[Editor’s Note: This piece contains spoilers for the series finale of “Hacks.”]
We have made no secret over the years that IndieWire thinks “Hacks” is one of the best-shot shows, comedy or otherwise, on TV. Cinematographer Adam Bricker has helmed the look of the series from the very first oner introducing Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) backstage at her Vegas casino residency to the last intricate drone handoff that leaves Deborah and Ava (Hannah Einbinder) exactly where they deserve to be: together.
Getting to sculpt the show for five seasons with a core group of collaborators is an increasingly rare gift, and Bricker and the “Hacks” camera department left it all out on the field in the show’s finale, also titled “Hacks.” The episode takes one last glorious road trip to a closed-down Louvre in Paris. The finale again casts Jean Smart in a kind of red light that makes her lethal to all millennial bisexuals, not just Ava, and it revisits some of the more challenging and rewarding visual storytelling that has elevated the series over the years.
In particular, there was a lot of intention around the opening of the final episode, a back-to-basics blessing to shoot in a scrappier, indie-filmmaking way across some of the best spots in Paris, and a lot of stress in making sure they got the final shot of the series perfect. With a lot of effort from Bricker and his team, and a little help from some friends at the Bellagio, they pulled it off in spades.
Bricker spoke to IndieWire about some of the marquee moments in the final episode, and how they help make the “Hacks” finale as visually satisfying as writers/creators Jen Statsky, Paul W. Downs, and Lucia Aniello make it narratively complete.
Ava’s Studio Oner
Bricker has always cherished the experience of reading “Hacks” scripts, but he was especially protective of the final set for Season 5. Even when director Lucia Aniello started prodding him about prep, he wanted to be kept in the dark for as long as possible. All things must end, alas, but Bricker was excited that the beginning of the finale, which follows Ava on her first day as a showrunner, would mirror the opening shot of the “Hacks” pilot, following Deborah backstage at the Palmetto casino.
“I remember reading that oner in the pilot and being like, ‘I must shoot this,’” Bricker told IndieWire. “It just seemed really fitting now that we come full circle, now that Ava has found her place, and give it the same epic treatment. What was fun was we had that initial oner as a template, and we were going to try and replicate a lot of those beats. We built the set on a soundstage and were able to lay it out with the same dimensions as the Palmetto.”
Production designer Rob Tokarz actually counted the number of steps Deborah takes in the original shot in the pilot, and Tokarz and Bricker made sure that Ava was taking the same number of steps, moving in the same way, that light was hitting her the same way (sans sequined jacket, but still). Bricker wanted to make sure the flare that hits Ava as she turns around was the same, working with colorist Shane Reid, also a five-year vet of “Hacks,” to match the red hues of the original shot.
Of course, there did need to be differences, and neither Bricker nor director Lucia Aniello wanted the moment to get too cute. It’s a different, less darkly glamorous environment on a film set — many of the grips and folks moving in the background of Ava’s walk are the real series crew — and Ava doesn’t land in front of a mirror but in front of a monitor. “The final reveal was a tricky one,” Bricker said. “Everything had to be really grounded and natural. And Joel Marsh, our steadicam operator — he operated every frame on the show, including the pilot oner — I love how he moves around Ava, and we matched the close-up size between Deborah’s oner and Ava’s.”
It’s that cinematic echo that helps fuel the moment of triumph when Ava calls action. The oner is a perfect example of the way that the camera on “Hacks” can have an outside perspective emphasizing the world of its main characters, and yet also bring us into how they’re feeling, within the same shot. It’s something that “Hacks” has done since the first shot of its pilot, and something Bricker feels the crew has been able to find creative new ways to expand upon.
“The crew continuity on the show is what’s made it so special for me — both as an experience and as a creative thing,” Bricker said. “I’ve never worked on any project for this long. I think in a lot of television, you have cinematographers alternating, coming and going between seasons. There’s turnover. The folks that were here at the end were also there in the beginning. We were all in it together all the way through.”
“Hacks” à Paris
But not the whole crew could accompany Deborah and Ava to Paris, on what Deborah wants to be their final trip together before she decides to call it quits on life, as well as comedy. This is, in part, because of the 2025 jewel heist at the Louvre. Those were the last shooting days for “Hacks” and, after an intense battle with the Louvre, the series could only bring about 10 people onsite, including Smart and Einbinder.
Everyone who was in that small number — including Bricker, Marsh, first camera assistant Jamiel VanOver, the actors, the three series creators, first AD Jeff Rosenberg (who also directed “D’Amazing Race” this season) — had been present at Jean Smart’s first camera test, before shooting the pilot. “It sort of felt like its own film,” Bricker said. “You were able to strip away a lot of stuff and really get down to the core of what made the show special, which was the two of them and their connection.”
A more scrappy, indie feel characterized all of the Paris location work, as Deborah and Ava go from their private wander through the Louvre to a night out at a club to smoking on their hotel balcony just as dawn breaks. Bricker and Aniello would be leaping between Einbinder’s and Smart’s coverage as the light subtly shifted — no cheating or sky replacement or VFX, just a murderous call time. “I remember we were bouncing back and forth between sides, sort of all dancing, and when you’re doing that, your adrenaline’s going. It’s a little fun, but it’s a little frantic,” Bricker said.
This fun-frantic energy goes for more than just the camera department — costume designer Kathleen Felix-Hager delighted in having Deborah and Ava swap coats after their night out clubbing — but in the club sequence itself, Bricker and his team did get to echo back a version of the Season 4 finale and slow everything down for a second to appreciate the force of nature that is Deborah Vance.
Trying to create a visual sense of connection across the story, Bricker found the same (lethal) kind of red light that Smart dances in, atop a Singapore club, for her moment of cutting loose in Paris. But in this moment, Aniello and Bricker add the emotional dropout of Ava seeing Deborah so alive and already starting to grieve her loss by shifting into slow motion, a very rarely used device in the “Hacks” cinematic toolkit.
“That’s what makes it so impactful here,” Bricker said. “It gives you a little thump, and then there’s a bit of a lighting change. The red remains the same, but our movers drop out the spotlights that are searching through the room, and it becomes a bit more strobey. But because it’s in slow motion, those strobes just feel sort of off. They’re not as perfect and as choreographed. It feels very raw and real.”
It’s designed that way, and there’s a rawness to how the sequence itself was shot. Bricker, Aniello, and Marsh were all down among the dancers because communication wasn’t possible from a video village with music blasting during the scene.
“Lucia and I were down on the set. I was standing next to Joel Marsh, who was camera-operating on Steadicam. Lucia was looking over Joel’s shoulder at his monitor. We were moving Joel, and at the moment where we wanted to push in on Hannah, I was grabbing Jean to pull her back so that Joel had a little bit of space to occupy that eye line,” Bricker said. “It was nice to actually be there really intimately conducting that. I think that the whole thing just worked out so beautifully. It’s one of my favorite sequences of the whole series.”
Happy Days on the Vegas Strip
The last sequence of the whole series, which morphs from the Eiffel Tower in France to the one on the Vegas Strip, requires many of the muscles that the “Hacks” camera team built over its run. Bricker had to account for some very careful compositional balance, seamless comping of the tower transitions, and an intricately choreographed drone handoff — all timed to the Barbara Streisand and Judy Garland duet, “Get Happy/Happy Days Are Here Again,” that had been in the minds of Aniello, Statsky, and Downs for seven years as the only way to end the show.
It’s not the first time “Hacks” has done some intense things with drones on the Strip, but the stakes are always (pun intended) quite high. The show has to permit for control over the strip and has a very narrow window in order to get it right. And if it’s cloudy, as it was the day they were supposed to shoot the drone work, well, you’re kind of out of luck. Luckily, everyone recognized the importance of the moment, and turned what should’ve been the shooting day into a rehearsal. If it worked, it would go into the episode. And if not, they’d reshoot it.
“It was really valuable that we did that because we learned a lot about the flow and the timing of the shot, and it was really, really good to have a test run. And then we were fortunate to be able to come back and reshoot it, and it was just perfect. It was meant to be, this perfect blue sky. We had done some sun mapping, and me and our first AD, Jeffrey Rosenberg, figured out that if we can get in between 10 and 11, when the sun is right between buildings, we’ll get this classic ‘Hacks’ flair.”
More than that, the extra time allowed location managers Kyle Sucher and Danny Finn to get in touch with the Bellagio to get use of the fountain during the shoot. “That wasn’t something we had during the test run,” Bricker said.
And it’s something that helped make the shot. Both the show’s drone operator, Ben Ellingson, and the camera operator, Natasha Mullan, had the Streisand/Garland song playing in their ears as the shot unfolded. They were whispering together to manage the dance of the handoff as the camera leaves Deborah and Ava on the street and takes to the Vegas skies, in time to see the fountain go off.
“We were sitting at our DIT station watching, and so many things have to go right in a oner like that. You’re mentally checking the boxes — ‘OK, we got that, we nailed that, OK this take might work.’ And then, as the camera’s pulling away, there’s a musical beat that just perfectly coincided with the Bellagio fountains, and you forget all of the technical things. You’re just, like, ‘Oh my God,’” Bricker said. “It was just such a beautiful, magic, absolutely ‘Hacks-y’ ending.”
Oh my god, beautiful, magic, and “Hacks-y” — that’s about what the camerawork on “Hacks” does, yeah.
“Hacks” is now playing on HBO Max.
