Jean Smart told interviewers this week that she had mixed feelings about the Hacks series finale. [1] This is the right reaction to a show that gave her Deborah Vance — a role that arrived late in a career that deserved arriving earlier.

Hacks premieres its fifth and final season on HBO Max on April 9 with a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score from early critics. [2] The show has earned its valediction. It is the rare comedy that took its subject matter — a legendary female comedian navigating obsolescence, a younger woman navigating her own ambitions, and the relationship between them — with the seriousness those subjects deserve. Smart's Vance is not a caricature of a diva. She is a study in what it means to be brilliant and unwanted simultaneously.

The timing is accidental but resonant. Hacks premieres the day after a ceasefire announced in a week when the dominant narrative was about men declaring victories. The show's five seasons have been, among other things, about what happens to women who refuse to concede that their moment has passed. The finale lands in a moment when the culture could use that argument.

Smart told CBS Sunday Morning that the ending required her to hold "gratitude and grief at the same time." That is a precise description of what the best television feels like when it ends — and what watching someone do the thing they were built to do, for the last time, feels like from the outside. [1]

Watch it. Watch it twice.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles