[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Hacks Season 4, Episode 4, “I Love LA.”]
Hacks‘ latest episode, “I Love LA,” may have tracked Deborah Vance’s (Jean Smart) journey to the late-night TV stage, but it also served as a sweet tribute to Los Angeles and the victims and first responders of this year’s wildfires.
In the installment, Deborah gears up to put on her first episode of the late-night show she and head writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) have been crafting since the beginning of this season, but it seemed anxiety got the best of her during rehearsal, forcing Deborah offstage only seconds after she stepped onto it. In order to reassure the network of her health, Winnie (Helen Hunt) set up a doctor’s appointment for Deborah.
When Deborah entered the waiting room for her doctor’s visit, she happened to sit next to sketch comedy legend Carol Burnett. The ladies have a moving conversation about nerves, because initially, Deborah is hesitant to believe she has anxiety. But Burnett admitted that she still experiences stage fright from time to time. Her trick? Instead of picturing the audience naked, she told Deborah to imagine she was performing the show for one person and to picture them.
By the time Deborah’s official taping is set to begin, she has put her focus on Ava, imagining an empty room with just her head writer to watch her. It was a winning trick, and while the women seemed to find themselves on more equal footing, the divide between them remained, leading to two very different premiere night celebrations.
Kenny Laubbacher / Max
Ava took the writers out for drinks, but after she saw they were so exhausted, she insisted they go home and relax. Meanwhile, Deborah’s dinner with Winnie and others fell through, which led her to call Damien (Mark Indelicato) to join her. Afterwards, they went to a club, but after Deborah stayed behind to keep partying, she got injured from a poppers-related incident, landing her in the hospital.
Ultimately, Ava was called in to help Deborah as her emergency contact, a detail she’d been meaning to change following their conflict. Considering their foiled premiere night plans, the collaborators found themselves sitting in the ER waiting room so they could watch the first episode’s broadcast on a working TV.
It’s a moment that proves things don’t always go as planned, but even under unideal circumstances, joy can be found. As Labi Siffre’s “Bless the Telephone” plays, a touching tribute reading, “Dedicated to the victims and first responders of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires,” is displayed alongside an image of Deborah’s LA mansion, which burned down in the wildfires.
“The body of it in the shape of the story was largely always what it is, but we hadn’t locked down our musical guests,” showrunner Jen Statsky says of changes made to this episode following the wildfires. “That part was scheduled to shoot later… and so having Randy Newman come and sing that song felt really lovely and an important thing to have in the show, post-wildfires.”
Newman made an appearance as the musical guest in Deborah’s first late-night episode, singing his tune, “I Love L.A.” Statsky goes on to say, “It was a really special moment on set to have him perform that for our crew and our cast, and it kind of just made the episode come together in a really nice way.”
As for welcoming Burnett, Smart says, “That’s another thing that’s been a treat is the number of people that we admire who love the show and… a lot of them would like to be on the show.” As the star puts it, “Carol is, she’s like an idol and I still love watching her old show and there’s no one like her.”
Showrunner Lucia Aniello credits Burnett with paving the way for a comedy like Hacks, “The show, if it’s about understanding the plight of the female comedian, Carol Burnett certainly paved the way for so many women. I think because she was… so naturally funny and made everybody just laugh… in a very subtle way, [she] dispensed with the idea about whether women were funny by simply being funny.”
See what else Smart, Statsky, Aniello, Einbinder, and Paul W. Downs have to say about the episode in the full video interview, above, and let us know what you thought of this moving installment in the comments section below.
Hacks, Season 4, Thursdays, 9/8c, Max
