To tell the story of how Hacks performed at last night’s Emmys, you have to acknowledge both its incredible success and its terrible failure. Last night, Jean Smart won lead actress in a comedy series yet again. This meant that every time Hacks brought out a new season, Smart won the same award for it.
This makes her the first woman to ever win an Emmy for every season of a programme’s run. It’s a history-making achievement, and thoroughly well earned. The flipside of that, however, is that this is all Hacks won last night.
One Emmy is better than many shows can even hope to dream of, but the reality is that Hacks swaggered into the Emmys with a record 24 nominations – the most ever for a comedy in a single year – and had the momentum of a huge farewell narrative behind it. But it only ended up winning one for Jean Smart and a Creative Arts Emmy for picture editing. In other words, last night Hacks lost 22 Emmys.
This isn’t a complete surprise. My long-held theory about Hacks is that while lots of people enjoyed it, it was always a bit of a protest vote. The show’s big year – 2024, when it finally won outstanding comedy series – came when the industry was tying itself in knots trying to decide whether The Bear should qualify as a comedy or not.
Hacks was the biggest immediately identifiable comedy in a weak field at the time, so that’s where the votes went. In other words, it primarily won because nobody wanted The Bear to win. Since then, shows that are easier to love came along.
Seth Rogen’s The Studio – same subject matter but more pointed, more technically ambitious and funnier – swept the board last year, and this time around it was the turn of Widow’s Bay. Did Hacks deserve better? In its final season, Hannah Einbinder was allowed to play more notes than she did in the year that she won.
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