The Last Laugh: Hacks Returns For Final Season

The Emmy-winning Max Original comedy series Hacks returns for its fifth and final season on HBO Max. And, as usual, our favorite show makes the most of its locations.

The 10-episode final season debuts new episodes weekly, with two new episodes on April 30 and May 7, leading up to the series finale on Thursday, May 28.

The fifth and final season of Hacks was filmed primarily in New York City and Las Vegas, with additional production occurring in Paris. Production for the final season officially began in September 2025.

For the New York City scenes in which Deborah Vance tries to get a big comeback gig at Madison Square Garden, extensive outdoor filming took place in the streets of Manhattan. Cast members, including Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder, were spotted filming scenes while carrying shopping bags and flowers in the city.

Of course, Las Vegas, Nevada, is the show’s home base, and several iconic Vegas locations were utilized for the final season. Production returned to the Las Vegas Strip in early October 2025 for multiple scenes. Filming occurred on East Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas at El Cortez Hotel & Casino. The cast and crew were reported to be filming at Westgate Las Vegas Resort in early 2026. Scenes were also captured at the historic downtown site, The Mob Museum.

A significant location from previous seasons, the Andrew McNally House in Altadena, California—which served as Deborah Vance’s Los Angeles “side mansion”—was unfortunately destroyed by the Eaton Fire in January 2025. As a result, it could not be used for new footage in the final season. In February 2026, production moved to Paris, with reports of filming in the Le Marais district.

So, what’s the main story for Season 5? In the aftermath of mistaken and unflattering news reports that she passed away, Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and Ava (Hannah Einbinder) return to Las Vegas more determined than ever to secure Deborah’s legacy as a comedian. There are many fun story arcs, plot twists, detours, and surprises. Two of our favorites? Deborah dates a young pop star in the vein of Harry Styles or Benson Boone. Ava dates a sex worker, and she’s fine with it. But she can’t stand his ambition to be a magician.

In a sit-down with the cast and creatives, select media got the inside scoop on this season. Jean Smart said she thinks viewers are “willing to go anywhere with us,” and in season five, “we get to get back to being profoundly silly, which is really, really fun.”

Hannah Einbinder said she enjoyed their “sparring,” and the comfort of working with the same team. Smart noted the “upheaval” in the industry caused by the encroachment of money men and AI. “I think we’re going through a really strange time and upheaval in our industry where big corporations really are taking over and calling the shots, and it’s kind of, it’s very scary.”

Smart highlighted the moment where Deborah seems “absolutely defeated. But then she rallies, and it gets her, you know, back up to where she wants to be, and go after what she wants.”

Einbinder agreed. “I think every evolution that these characters have undergone has felt warranted and earned. And everything that I would hope for them has been achieved. So, I think what I can observe about Ava’s growth is just that she has changed and been affected for good, I think, by Deborah and, you know, grown up. And I think the difference between a 24-year-old person and a 30-year-old person is actually like quite huge. There’s a Saturn Return, obviously, if you ascribe to that, you could, yes! You know, Ava, like really went through that on this show.”

“I feel like certainly they’ve both become more nuanced, and they’ve both affected each other, and they’ve both changed each other,” said Smart. “But I just feel like from day one that Deborah was on the page and I totally got her. It was a gift.”

“And just to be extra mysterious, I have never asked them how the series was going to end from the day we met until the finale. And I didn’t really have an idea of how it would end. I wanted to be surprised. I’ve loved being surprised every episode for all these years.”

Hacks first aired in May, 2021. Both Smart and Einbinder say they will miss their characters and the show, but that the finale feels fitting.

Einbinder looks back fondly, and after what feels like many farewells. “I feel like I’ve had like a million little wraps. Like, you know, we wrapped our LA crew and then about 80% of our crew went to Vegas, and then a smaller crew went to Paris, and then we had two wraps in Paris. So, I didn’t have a single climactic moment. I think I had a series of moments throughout the season where I just kind of, yeah, it was dawning on me that it was the end.”

“When it started to become very real to me was, as the season went on, they started wrapping certain sets, like when we were shooting in Deborah’s house, which—I love that house, it’s like running around a big giant dollhouse, I just love it, because they copied a giant mansion in Bel Air and recreated it on stage at Universal. It’s absolutely stunning. And so…the first time it happened, they said, ‘Okay, that’s a wrap, that’s a series wrap on Deborah’s bedroom.’ I was like, we’re never gonna sleep in this bedroom again? And then that’s the wrap on the kitchen. I was like, Oh my god. They let me sneak little souvenirs from each set…”

Einbinder said, “To walk away from that place is so crazy, yeah, to like sit on those couches and walk out. You know my freaking ass was shedding a damn tear.”

Season 5 offers some new settings, however, that are fresh and hilarious and take Deborah and Ava to new parts of themselves. “There are some scenes in the Montecito episode that I think are just going to go down as classic Hacks, reveals Smart. Cherry Jones plays a lesbian frenemy of Deborah’s who misunderstands the relationship between Ava and Deborah as romantic and not creative. Much hilarity ensues. There is one scene in particular that the Smart said she could not get through without cracking up. Those scenes also offer a fascinating take on queerness in Hollywood and the pressure to come out. And Deborah and Ava, in fact, go along with the assumption that they are gay, so that they can get an iconic jumpsuit from Jones’s closet!

Season 5 may be its queerest yet. Einbinder said, “I think, like, Deborah Vance is such a queer icon. I think that is central to who she is. I think one of the most amazing conversations that I’ve seen represented in our show about queerness and about queer icons is between Tim Bagley and Carl Clemons-Hopkins in Palm Springs at the bar where they’re discussing what it is to love a diva. You know, what it is to see and support someone before they are given mainstream approval, when she is in her Vegas journey and believing in her, and I think Deborah Vance is the epitome of a queer icon.”

But Einbinder says her character, Ava, is also “And I think like, we have people writing to their own experience. Ava is a product of queer people creating “a vivid and authentic character. And when I first read this character on the page, I was like, this is a fully realized human being. There are no tropes. There’s no parody. It is what happens when people write to their [queer] experience. And the spirit of the show is about this underdog. You know what I mean? And that is so true. To the experience of a lot of queer people, and so it’s just all the way through it. It’s all the way through the spirit of the show, as well as just being filled with these amazing characters who obviously revolve around the diva herself.”

Season 5 cast: Series regulars Emmy® winner Jean Smart, Emmy® winner Hannah Einbinder, Emmy® winner Paul W. Downs, Megan Stalter, Emmy® nominee Carl Clemons-Hopkins, Mark Indelicato, and Rose Abdoo return alongside guest stars Emmy® nominee Robby Hoffman, Tony Goldwyn, Emmy® nominee Kaitlin Olson, Emmy® nominee Christopher McDonald, Emmy® nominee Jane Adams, Lauren Weedman, Poppy Liu, Johnny Sibilly, Luenell, Angela E. Gibbs, and Caitlin Reilly. Guest star Christopher Briney joins the cast.

Season 5 credits: HACKS is created and showrun by Emmy® winners Paul W. Downs, Lucia Aniello, and Jen Statsky. The series is executive produced by Downs and Aniello via their Paulilu banner, Statsky via First Thought Productions, as well as Emmy® winners Michael Schur via Fremulon, David Miner for 3 Arts Entertainment, Morgan Sackett, Joe Mande, Aisha Muharrar, Nate Young, and Ashley Glazier. The studio is Universal Television, a division of Universal Studio Group.

Hacks is now streaming.