In the “Hacks” universe, “Who’s Making Dinner?” is a fictional sitcom celebrating its 50th anniversary at PaleyFest with a screening and party. The story goes that the sitcom was created in the 1970s by Deborah (Jean Smart) alongside her late husband, Frank. However, Frank conned her out of a creator credit, leaving himself with sole writing credit.
Between the PaleyFest celebration and the clips from “Who’s Making Dinner?,” “Hacks” production designer Rob Tokarz faced a challenge: “How do we make this?” Tokarz drew inspiration from classic sitcoms like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “All in the Family,” that have endured and still resonate with audiences. This show needed to feel as important,” he says. Tokarz drew from tones for the living room and décor from “All in the Family,” landing on a color palette of avocado shades, oranges and creams.
While we did pull out tones from ‘All in the Family,’ we wanted to uplift the actual architecture,” he explains. Jennifer Lukeheart, the show’s set decorator, searched far and wide. Ultimately, she found the seating in a surprising location: Facebook Marketplace.
The couch wasn’t all that paid homage to the past — the pass-through and doors used on “Hacks” were assets taken from the archives of TV history from the “Will and Grace” set, specifically from the episodes where the show honored “I Love Lucy.” As part of the PaleyFest sequence, Tokarz and his team took a few pieces from the set dressing and built that out. They added gravitas to the history of the set. That set makes an appearance later on in the series finale, this time as Ava (Hannah Einbinder) walks around — but it looks very different.
Tokarz updated it to make it feel contemporary, and approached it with realism. But now we’re in Deb’s legacy with Ava. Now Ava has her own legacy to build with her own show.” As it turned out, re-creating a set that paid homage to sitcoms of yesteryear was the least of Tokarz’s challenges.
In episode 8, titled “The Cube,” Deborah stages a publicity stunt to announce her Madison Square Garden show. She’s still barred from performing due to the fallout from quitting her late-night show in Season 4, so she decides to have a magician suspend her in a Plexiglas cube above the Las Vegas Strip to announce the show. The sequence required the entire creative team to help solve the problem of how to pull it off, so it was shot in pieces and out of order.
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