Deborah Vance of Hacks is awful – so she's become my role model

When you’re a middle-aged woman, you’re constantly told to take supplements, get resistance bands, do weights, take up yoga, eat truckloads of protein, limit fatty foods, stay hydrated, exercise your pelvic floor, walk in nature, do Pilates, give up alcohol and meditate. In other words: BEHAVE YOURSELF. 

Perhaps that’s why Deborah Vance of Hacks has become my role model for the next part of my life. This character couldn’t behave herself if her life depended on it. In fact she’s awful: stinking rich, cravenly ambitious and so litigious she’d sue a squirrel for looking at her.  

In other words: she is AWESOME. 

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Hacks came to prominence in 2021, just as I was anxiously rocking backwards and forwards and watching repeats of The Office. I have to confess to not having the brain capacity to appreciate it at the time, and I automatically scrolled past it on the way to something more novel. Well, what a fool I was. 

As a lot of you probably know Deborah, played by Jean Smart, is an ageing, problematic comedian who is stagnating in her Vegas residency (think Joan Rivers, but with a face that moves). In a bid to revive her flagging career, she’s unwillingly paired with Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) an awkward and entitled queer Gen Z writer, who attempts to drag her kicking and screaming into the modern age. Hilarity ensues and a classic cross-generational comedy duo is born – fighting, wisecracking and slamming car doors all the way.

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Deborah is such a diva she makes Mariah look like a bag packer at Asda. She’s something that women aren’t allowed to be – outrageously, gloriously self-centred. Society really doesn’t like that (otherwise who would unload the dishwasher?) so she’s an absolute treat. She pushes past narcissism and turns it into a courageous form of self-preservation.

My god, she can do it all. Bring a crowd to their knees, shout at the gardener, gut a fish, slug a Martini, sell her range of shonky signature merchandise on TV and perform a killer golf swing that could decapitate. She says and does terrible things, but always comes through when it matters, before immediately and gloriously snapping back into being an absolute bitch. 

The generational divide between her and Ava is also very cleverly handled (the And Just Like That… writers should be locked in a cupboard and forced to watch it forever). There’s a scene where Ava is shocked to find a troupe of little people in Deborah’s living room, auditioning to be the elves that will hand-deliver her Christmas cards. “They are working actors, this is a legitimate gig, I pay double the SAG rate!” Deborah snaps, matter of factly.

While Ava fuzzily tries to get her head around the moral implications, Deborah shoos her away with “You take your breakfast to figure out what’s wrong with it and if you can’t, I never want to hear about it again.” Honestly, it’s so refreshing, I feel like I’ve just brushed my teeth. 

Smart intelligently embodies all Deborah’s contradictions. She is imperious, vicious, vulnerable, feisty and entirely believable – you could just watch her all day long. And there’s a cast of supporting characters and celebrity cameos that are every bit as funny and vivid as the leads.  

So if, like me, you’ve been sleeping on Hacks watch it now. Then watch it again. And if, like me, you’re a middle-aged woman believe me, she is our queen. We all need to be more Deborah Vance. We need to take her lead and do whatever the hell we want. Claw our way to the top while wearing a pair of dangly QVC earrings. Take up space, waft into rooms, work on our zingers and our callbacks, hawk our signature spice racks and stop giving a shiny shite what anyone else thinks. The time for behaving ourselves is over!

Hacks is on NOW and Sky Max.

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