Hacks' finale explained: ‘There wasn't any other way to go'

The Age

2 days ago

This story contains spoilers about the season four finale of Hacks.
When Merrill Markoe was the head writer for NBC's Late Night With David Letterman in the 1980s, she used to stand by the studio doors to watch the host deliver jokes to the audience. Her heart felt like it was pounding out of her chest.
'Oh my god,' she recalls thinking. 'If this doesn't get a laugh, I'm screwed.'
That's how high the stakes felt writing for late-night television, an unrelenting beast that must be fed daily with heaps of material, much of which could be found wanting and scrapped at any moment.
So when Markoe starred as herself on the Max comedy Hacks this season as a writer on fictional comedian Deborah Vance's talk show, that real-life stress came roaring back. In one scene, Ava Daniels – the show's head writer, played by Hannah Einbinder – nervously confesses to Markoe what an honour it was to work with her, and that she hoped it wasn't strange for the late-night TV legend to be reporting to someone younger. Markoe assured Ava that she absolutely did not want to be head writer, adding, in an improvised line, 'I don't want to call it hell on earth, but, I mean, it's a job for a lunatic.'
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The 'lunatic' line turned into a fan favourite during this fourth season of the Emmy Award-winning Hacks, which recently concluded and centred on the uniquely magical and confounding cultural touchstone of late-night comedy. Markoe didn't know what she was saying until it was out of her mouth, but she felt it with all her soul.
'Somebody, I can't remember who it was – it might have been Jay Leno – told me that [executives] broke it down into segments where they showed you what was getting a higher rating and a lower rating,' Markoe said. 'Like, if a girl came out in a real short skirt, the rating went a little higher. And then if somebody came on that nobody was particularly interested in, the rating went a little lower. So they just make it so that it's impossible not to be completely crazy.
'We didn't discuss ratings so much, although I know Dave took them personally. I mean, how can you not?' she continued. 'You have a show that you think went really, really well, but it turns out that the ratings were not that good. But you think, 'Well, wow, that was really quality stuff we did.' That's a very confusing little thing to put yourself in over and over and over and over.'