How 'Hacks' Production Designer Rob Tokarz Scaled Things Up For The Final Season

Since “Hacks” premiered in 2021, it’s fair to say that the Little Debbies have grown in number. Over its five-season run, audiences got to ride the roller coaster career of comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her writer, Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder). Audiences, both at home and in the theaters, have watched them conquer the American (and, for a brief stint in season four, Singaporean) comic scene. To capture the sprawling career of this show business icon, she needed a backdrop that had all the glitz and glamor that would follow such an A-lister. To create this world, production designer Rob Tokarz, who has been with the show since its second season, talks the nuts and bolts, the callbacks, and the cameos that helped him set the stage for the final season of “Hacks”. 

“Every time I start a season, I binge-watch the previous seasons, and you just see how they evolve in these spaces,” says Tokarz of preparing for the series finale. As Vance pursues a grand comeback show at Madison Square Garden, we visit a lot of the places that foregrounded her success: the offices of Schaefer & LuSaque in the American Cement Building, Vance’s sprawling home in Vegas, and even some of the sets from “Who’s Making Dinner,” the show that first shot her to fame. “You just want to make sure the set looks right but also honors who they are.”

“One of the big things that ‘Hacks’ started with was seeing the machine that powers someone like Debra Vance,” says Tokarz on developing the different layers of the show. It’s not just about Jean Smart making the audience laugh with all her quippy one-liners. It’s about all the little parts that need to come together before the punchline: the writing rooms, the stagehands, the management, and the production efforts that tie it all together.

So when “Hacks” approached this legendary New York venue, it had to come with this signature inside look into the show business that has come to define the HBO show. “It’s not just what a Madison Square Garden show looks like from an audience perspective. It's what’s behind the scenes. Can we find someone on Instagram who went to a show and could show us how the roadies have their boxes set up and how they move through space?” He even admitted that, in creating the sets behind Vance, he sometimes uses the grip carts and equipment from the show’s actual crew to emphasize the inner workings of show business. 

Although this last season goes across America, there’s always a return to the city where everything first happened: Vegas. On working within the city’s myriad of styles, Tokarz notes, “Vegas is broad by itself. Very aggressively, whatever style of architecture it wants to do, it's going to go whole hog.”

In this send-off season, Tokarz finally got to do something he’s been dreaming of since coming on to the show: contribute to Deborah’s opulent manor in a Vegas enclave. “This season, we were able to add to the house by building her closet!” The home was originally designed by Jon Carlos, opens in new tab, the show’s initial production designer. “It exudes the wealth that Deborah has accomplished, but also it's her personality, so it needs to have the bits and pieces that make her her.”  He lists the animal prints, antiques, the microwave from the 90s, and the soda machine that surrounds the comedian. 

Describing his addition to the home, Tokarz mentions that we find Deborah “in this icy blue wig room, and it had this flamingo wallpaper behind her.” To create this new space, he worked off the blues and pinks that have become a kind of signature color palette for the character. “So we wanted to have the softness of the space. We wanted to have those color tones that she looks so great against. We wanted it to be elegant. We wanted it to feel really real.”

If there’s one thing that’s notable about this season, it's that it’s jam-packed with famous locales and faces. To get all the people and places to fit together (and to accommodate everyone’s shooting schedules), the whole season was shot, not chronologically, but based on location. “We block shoot,” said Tokarz of the method, “which means instead of shooting things sequentially, we group together sets, so I kept 10 scripts in my head all season long.”  

This way, the show wasn’t only able to get iconic locations, but also host some massive stars, including “The Summer I Turned Pretty” actor Christopher Briney, “Xena: Warrior Princess” star Renée O'Connor, teen idol Jesse McCartney, and playwright Tony Kushner. Not to mention internet legend Trisha Paytas and comedian-writer Jordan Firstman. Although Paul Downs, the show’s co-creator who plays Jimmy LuSaque, is a regular on-screen, this last season surprises audiences with another co-creator appearance. In episode 3, “No New Tricks,” Lucia Aniello has a brief appearance as the real estate agent who’s working with Marcus to hunt for a casino space to invest in.  And one of the most exciting cameos of this season isn’t in fact a person or a place, but a show. When DJ (Kaitlin Olson) reappears, asking her mom to make good on her promise of appearing alongside her in the globe-trotting reality show “Amazing Race,” Deborah has no choice but to oblige her daughter’s request. Creating this show within a show—which “Hacks” has done many times before—took an extra level of expertise. “The entire time we had contact with the producers of ‘Amazing Race’. They were super supportive of it and wanted to make sure everything was right,” says Tokarz. “They provided the clue boxes, the envelopes, and all the little details like the little flags and arrows so that you know which counter to go to… And right down to the fact that we use their operators as background. The camera people that you see on screen are the actual operators for the ‘Amazing Race’ because there's a choreography, there's a ballet to the way that they shoot the show.”

As season five of “Hacks” follows Deborah, Ava, and the team one last time as they stumble, fall, crack jokes, and get back up, the approaching final episode becomes even more bittersweet. It’s going to be one tough curtain call, but when that farewell eventually appears on screen, these seriously funny ladies will be remembered with lights, glitter, flamingos—thanks, in part, to the work of Tokarz and his team.