The second was that HBO Max’s show Hacks premiered, to warm-ish reviews and moderate fanfare. The basic premise of the show, which recently concluded its excellent fourth season, centers on the career of Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), a comedienne in her 70s with a long-running Las Vegas residency and a lucrative empire selling crap she’d never own herself on QVC. Vance, whose fame is depicted as something like a combination of that of Joan Rivers and Jeff Foxworthy, can fill a large theater every night as a result of decades of disciplined dedication to getting cheap laughs from the widest possible audience. Her populist appeal, while it has made her fabulously rich, has not, however, won her the love of young snobs in coastal metropolises.

Enter Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbeinder), Deborah’s foil, and the other half of the relationship that is the beating heart of the show. Ava is, in short, a young snob from a coastal metropolis. A comedy writer from Los Angeles, she’s officious about employment law, she drives an electric car, she has an ironic bad haircut, she’s bisexual, and she’s scrupulously moralistic about other people’s choices of words. In short, she’s woke. As the show begins, she finds herself unemployed because she tweeted a little too close to the sun in trying to attack a Republican politician, and her own “side” turned on her with an ungenerous reading of her joke. This is the first hint a close watcher might get about the subversive cultural commentary that Hacks offers about the end of the woke era in American life. “Cancel culture,” whatever that was, mostly destroyed the people who participated in it, the show is telling us. Hacks is never explicitly political — it is too good and too human for that. And it certainly doesn’t mean to be or doesn’t declare itself to be “anti-woke” or anything so outlandish. But, pay attention, and you’ll start to see the world we have all been living in painted in vivid color.

As the show begins, Deborah is facing the prospect of losing her residency, and Ava needs a gig. Ava and Deborah happen to have the same manager, Jimmy Lusaque, played by show co-creator Paul W. Downs. He has the bright idea of solving both problems by getting Ava a job writing material for Deborah. They immediately dislike each other, but for one thing: They are both really funny. In their first meeting, as they begin to insult one another and disagree in the way any two people who are culturo-politically at odds would: with brilliant barbs. Their mutual respect for each other’s technical joke construction skill overcomes any feelings of insult, and so Deborah, a professional above all else, employs Ava.

What ensues is maybe the most interesting relationship on television: a very woke and a very nonwoke woman who have to figure out how to get along for the sake of their art come to deeply love one another.

But it doesn’t come easily. The younger, woke generation represented by Ava is highly scrupulous about things that simply do not matter, so Deborah has to put up with her hectoring and language policing. The older people who do know what really matters, represented by Deborah, are from a time when things were harder. Deborah’s mindset was formed in the 1970s, when, as a young and uber-talented comedian and mother, she became the first woman to get a spot as a late-night host, only to have the show taken away for unfair reasons. The lessons she took from this, about the adaptations it takes to succeed, have made her a harsh person and, crucially, a bad mother. Her daughter, played by Kaitlin Olson (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), bears the scars. So, dealing with the frustrating immaturities of young Ava turns out to be not just a hassle for Deborah but an opportunity. Here is her second chance at motherhood, a second chance to figure out how to succeed in her career without making herself cruel and selfish in the understandable but damaging ways that her generation once had to.

And the comedy it yields is electric. Ava is only great when she is channeling Deborah, somebody without her own vapid ideology and politics. Deborah is only great when she’s pushed by Ava to be sensitive to thoughts and feelings she would naturally ignore. This is the magic of their creative partnership. With Ava goading Deborah to be more focused on the emotional and high-minded, we witness a woman in her 70s experiencing an artistic renaissance. By the end of the third season, she’s put out a hit new special to universal acclaim and successfully campaigned for a recently vacated slot as a late-night host.

As the fourth season begins, Ava has learned a trick from Deborah and blackmailed her way to the job of head writer, and the two are deeply at odds even as they are under the most pressure they’ve ever been. The twin conflicts of the season are whether the love and respect in their relationship will win over the hurt and anger in it, and whether the creativity and fun they bring to their biggest ever project together will prevail amid the diktats of a large corporate network. The big bad villain, to the degree there is one, is the literalistic and counterproductive rules imposed by human resources. As Deborah jokes at one point, “How do you tell an HR rep she needs to wear deodorant? It’s a trap.” Here is another hint about the real politics behind this show. Yes, life is hard, and it contains injustice, but the official channels for remedying it don’t actually work. The only things that do work are more ineffable, human, and hard to put into words: trust, jokes, and judgment.

So what, besides the coincidental timing of the show’s premiere, does this have to do with bygone mask regulations and the politics of 2021?

During the run of Hacks, America has been through a lot. “While wokeism has not made masks an issue, in my experience the pro-woke view and the pro-mask view are highly correlated,” Tyler Cowen wrote in a February 2022 Bloomberg column. This was a time when someone referring to wokeism was referring to something utterly culturally dominant, and when someone who did not like wokeism might have pessimistically felt that the wokeism issue represented an all-or-nothing battle for freedom, for comedy, and for sanity. According to my friends from abroad, the most noticeable feature of American life over the past 5-10 years is our marked “polarization.” And not without reason. The first half of the 2020s in America has seen talk in our public discourse of a “great national divorce,” and even a second civil war. Memorably, in 2024, there was a film, Civil War, about just such a thing, with dozens of attendant thinkpieces.

ADOLESCENCE IS GRIPPING, BEAUTIFUL … PROPAGANDA

But, in that same column, Cowen prophesied an ending that would be less satisfying than the total victory or defeat of wokeness: “Wokeism is likely to evolve into a subculture that is highly educated, highly White and fairly feminine. That is still a large mass of people, but not enough to run the country or all its major institutions.” So long as the wokes one day didn’t run everything, in other words, they’d just be another weird tribe in a country full of different kinds of people, and we’d learn to live with them. Through its depiction of Ava and Deborah taking from one another’s worldviews while retaining their remaining differences, Hacks depicts its odd couple, stand-ins for the woke and the unwoke, getting along peaceably with each other.

Hacks is a show about bipartisanship. Not between Democrats and Republicans per se, but across the most salient divisions that actually exist in America today. The great national divorce is off, reports of permanent liberal cultural dominance are greatly exaggerated, and despite how it feels right now, the Right cannot keep winning forever. The question for America now is the question of Hacks: can America work after wokeness? So long as neither side tries to totally dominate the other, the answer is yes, brilliantly — as brilliantly as the central relationship in this memorable show.

Nicholas Clairmont is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.