept waiting for the twist to be that this supposed yokel was a whole lot savvier than she was letting on (“Wow, Los Angeles! Like the L.A. episodes of Sex and the City!”), but that moment never came. She was just … Dance Mom. Of course, I always enjoy a good Kayla and Jimmy moment — Kayla doesn’t suffer from imposter syndrome, but a lot of women and Jimmy do — but this bit never really goes anywhere. Especially given all the drinking, starting with the “why not?” lunchtime margarita, I was sure we were headed for some drunken disaster, either that afternoon or later on camera, after both Kayla and Jimmy gave her some tequila shots for confidence, not realizing the other had already done it. (Sort of an accidental version of Kaylie Hooper sabotaging America’s Kids Got Singing.)

Ava should be riding high: She got her dream job and her dream relationship, having the time of her life with that hot couple she met at the sex shop. She can have great sex, check her phone and see that Emily Blunt won’t do the gravy-bowl challenge, and leave without hurting anyone’s feelings. Perfect system! But a conversation with her On the Contrary friends makes her suddenly self-conscious about the hacky (heyyyy) material Deborah is pushing. Deborah counters this by complaining about “CNN words” in the writers’ room. I feel like the better argument here is not that late night can’t be political — aren’t most of the late-night shows doing bits about politics now? — but that Deborah is not political, and the show will only succeed if it aligns with Deborah’s strengths and passions. (I do love Ava’s crack about how “using Google isn’t as hard for most people as it is for you,” followed by Stacy’s interjection: “Let’s watch the cybershaming.”)

Deborah’s pitches aren’t bad, exactly, but they are very … daytime. For someone who has spent her entire life dreaming of hosting a late-night show, she is shockingly ill-prepared to fill the hour with content. Did she really have no ideas beyond a vague sense of “Johnny Carson but girl this time”? Where is their “Carpool Karaoke”? Or their “Day Drinking“?

She is taking the data seriously and literally — she’s wearing waist-length extensions and having them cut open the front of the desk so the fans can see those sexy ankles! — as she lies through her teeth about how much she loves to eat bread during a cooking segment with Antoni. Not great!

Miraculously, Deborah and Ava pass on Dance Mom after seeing her underwhelming audition. (“She does have a lot of followers.” “So did Charles Manson!”) Deborah has an intense surprise run-in with Ava and her hot couple that night. Deborah attempts to humiliate Ava for doing something that honestly seems to be working out great for her, and whatever; Emily and Dev are hot! Though Deborah’s mockery is pretty toothless, considering her recent infractions, Ava cuts her to the bone by minimizing their entire history together as “I just wrote jokes for her” and delivers a death blow when it comes out that Emily and Dev aren’t watching Deborah’s show because Ava “told them to wait for it to get good.”

By the next day, tensions between the two are high again, as Deborah rejects Ava’s joke about paid parental leave for a bit about “wine o’clock,” good LORD. Wine o’clock?! It really just goes to show that you can’t do good work if you don’t respect your audience. Their fight escalates, forcing Stacy to take out the volume jar, which has almost $4,000 in it.

Ava handles this defeat with total maturity and professionalism. Oh, never mind, she secretly has the wine-o’clock cue card replaced with the joke about paid leave. This is why it’s so important for the industry to keep using cue cards: potential for sabotage. Deborah, who’d basically memorized the wine-o’clock line, tells it badly, and she and Ava wind up in a yelling match in front of the studio audience. Ava insists that Deborah needs to let the audience get to know her, and naturally, Deborah’s enraged response to this is, “How did letting you get to know me work out, you pathetic, conniving bitch?” In her rush to intervene, Stacy trips on a wire and face-plants hard. As blood gushes from her mouth, she reams out these two: They’re both wrong (shocker!). Ava’s a snob and Deborah’s obsessed with data. Dance Mom is summoned over Ava’s objections to the stage.

The audience … loves her? Do we buy that this would go over so well? I don’t! Ava looks nauseous. We are forced to watch the entirety of the dance, which again would suggest something interesting was going to happen (e.g., vomiting up the tequila shots; doing something outrageous and salacious that belies her aww-shucks demeanor), but it’s just more TikTok dance, which Deborah is cajoled into joining. She looks so stiff in that pencil skirt. Ava yearns only for death and I don’t blame her. A cooking segment with Antoni followed by Dance Mom? It’s all so Ellen-coded (derogatory).