The series finale of “Hacks,” which dropped on HBO Max in late May, wrapped up the comedy series’ five-year run with a richly satisfying episode that stayed true to its characters while taking them in a few surprising directions.

After five seasons of bickering, reconciling, double-crossing, warring and collaborating on great comedy together, veteran stand-up comic Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and cynical millennial comedy writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) take a sad and in many ways shocking girls’ trip to Europe so that Deborah can end her life in a Swiss assisted-suicide clinic rather than endure more cancer treatments. (Spoiler alert: At the last minute, Deborah changes her mind and decides to stick around and write more jokes with Ava.)

The dark turn blindsided many viewers, but the show’s co-creators, Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky, were aware that it was coming from the moment they pitched “Hacks” to a variety of networks and streamers in 2019. And they spent all five seasons dropping hints and constructing setups that would pay off by the finale.

“We knew that Deborah was going to get this diagnosis and we knew they were going to go on this trip since the pitch,” Downs said.

“It was aiming toward that,” Aniello added. “The themes of life and death and legacy were what we wanted to explore. And because of that, we were able to build all five seasons toward this finale.”

The trio have eight Emmy nominations among them this year: Aniello for producing, directing and writing; Downs for producing, writing and acting; and Statsky for producing and writing. They sat down with TheWrap for an exclusive look at the various ways in which they peppered the entire series with moments, themes and lines that paved the way for the finale.

The video of that interview, complete with film clips showing the key scenes, can be seen above.

Here’s a breakdown of setups and payoffs.

The Tracking Shots

The opening scene of Season 1, Episode 1 captures Deborah from behind as she finishes her act on stage in Las Vegas. The camera trails just behind her as she walks through the wings of the theater, finally showing her face at the end of the long tracking shot. Five seasons and 47 episodes later, a similar shot trails Ava on her first day on the soundstage as the showrunner of “Who’s Making Dinner?,” her reboot of Deborah’s 1970s TV series. (Many of the staffers Ava passes in that shot are actual “Hacks” crew members.)

“We were always trying to think in a visual way,” said Aniello, who directed both of those episodes. “The opening shot was written to show a person from behind, and then you’re brought into their inner world once you reveal their face. And in this finale, when you see the back of Ava and then you eventually see her face, it’s of course a mirroring to that first shot. But also, it’s the opposite: This is somebody we’ve been with the whole time, and now we’re going to see where she’s going in her future.”

But that’s not the only instance in which directorial choices in the pilot are echoed in the finale. “In the pilot, when she’s having lunch with (casino owner) Marty (Christopher McDonald), there are a lot of smooth and still shots,” Downs said. “And then when Marty says, ‘I’m cutting some of your dates,’ it switches to handheld. Then in the finale, when (Deborah and Ava are) at lunch, they’re having a nice time. But when Deborah says, ‘I have this diagnosis,’ we switch to handheld again.”

The Specter of Death

In the fourth episode of the first season, Deborah asks Ava to write lines for a QVC appearance hawking Deborah Vance Progesterone Drink Supplement Packets. “Sustained use does sort of raise the risk of ovarian and breast cancer,” she tells Ava with a shrug. “Anyway, got jokes for that?”

In the finale, after telling Ava about her diagnosis, Deborah adds, “Yeah, I probably shouldn’t have doubled up all those years” on the packets.

“The progesterone packets were seeded in Season 1, knowing that eventually she would have a kind of cancer,” Aniello said. “We were aware that in Season 5 we would have her say, ‘I’m sick and this is what’s going on,’ and we didn’t want the audience to think that totally came out of nowhere.”

They also established Ava’s connection to suicide: When we first meet her in the pilot, she’s telling her agent, Jimmy LuSaque Jr. (Downs), that if she were going to kill herself, she’d wear a suicide vest on “Watch What Happens Live.” Five episodes later, a one-night stand of Ava’s leaps from a window to his death; in the fourth season, Deborah thinks Ava is going to drown herself and races into the surf to “save” her.

“When we wrote the opening joke for Ava, we did know that this decision of Deborah’s to end her own life was coming,” Downs said. “The idea of taking your life has always been on the edges of Ava’s character, with a recurring gallows humor that we’ve used knowing that we were going to get to this place of potential euthanasia for Deborah.”

Another twist: In Season 4, after Deborah lands a historic gig that makes her the first female late-night host and she goes back on her promise to hire Ava as that show’s head writer, Ava says that Deborah is so selfish that she’ll die alone. But in the finale, Ava agrees to go to Europe specifically so that Deborah won’t die alone.

Recurring Lines, Recurring Behavior

Throughout all five seasons, lines jump from one character to the other. In Season 2, Ava pleads, “Don’t leave me” as Deborah tries to teach her to swim. In Season 3, Deborah uses the same line when the two women get lost in the woods. In Season 5, it’s back in Ava’s mouth as she begs Deborah not to end her life. “You can’t do it without me” and “You’re a big, brave girl” also recur at different times.

“We try to build the series like music, with the idea that refrains can come in and out and can mean different things at different times,” Aniello said. “For us, that’s part of the larger tapestry of the show: How can we use language in a way that feels like it’s at times surprising and yet inevitable?”

The language also reinforces the growing bond between the pair. Early in the second season, Deborah scoffs at an email in which Ava uses the greeting “y’all” to avoid the gendered “you guys,” but later Deborah begins to use the phrase in her own stand-up. “It was another way of showing how little Ava-isms have embedded themselves into Deborah in ways that she doesn’t even totally realize,” Aniello said.

One of the show’s key phrases is “That’s the better joke,” which at times is followed by Deborah pulling out a notebook and jotting down the preferred punchline. The line first shows up at the climax of the pilot episode, when Deborah pursues Ava down the driveway of her estate, and it returns in the finale when Deborah realizes that she wants to keep on living so that she and Ava can write new material together.

“The very first time they meet, the thing that excites Deborah and makes her chase Ava down the driveway is that she wants to tell her that she’s got the better joke,” Statsky said. “That is very much set in stone in the pilot as what will be their love language. No matter what they clash over, what will remain is that they speak the same language — and that’s the language of jokes, and always striving to find the best possible joke. That has tied them together for the entire series.”

Big Hands

In Episode 2 of the first season, Deborah mocks Ava for having large hands. She returns to the subject later, but the punchline doesn’t come until the finale, when the women compare hands and it turns out that Deborah’s are bigger.

“That was very much a discovery,” Downs said. “We had written that Deborah was going to make fun of Ava’s hands in the pitch doc, before we cast anybody. And when we cast Hannah, I will say that Hannah has large hands.”

“But beautiful,” Aniello added quickly.

“It’s important to note that we had the big-hands joke before we cast Hannah,” Statsky said. “It’s not like we saw Hannah’s huge hands and thought, this would be hilarious!”

Later, they noticed that Smart’s hands were actually larger. “We were holding on to that nugget for a long time,” Aniello said. “When it felt like we were rounding the bases, we said, ‘Right — it’s for the end.’”

More Finale Prep

The final episode circles back to a couple of additional motifs from earlier seasons. In the second episode of Season 1, Deborah is established as a fanatic collector of salt and pepper shakers, and in the middle of Season 3, after Ava admits she’s never been out of the country except for one trip to Montreal, Deborah says that if she’s never been to Paris, “you’ve never had real bread.” In the finale, they go to Paris together, Ava eats “real bread” and they shop for salt and pepper shakers at Deborah’s favorite flea market, though she opts not to buy a particular pair at a time when she thinks her next stop will be the Swiss clinic.

“So much of this show has been both of them changing each other and making each other better,” Statsky said. “And one way Deborah’s made Ava better is opening her up to a world Ava didn’t know before. Part of that is going to Paris, having real bread and going to the flea market that she absolutely adores.”

The salt and pepper shakers, Aniello added, are a symbol for the two. “They really are better as a set,” she said. “She’s always collected these things, but now that she’s grappling with the end of her life, she doesn’t see a use for them anymore.”

Then again … “In our mind, Ava did buy the salt and pepper shakers without Deborah knowing, with a small shred of hope that Deborah would reconsider ending her life,” Aniello said. “That’s our writer’s truth.”

The Vegas Arc

Not everything was meticulously planned from the start. Take the changing relationship between Deborah and Marty: In the first season, he’s her boss and he’s trying to cut her residency at his Vegas casino, but by the finale Deborah owns a casino and she’s hired a grateful Marty to run it after he’s lost his job. “That wasn’t in the initial pitch,” Downs said. “That was testament to Chris McDonald and how fantastic he and Jean are on screen together. That was something that evolved and developed.”

“The Amazing Race“

One of the more memorable episodes in the final season follows Deborah and her daughter, DJ (Kaitlin Olson), as they appear on the reality show “The Amazing Race.” Again, it didn’t come out of nowhere: In the final episode of the second season, Deborah and Ava watch the show and decide they’d do well on it. (The jury’s out on how Deborah and Ava would have done; Deborah and DJ are eliminated in short order.)

“We knew in that Season 2 finale when a joke is made about how they would do, it’s the setup that we knew we would eventually do,” Statsky said. “’Amazing Race’ has always been a huge part of the lore of this show. Some of us wanted maybe even a full season of it.”

By some of us, she means Aniello, who Downs said would have liked to do 10 episodes with Deborah on the reality show. “I still think there’s something there,” Aniello insisted.

The Love Story

The “Montecito” episode in the final season finds Deborah and a reluctant Ava pretending to be lesbian lovers in order to persuade rival comic Kelly Kilpatrick (Cherry Jones) to lend Deborah a Bob Mackie-designed jumpsuit once worn by Carol Burnett. On a weekend retreat at the home of Kelly and her partner, Monica (Leslie Bibb), the hosts ask Deborah and Ava how they met — and Ava comes up with an origin story that pretty much describes what happened in the Hacks pilot, albeit with a lesbian spin.

“You could write that so many different ways, and it would’ve still been funny, coming up with some insane story about the way they met,” Statsky said. “But I think what’s so satisfying about that episode is that so much of Ava and Deborah’s real history is baked into what they talk about. It’s all real things that the audience has seen over five seasons. And I think that makes it, as a viewer, so much more enriching and fun because you feel more a part of it. And so, yeah, we decided that she would tell the real, true story of how they met.”

Aniello laughed. “It mapped on a rom-com a little too well.”

In the end, the showrunners agreed, the final season was a mixture of what they planted early on and what they came up with along the way. “It’s a delicate balance of all these things that were very intentionally planned out since the beginning, but also knowing that the process of making a show is alive,” Statsky said. “You have to pay attention at all times and be willing to adjust if it’s going to make for a better show.”

This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

As TV endures a sleepy summer — save for a couple of splashy releases like Peacock’s “Love Island USA” and Netflix’s “I Will Find You”— the list of titles cycling through the top streaming movies has been much more varied, with box office hits thriving at home.

TheWrap crunched the numbers from Nielsen’s streaming charts for June through mid-July (the streaming rankings face about a one-month delay) to find out which movies people watched most on streaming this summer, and saw Disney/Pixar’s “Hopper” tally 2.66 billion viewing cumulative minutes on Disney+ from July 1 through July 12, standing as the interval’s top streaming movie.

“Hoppers,” which debuted in theaters in March grossed nearly $400 million worldwide at the box office, was just one of several theatrical releases to find big success once they hit streaming. Amazon MGM’s “Project Hail Mary,” Disney/20th Century Studios’ “Avatar: Fire and Ash” and Amazon MGM’s “The Sheep Detectives” also landed within the summer’s top five streaming movies, each tallying over a billion cumulative viewing minutes.

A commonality among them? Long theatrical windows.

The strong numbers for these releases — and the fact that they’re dominating the streaming movie landscape — prove that longer theatrical release windows aren’t hurting these films’ performance on streaming platforms. Just look at “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” which had an especially long window due to the mountains of money the franchise makes at the box office, which hit Disney+ in late June, six months after its Dec. 19 debut.

“Fire and Ash,” the third movie in Cameron’s “Avatar” franchise that ended its box office run with $1.5 billion, racked up 1.7 billion minutes viewed in just three weeks, coming out as the No. 4 most-watched streaming movie during June and part of July.

The same can be said for “Hoppers” and “Project Hail Mary” (which grossed $684 million worldwide), which both embraced a full three-month theatrical window but still managed to make a splash on streaming, straddling the line of staying relevant for those who didn’t catch the movie in theaters, as well as giving fans who did enough of a breather before they revisit a new favorite.

“Project Hail Mary” also double-dipped — the film made its streaming debut first on MGM+, then on Prime Video a few weeks later.

This falls in line with a trend across the film industry that has seen studios shift to a 45-day theatrical window, with Universal vowing to extend its minimum window for all films starting in 2027. The proof is in the pudding here — a longer window not only allows for bigger box office, but also has no adverse effect on streaming viewership.

The outlier here is “The Sheep Detectives,” less of a box office hit (it made $131 million against a budget of $75 million) but a critical darling, which had shorter one-and-a-half month window from its May 8 theatrical release. But Amazon MGM made a pivot when the film fell off at the box office, pushing it to streaming earlier to take advantage of the positive word of mouth.

It wasn’t just trickle down from the box office that generated streaming success; several of the top movies are earlier movies from franchises that were about to debut new installments. “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” Tom Holland’s first solo “Spider-Man” film, tallied up 518 million viewing minutes across two weeks in early July ahead of the “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” premiere on July 31, and viewing for previous “Toy Story” movies spiked ahead of the “Toy Story 5” theatrical debut in June.

Part of the “Spider-Man” spike happened on Netflix, with both “Spider-Man: Far From Home” and “Spider-Man: Homecoming” landing in the No. 3 and 4 spots on the films list.

But while Netflix — which is facing a slower season on the TV side — doesn’t release its films in theaters often, it still found success against the box office heavyweights across a variety of genres.

Romcoms “Voicemails to Isabelle” and “Office Romance,” Eric Andre comedy “Little Brother” and Millie Bobby Brown actioner “Enola Holmes 3” scored solid viewership, while the streamer’s buzzy true crime documentary, “Maternal Instinct,” skyrocketed to the No. 2 spot — just behind “Hoppers” — for the interval with nearly 2 billion minutes viewed. “72 Hours” and “The Last House” have also performed well later into the summer.

And while “The Devil Wears Prada 2” didn’t make it within the interval as it debuted on Disney+ and Hulu in late July — we’ll expect to see it hit Nielsen charts later this month — the legacy sequel made waves as the biggest live-action movie premiere on the platforms since “Deadpool & Wolverine” with 15.2 million global viewers in five days.

Notably, it was Netflix, Disney+ and Prime Video that were home to the top 15 streaming movies, though this interval cuts off before Universal Studios hit “Obsession” made its way to Peacock on July 17. And that’s not even mentioning “The Odyssey,” which is still shattering box office records and will land on the NBCUniversal streamer later this year.

Shark Week takes a bite out of cable

Shark Week scored its strongest performance in seven years, boosting Discovery Channel to rank as the No. 1 primetime cable network for the week among adults, men and women 25-54. 

Across Shark Week prime telecasts for the week, the programming averaged a 0.77 rating among adults 25-54, according to live-plus-three-day figures, marking the largest year-over-year increase in 13 years and the first year of ratings growth since 2023.

ESPN scores WNBA viewership win

Saturday’s WNBA game between the Indiana Fever and the Chicago Sky averaged 2.6 million viewers on ABC, ranking as ESPN’s No. 2 most-watched WNBA game ever — a milestone the network hit for the second consecutive week.

Viewership for the match was up 79% compared to last year’s ABC regular season average, and, through 22 games, the WNBA on ESPN networks is averaging 1.3 million viewers, up 5% year-over-year.

HGTV ratings milestone

“Ugliest House in America” Season 8 is off to a strong start. The HGTV show scored notable ratings for Episode 2 on July 27, with a 0.72 rating among adults 25-54 and a 1.04 rating among women 25-54, according to Nielsen live-plus-three-day viewing figures. This marks the highest-rated episode for the latter demo in series history.

The ratings boosted the show to triple-digit increases — 260% and 353%, to be exact — over the previous year.

ICYMI:

• “The Last House,” the sci-fi thriller movie starring Greta Lee and Wagner Moura, tallied 27.5 million views on Netflix in its opening weekend
• “The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare” remained Netflix’s most-watched TV series with 10.6 million views in its second week
• Hallmark+’s “Paris Is Always a Good Idea,” garnered nearly as many viewers as the streamer’s biggest hits. Read our interview with president Darren Abbott about the company’s big bet on streaming here

The Trump-led board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has voted to move forward with a new plan to shutter its main building for renovations, according to the New York Times.

Under the plan, the Kennedy Center’s main building will be closed while a newer extension called The Reach will remain open for limited programming and operate as an active memorial to John F. Kennedy.

The board also voted to inscribe President Donald Trump’s name on the building beneath the main signage. Representatives for the Kennedy Center did not immediately return TheWrap’s request for comment.

The latest decision follows an “independent and objective analysis” of possible options by outside consulting firm Delta Consulting Group, which determined that keeping the main building open during renovations would be significantly more expensive.

The board’s resolution states that it is “fully committed” to continuing arts and educational programming during the closure and maintaining the “historic and architecturally significant nature of the center’s main building.”

Per the Times, the renovations would include new furniture, a new coffee shop, electronic ticketing kiosks and $7 million in public restroom renovations. The target for reopening would be summer of 2028.

It also directed officials to take “all legal means” to recognize and honor Trump’s “existential and unprecedented contributions to the survival of the center.” Per the resolution, the inscription underneath the Kennedy Center would read: “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.”

The move comes as The Kennedy Center has been in limbo with performers exiting and going elsewhere and its workforce, which was already downsized through a round of layoffs in anticipation of a full closure, left in the dark about the future.

The new plan is subject to approval from a federal judge, who had temporarily blocked the board’s previous plan to shutter the entire Kennedy Center for a two-year renovation earlier this year following a lawsuit from Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty, who holds an ex officio seat on the board.

At the time, Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that the original vote was “ill-informed and seemingly preordained” and that the board was “derelict” and based its decision on an “insufficient, one-sided presentation of information.” Cooper added that they “neglected to consider the full range of its statutory obligations and potential adverse consequences of closure on programming and memorial functions.”

Additionally, Cooper ordered that Trump’s name be removed from the Kennedy Center. An appeal to the judge’s ruling by the board was rejected by the D.C. Appeals Court.

Cooper will review the new plans for construction and future operations next week.