It’s hard to believe HBO’s Emmy-winning show Hacks ended its five-season run earlier this year amid the 2026 TV schedule. The final season of the comedy, starring Jean Smart as washed up comedian Deborah Vance, received a total of 24 Emmy nominations, setting a new record of noms by a comedy series for a single season. The show is filled with memorable moments, and I still remember Deborah's heartwarming speech at Ava’s dad’s funeral. But I had no idea at the time that Jean Smart had just lost her husband while filming the finale, and it adds a whole new perspective to that funeral scene.
A perennial Hollywood darling, Jean Smart has starred in iconic sitcoms such as Designing Women and Frasier, but who could have predicted that the crowning jewel of her career would come decades later at the age of 75. For the most part, the Hacks cast has described the five-year run as a dream to film. However, the Fargo actress opened up to CBS Sunday Morning about how one of her biggest challenges to date took place while filming Season 1's finale, just days after her husband’s sudden passing in 2021:
I had one rough day where we were doing a funeral scene, and I thought, I don’t know if I can do this. But, I took an ativan… and it actually turned out to be a really good, and very, very, very funny scene about Ava’s father’s funeral.
Jean Smart
To jog your memory, Season 1, Episode 10 of Hacks, "I Think She Will," deals with Ava’s father’s funeral coinciding with Deborah Vance’s final show at the Palmetto in Vegas. Just before Ava (Hannah Einbinder) leaves to go home, she and Deborah get into a fight when she finds out Deborah plans to throw all the new material they’ve written out the window. So the young comedy writer is shocked when Deborah shows up at her father’s funeral, having flown right from her show to Massachusetts, instead of celebrating her final night.
Deborah ends up bringing joy and humor to the dark moment, something that may hae been incredibly difficult for the mourning Smart. Her husband, Designing Women co-star Richard Gilliland, died suddenly on March 18, 2021 from an undiagnosed heart condition, just days before Hacks Season 1 was set to wrap production. The finale was ultimately dedicated to the late actor.
Having witnessed the close familial bond that has grown among the Hacks cast during its run, I'm not surprised to hear Hacks creators Paul W Downs, Lucia Aniello, and Jen Statsky were incredibly sympathetic to the circumstances, even having only worked with Smart for a few months at the time. Though they offered the Babylon actress a number of options, Smart said she decided to push through the last few days of filming:
They were incredibly accommodating. They said you can take a couple weeks off, or you can do a day here and a day there, or you can do it all at once, whatever you want to do. So I said, I was still kind of in shock, so I just said, let’s just do the five days. Just get them done.
I feel so sad now knowing that Jean Smart had to go through all that. The veteran actress jokingly recalls taking an Ativan to help her through it, but I’m also glad she had such a supportive group of people around her.
You have to be incredibly strong to give that kind of performance during a time of such grief, and it just goes to show how incredibly tough and dedicated an actress Smart is. For every season of Hacks, she took home the Emmy for Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, with her latest coming from the 2026 Emmys. Each year, the competition was steep, with the likes of Quinta Brunson and Ayo Edebiri almost always being nominated alongside her for Abbott Elementary and The Bear, respectively, but it’s a moment like this funeral scene that helps prove why Smart was deservering of the honor.
While I’m excited to see what Jean Smart tackles next, which looks like the upcoming Family Stone sequel, Hacks will no doubt cast a long shadow over the rest of her career. However, she certainly has won over a whole new generational audience, and I hope to see her and Einbinder work together again in the future. For now, revisit their hit comedy series by streaming all five seasons with an HBO Max subscription.
