On May 28, 2026, the acclaimed comedy series Hacks (HBO) premiered its final episode. In it, the show’s two leading ladies—veteran comic Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her younger, more progressive, writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder)—take a final trip to Paris, together. I say final because—beware spoilers—Deborah has just been diagnosed with cancer, has decided to forego treatment for all the obvious reasons, and, instead, is planning to seek medical-aid-in-dying in Switzerland. Ava is, by turns, furious, distraught, pleading, and only then, finally, reluctantly supportive.
Over breakfast, before heading to the clinic, Deborah and Ava bandy about some gallows humor about the latter’s imminent demise—not for an upcoming show, of course, but because workshopping such material is who they are. Because tapping this innate well of creativity, shared now between them, has sustained the pair not only as characters over five seasons but also—in a tribute to the show’s artistry—as seemingly real people in our minds. The joke they conjure up is that “The best part of dying for a person with disordered eating is getting a second croissant.”
But while Ava goes to the bathroom, leaving Deborah to sit pensively alone, we’re reminded of the comedy legend’s indefatigable attention to detail, in this, a “love story” about craft: she opens her ever-handy notebook to finetune the joke further. What she lights on is the stronger of the two versions: “The worst part about dying is I can’t even enjoy being bone-thin.” Of course, there’s no point in committing her revamped jape to the page; only—as Smart’s expressionistic range reveals—this is exactly the point. The point not for death but for life: to continue collaborating with Ava, and—as the partners finally decide—write at least another hour’s worth of material, even if Deborah can’t live for another thirty years. She will not go on to Switzerland.
That hour will be penned about none other than treatment, sickness, cancer.
The two embrace, and the effect is a perfectly balanced tone of poignancy and perseverance, underscored by one of the most beamish mash-ups I know: Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand’s duet of “Happy Days Are Here Again” and “Get Happy,” which somehow always makes me cry. This time, I wept.
I am not of course the first to call this finale—or, for that matter, the show’s entire five seasons—one of the greatest in recent television history. Its celebration of chosen family; its validation of artistic deliberation; its vista into accomplishing such greatness by chipping away, as one would a block of marble that can be hewed only over time; its wit and humanity and humor—on all this and more, one can read the work of myriad cultural critics.
Here, I want to focus on only two other aspects of Hacks, in its final season: the show’s handling, first, of AI (what else?), and, second, of disability.
Admittedly, Hacks has also received ample coverage for its response to the former: that is, for repudiating this agency and creativity—and thus humanity—effacing force in our lives. Briefly, let me explain: at one point, Deborah nearly helps to train a chatbot that would overlay her comedic panache atop the flat rhetorical surface of users’ toasts or speeches. She’s game—for the huge payday if nothing else. But then the tech bro pitching the idea (Alex Moffat, played well because detestably) goes too far: he suggests that Deborah will eventually use it to revise, even, her own work. The barb she thrusts back at him is one of the high points of the series: “Why are you trying to optimize the creative process? That’s one of the things we’ve actually figured out.” Artistic brilliance, Deborah’s realized through her work with Ava, can grow only out of “creative friction”—especially alongside artistic “soulmates”—as Michael Schulman has beautifully summarized the message.
Hacks, then, powerfully platforms human creativity via concerted, careful, conversational collaboration. But even more than the collaboration itself, the show vindicates its movement at a crawl, promising that the creation to emerge will be all the more coruscating, sustaining, affirming for the halting, interpersonal pace with which it was made. It’s a pace that tellingly aligns with one Moya Bailey has limned in the context of disability theory: a tempo that proceeds only at a rate of trust, rather than sterile efficiency, so that nonnormative bodyminds, and the wisdom they contain, are included in the work of collective (for Bailey) intellectual inquiry.
This synergy brings us to the second point I mentioned above, which, by contrast, has gotten hardly any attention at all: Hacks ascends to its triumphant zenith on the back of certain invigorating ideas about embodiment and endurance and creativity that have everything to do with disability, albeit broadly defined.
As I’ve written for Synapsis before, I’m a professor of disability studies and a proudly disabled individual myself, one who uses a cane and brace. This means that I’m particularly attentive to moments when popular culture adopts an ethos that might be called crip. The term reclaims the slur word cripple, signals an anti-ableist politics, and imagines disability as an identity and complex phenomenology, not just of problems or pain, but of possibility, as well. As the bioethicist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has persuasively shown, disability might even be conserved, for the narrative, ethical, and aesthetic “resources” it confers. One driver of these resources, theorists like Bailey and Alison Kafer have argued, is the way somatopsychic difference changes one’s experience of time, often in curlicues of distillation against the rigid standardization of our ableist world: crip time versus its clock counterpart. Hacks, for its part, suggests that the accelerated efficiency of AI is a still-more troubling evil twin of this second temporal scheme, of chrononormativity (a la Elizabeth Freeman). And in embracing the fissures with which humans can pierce the liquid plane of perfected slop, the show, indeed, reveals a spirit that might be called crip (just as something can be queer, or queer-coded, without featuring any explicitly queer characters at all).
In its final episode, however, the show’s brassy protagonist is in fact disabled—or will become so imminently. At least, she can be considered as much if we take disability to mean any feature of mind or body that limits one’s function or elicits stigma or effects some combination of both. Clearly, Deborah is worried about this combination: becoming a distortion of her former self and being remembered, specifically, in this attenuated state.
Is it any wonder, then, that the show flirts with the euthanasia plot, a reflection of our society’s assumption that to be dead is better than to be disabled. We can find it in such potboilers as Jojo Moyes’s Me Before You—and the subsequent film, which elicited scorn from the disability community—and Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning film Million Dollar Baby. In both cases, dramatic tension arises not so much from the lived realities of disability than from their ableist reduction: a fabulation of psychological anguish that we crips must experience, knowing as we do how indisputably burdensome one is with, or how irreparably sallow life must be after, our independence significantly curtailed. In deciding to die, however, the leads of both works reclaim their agency by ending it altogether—while melodramatically engineering a gutting resolution of grim reality and grief.
By comparison, Hacks is an anti-ableist triumph. True, Deborah isn’t as significantly disabled as either Moyes’s Will Traynor or Eastwood’s Maggie Fitzgerald—and indeed, the show never shows her explicitly physically compromised at all—but it insists on a futurity (a la Kafer, again) that will be disabled, all the same. It achieves as much with a coup d’etat of narrative resistance, inverting the euthanasia plot and revealing that the results needn’t be any less rewarding for the perseverance of unwieldy—perhaps unsightly—embodiment in the frame. The final episode, in fact, reveals that such a reversal can pack just as much of an emotional wallop with still more insight into the human condition, to boot.
That insight, we’ve already observed, revolves around creativity—and, in the show’s final moments, creativity as implicated in a generative relationship with cripness. By this, I mean that the finale transfigures the latter into a catalyst for the former, as Deborah enters—what to call it?—the spectacular tenth of what we thought was only her nine artistic lives. The comic’s pursuit of greatness will continue, precisely by heeding, embracing, plying—performing—the panache and possibilities and, yes, surely pain, of sickness. And as her aesthetic matures further, it will follow trail blazed by some of the greats: Beethoven, Milton, and Monet, for a few examples, all of whose “late style” not only ensured their legacy but was decidedly crip. (The point is made beautifully by Garland-Thomson in the preface to a recent volume co-edited by me and Angelica Duran.)
Meanwhile, the sign-off episode of Hacks levels a final blow at AI: humans, it insists, can preserve their humanity not only by being creative—and connecting to others through creativity, precisely by refusing to optimize it—but by shining their creativity through the prism of the very thing out of AI’s reach: experience. More specifically, the experience of embodiment—of embodiment going wrong, or unpredictably haywire, most of all.
In other words, the supreme gift—even genius—of Hacks is this: the show inspires hope about aspects of human existence that have typically been coded in plangent terms, aspects that can be summed up under the banner of—what else, now—disability. I’m not here to denounce this plaintiveness outright, for personal and intellectual reasons alike. Lord knows I’ve mourned my changed and ever-changing body—and I’ve learned much from the work of scholars such as Jasbir Puar, whose Right to Maim outlines the horrors of debility: a steady, or sudden, wearing down of the body as a result of oppression, violence, and war.
But those of us who have acquired disability, or live with it, under other conditions can maintain a sensitivity to these injustices—in thought, word, and deed—while at the same time developing crip pride and knowledge for ourselves, however ambivalently this process unfolds. Especially now, it’s imperative that we do so—to show the way for others in our stead.
That sounds ominous, doesn’t it? Others in our stead. Disability has always been the most fluid identity category of them all, as Lennard Davis has argued, but at least in a relative sense, the category is widening rapidly as I write this. Quite apart from any adverse somatopsychic effects of our dominant technologies, AI is poised to catch out the limits of everyone, even the ablest in society; it’s poised, that is, to render even these people—who’ve never before wanted for savviness or speed—deficient in the extreme. And yet, if Hacks, if disability studies, if this essay has anything to teach us, it’s in just such a deficit—in the inherent interestingness of embodiment—that connection, art, and hope reside.
For my part, I plan to carry this hope forward into my scholarship and teaching; I’ll be doing so as higher education faces evermore existential threats, related to AI and much else. (For those not deluged by such talk, read Jay Caspian Kang’s recent interview with University of Utah dean Hollis Robbins to get a sense of what I mean. Disability studies, I’d argue, has a leadership role to play in the way forward.) Even so, the shape that such a hermeneutics of crip optimism—too wordy?—should take exactly is a subject for the fall (with a glance at more positive takes on AI, technology, and accessibility, as well). At present, it’s enough to embrace the fact that we are, most definitely, hacks, every one of us; indeed, we should be thankful for the limitations this epithet suggests. That’s because we can find meaning, only, in hacking it, in bodies, together.
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