A smart Smart shows finds new crises

Amid the swirling complications of “Hacks,” there’s a familiar theme.
“Be careful what you wish for,” Jean Smart said.
In the fourth season (starting Thursday, April 10, on Max), Deborah Vance (Smart) has her wish – a latenight talk show. It’s he dream of many comedians, except ….
Joan Rivers – the real-life person sometimes compared to the fictional Deborah – did get her own talk show. It failed and her life sagged.
That might not happen on “Hacks,” but things won’t be easy. “It’s the pressure,” Smart said. It “gets to her.”
The show has always been about strong people (shown here) colliding. Hannah Einbinder plays Ava Daniels, Deborah’s head writer, forever pushing her. That’s trickier when they have a show to run.
“My biggest fear, after the first season,” Smart said, “was: ‘Now that they’re kind of friendly and working together, (will) the audience sort of see them butting heads?’”
The disputes, she said, “just get better and better … and meaner and nastier.”
There are generational difference in the characters and the actors. Smart is 73; Einbinder is 29.
Einbinder talks positively of the sex scenes she has this season. “I have found it incredibly liberating to be nude on camera. (It) helped me to feel really, like, more cool and free.”
Smart, by comparison, said she hadn’t even known there was a sex scene.
The script clearly said it, writer-producer Lucia Aniello said. “It said they’re hooking up.”
Replied Smart: “I say ‘hook up’ all the time. I don’t mean THAT.”
On other things, all generations agree. Smart said her son, 16, has a high school theater teacher who “can be verbally abusive …. I don’t see how you can possibly get good results out of somebody” that way.
Einbinder agreed. Actors are “really inherently sensitive people” who don’t need high pressure, she said.
She grew up around the business. Her mother, Laraine Newman, was one of the original “Saturday Night Live” stars.
Smart has opposite roots. “My dad was a schoolteacher,” she said. “He worked two jobs, just because he had four kids. And my mom made our clothes …. I’m actually very grateful for my childhood.”
She has worked with good people throughout her career, she said. And now she plays someone whose life is filled with the excess she wished for.