On last night’s Emmys red carpet, the first-time winner announced the HBO Max comedy will be saying farewell after its next chapter.
On the Emmys red carpet last night, Hacks star Hannah Einbinder revealed that the show’s fifth season will be its last. The newly minted Emmy winner shared the news with E! News right before the ceremony started. “We’re going to start [filming] next week, and knowing it’s the last season is really bittersweet. But I think it’s right. It’s nice to do something as many times as it should be done,” Einbinder said. “Not overstay your welcome. Rip it and do it and laugh and cry.”
This always seemed to be the plan, given the HBO Max series’ creators — Jen Statsky, Lucia Aniello, and Paul W. Downs — have said in multiple interviews that they always envisioned Hacks as a five season show.
The group of creatives told Variety in an interview after last season’s finale that they had an end in mind from the start and were working out what the path was to get there. “We are now breaking up Season 5, and we have to see how many episodes it will take us to get to where we know we’re going to go,” Downs told the entertainment publication. “The final scene of the final episode has been in our minds since 2015, and we’re excited to get there. But that may take more episodes than we can fit in the season. So the truth is that we don’t know.”
At last night’s ceremony, the series’ two leading ladies took home statues. Jean Smart clinched her seventh Emmy win and second consecutive win in the Lead Actress in a Comedy Series category. And Einbinder nabbed her first Emmy Award, beating out last year’s winner Liza Colón-Zayas — along with Jessica Williams, Janelle James, Kathryn Hahn, Catherine O’Hara, and Sheryl Lee Ralph — in the Supporting Actress category. The new Emmy winner ended her acceptance speech on a prescient note that earned her several headlines as the evening’s events came to a close: “Go Birds, fuck ICE, and free Palestine.”
