TV Is Full of Stories About Creative Work — Minus the Work Part
HBO’s “Hacks” is more interested in its characters’ personalities than their output. But plenty of great stories have been told about the creative process itself.The premise of HBO’s smart hit comedy “Hacks,” just finished with its first season and renewed for a second, is that a played-out older Las Vegas comedian, Deborah Vance, ends up paired with a canceled and unemployable Gen Z comic, who is meant to help her write new material. Both of them view the association as beneath them. Deborah has always written her own material. Ava, who shows up for the job without even researching her new employer’s work, smarts under the perception that Deborah doesn’t regard her as very talented.When, in the second episode, a flat tire leaves them stranded in the desert, Ava begins to complain that Deborah is making the job unnecessarily hard, even though Ava is “good.” Deborah, regally outfitted in a flowing robe and parasol, responds coldly. “Good is the minimum,” she says. “It’s the baseline. You have to be so much more than good.” Even if you’re great, she says — and even if you’re lucky — you still have to work, and hard, “and even that is not enough.” Deborah doesn’t respect her new employee because Ava has done nothing to earn that respect and has in fact done much to discourage it. She then abandons Ava in the desert.Deborah may be a highhanded, abusive boss, but she is also right. Watching this show, though, you sometimes wonder if it believes her. Like most shows about creative endeavors, “Hacks” commits to the idea that its characters are hustlers: Deborah, in particular, is ruthless when it comes to keeping her Vegas time slots. But one thing that is rarely on the table in shows like this is real failure. (Deborah might lose her slots, and Ava her job, but we’ve seen enough of these stories to suspect those would only be stages on the way to their eventual success.) And despite Deborah’s speech, one thing we rarely see her and Ava do is actual work, hard or otherwise. They bounce jokes off each other, briefly, in the first episode, and Ava pitches Deborah a few times. We see Deborah’s standup, but aren’t offered much insight into her process. We barely see Ava’s work at all. These women are in comedy, but for all it matters to the show, they might as well be in car sales. At least in a show about a dealership, you would see them sell some cars.Taking failure off the table, rarely depicting creative work — these are linked choices, and in making them, “Hacks” is hardly alone. Even outside the realm of TV and film, you find things like Sally Rooney’s novel “Conversations With Friends,” about a poet whose poetry never appears in the book; everybody says she’s great, and we’re left to imagine why. You wouldn’t watch “Rocky” and expect to see neither training nor boxing, but in stories about artists, it’s typical to relocate all the struggle, all the drama, into the protagonists’ personal lives. They are blocked creatively because they are blocked personally. Or they are fine creatively, but personal conflict erupts right before the big show and pours out in their performance. The work, the talent, is a given. The story is elsewhere.“Hacks” is not centrally concerned with the business of show business. Its biggest story lines involve changes in gender politics and tastes — in comedy, but not only comedy — across generations. The show that Ava eventually pushes Deborah to write sounds personal, confessional, more like Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette” than a Vegas comedy set. But we never see it; we’re only told it bombed, which might have been interesting to watch. Ava’s other major intervention is accusing Deborah of not sticking up for other women, which leads to a scene in which Deborah lectures a male heckler, then pays him $1.69 million to never again enter a comedy club. “Hacks” can get away with this — can avoid showing its characters developing their work — because we accept the premise that they are both talented. If it wanted to suggest they were bad or mediocre at what they do, we would have to see it.They assert that failure lies at the heart of all art, and that any story about art is a story about progressive failures.There are works out there about people who are artistic failures. Some have no talent, while others just have no luck. In the first two minutes of Elaine May’s “Ishtar,” we watch the two protagonists writing a song together, testing out lines, discarding what works and keeping what doesn’t. They do this throughout the movie, even in life-or-death situations, because writing songs is what they care about. The joke is that they are fine-tuning songs that are incredibly, unsalvageably bad, working toward an ideal of aesthetic perfection shared by nobody but them. This creative process is faithfully recreated by May, step by painful step, because the movie is ultimately about two guys who will never be what they want: great songwriters.In Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood,” we watch the titular director of comically hokey B-movies as he crafts “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” famous in some circles as the “worst movie ever.” Unlike May, Burton doesn’t leave the question of why Wood’s movies are so bad as a kind of holy mystery. They’re bad because Wood doesn’t attend to his actual work: He buzzes with such enthusiasm that he films one take of everything, no matter how bad. Like “Ishtar,” the film celebrates this delusional commitment by structuring itself as if it were the story of an artist who eventually won acclaim — and, like “Ishtar,” it revolves around people who are difficult to root for, not because they are unlikable but because they are incompetent. The opposite may be true for Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy,” in which Rupert Pupkin gets on TV by kidnapping a TV talk-show host. The big twist is that his routine is actually pretty funny; he’s just an unlikable guy whose name nobody can remember.The reason these movies are outliers is pretty simple: They were all bombs. (In the case of “Ishtar,” a bomb of such infamous proportions as to become a punchline for decades.) But by putting artistic struggle at their core, they assert that failure lies at the heart of all art and that any story about art is a story about progressive failures. Like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner, failure chases something it will never have. But would we know anything about the Road Runner without it?Television shows dedicated to creative work, and creative failure, are harder to find. There was “30 Rock,” about a sketch-comedy show that was, pretty clearly, hacky, unfunny and poorly run. And yes, there’s probably only so much time audiences can be expected to spend watching people tinker with songs or jokes — but other kinds of television have figured out how to mix personal drama with the actual work of their characters. There’s no reason we can’t see Deborah and Ava working together; we just don’t. “Hacks” is meant to be a show about women and the work they do that goes unrecognized. But that work seems to be recognized least of all by the show. It would have been a crazy thing to dedicate an episode to Deborah’s routine and its failure to land. But it would have supplied the missing piece of her partnership with Ava. It would have been a crazy thing, but it would have made a better show, too. Source photographs: Screen grabs from HBO MaxB.D. McClay is a critic, an essayist and a contributing editor at The Hedgehog Review and a contributing writer at Commonweal. More
