‘Hacks’ Team Explains Jean Smart Inspiration for Deborah Vance TV Guide Magazine (Exclusive)

When you suddenly spot a friend on TV, you point at the screen and cheer. That’s what happened when I saw TV Guide Magazine (TV Insider’s sister publication) of which I’m the West Coast Editor, front and center in the April 30 episode of Hacks. At a splashy event honoring the 50^th anniversary of Who’s Making Dinner?, the fictional hit 1970s sitcom where Hacks’ diva comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) got her start, a poster-sized blow-up of the classic American publication’s cover was prominently displayed. On it were a beaming young Deborah circa 1976 and her then-hubs, the late Frank Vance (or as she calls him in this episode, “my nasty bastard-ass cheating ex-husband”).

Series creator Jen Statsky explains the choice to feature the faux cover: “We’re always looking to achieve realism. For us, it made so much sense that they would be on the cover of TV Guide. It was such a huge thing of that era to be featured on that. I remember Buffy being on the cover; I was in middle school, and Buffy was huge. If you were on the cover of TV Guide, it was the center of TV cultural conversation.”

To bring the mock cover to life, production designer Rob Tokarz says, “We’d done quite a large amount of research surrounding what that time-period would feel like. Growing up, TV Guide was a regular fixture in my life. With each new issue, my grandmother would put on her glasses and mark the shows she planned to watch with a ballpoint pen.” Tokarz studied actual covers from the 1980s in which Jean Smart was featured with the cast of the sitcom Designing Women. “It was a decade later than our show within a show. It was still a valuable insight into what Jean would have looked like at that age,” Tokarz says. “Over two days of shoots, we photographed the characters of young Frank, young Deb. Costumes, Hair and Makeup made everyone read as authentic. “

The cover was just one part of an episode that added depth to Deborah’s backstory. “It was a really special episode for us. For years, such a central part of Deborah’s character has been this betrayal by her husband and this lore of the show they had, and how it all went awry,” Statsky says of Frank taking sole credit for the pilot they co-wrote, not to mention having an affair with Deborah’s sister. “And to get to dig deeper and really explore that, humanize Frank in some way, and give her a new lens for which to view that part of her life was really special and important.” At the event, a never-before-seen old interview clip is shown in which Frank says Deborah was always the funny one. She’s shocked and gratified to hear it — but also disappointed in herself that his opinion still matters to her.

If had Deborah Vance’s boldness I might go so far as to say that without TV Guide Magazine, there might not have been a Hacks. Growing up outside of Boston, Statsky’s aunt, Jean Morelli, was a subscriber. “She was the person who introduced me to TV and movies, and it was always in her house. She was the one who introduced me to Nick at Nite, so, old school sitcoms of this era, early ’70s sitcoms, that are so wonderful,” Statsky says.

In the episode, Deborah’s writing partner and sidekick Ava (Hannah Einbinder) enthuses about Nick at Nite, too. She even considers rebooting Who’s Making Dinner. So, with Hacks wrapping, would Statsky reboot one of her favorite classics? She says this about what’s next: “Paul [W. Downs, the co-creator of Hacks] and I are working on our next show right now. We’re in the beginning stages of researching and developing. It’s not a flashback sitcom, but I love sitcoms. I grew up watching sitcoms, so certainly it’s an area that in one way or another, we want to keep working in, whether it’s things we write ourselves or things we produce.” Sounds like a bunch of great cover stories are ahead for today’s TV Guide Magazine.

Hacks, Thursdays, 9/8c, HBO Max