“Hacks” Season 4 may have been about Deborah Vance’s groundbreaking ascent into late night TV, but she was joined by a real-life late night pioneer on-screen in co-star Merrill Markoe.
After being a consultant on the Max comedy series for years, the Emmy-winning writer effectively plays herself in the show within the show’s writers’ room, bringing with her more than 40 years’ worth of industry knowledge.
“I wanted to write on Season 4. I just thought, ‘Wow, I really relate to the tension between the head writer and the star.’ It’s great to have it be two women. I relate to that and it would be really fun to add my perspective to that. So I tried to talk [Paul W. Downs] into it, and he said, ‘Well, we’ve already written all of the season,’” Markoe told TheWrap ahead of the Season 4 finale, which premiered Thursday. “This was after I consulted first, so then he called me back and he said, ‘How would you feel about being on the writing staff on the show?’ And that just made me laugh out loud. I thought that is so f—king funny. So I said ‘Yes.’”
The writer-turned-actress was the original head writer on “Late Night With David Letterman” in 1982, ultimately winning three Emmy Awards for her work (she also has a Writers Guild award and was awarded their Laurel Award for TV Writing Achievement in 2020).
“The tension between Deborah and Ava is real. I mean, it’s a very tense position for the host, depending on how easy-going they are,” Markoe shared. “I don’t know any of the other hosts now, except I know Conan [O’Brien] a little bit and I think he’s maybe easier-going. Letterman, not an easy-going guy. Deborah, more like that, I think, than not.”
“It’s a very stressful job to have to come through with stuff every single day. You have to be adjusted to that,” she said. “I’m a person who likes to write every day, so I sort of fit it. But you do need to have a staff that all gets what the task is and is able to fulfill the task within the boundaries of what the host is going to look at and like. Lots of solutions to every problem. But if it’s a solution that the host doesn’t like, then you might as well not have thought of them.”
With that much hands-on expertise to share, showrunners Lucia Aniello, Jen Statsky and Paul W. Downs told TheWrap that getting to feature Markoe is “very much what the show is about, giving women their due.”
“She’s been in the ‘Hacks’ world with us for years now, but we always like to bring in women who have more of a similar experience to Deborah in terms of their age and working and rising in the industry,” Statsky shared. “Merrill was someone who had contributed to the show before, in the writing, and then we just realized as we were casting and making the show — we always wanted the show to be funny first, but we also want it to feel real. Having her in the show just felt like she had this incredibly specific POV that we wanted to highlight and share and also pay our respects to.”
“The fact that she did co-create ‘Letterman,’ she has a storied history with the late night genre and she’s brilliant and funny. The show is about these women in their quest for dignity and respect and reverence,” she continued. “Merrill is one of those women that we should absolutely respect and pay reverence to and talk about even more than we do, because she’s so brilliant and has done so much and is such an important figure in the history of late night and is still working today. We’re lucky to have her in our orbit for the show.”
“She always came with pitches and alts and jokes. She is so funny and a lot of them ended up in the show. She cracked those writers up so much,” Downs agreed. “They love working with her, too. All of those comedians, all the people that make up the writers’ room, they really got a kick out of her, because she’s just so funny and so sharp.”
From her point of view, Markoe also found the show’s cast and crew to be top-notch: “‘Hacks’ is one of my favorite shows … It was fun, it was a great group. I enjoyed hanging out with everybody.”
“I can’t believe the amount of coverage they do. We were flying by the seat of our pants and we were always planning for things to just not really work out. We’d have to bail out and make fun of them if they didn’t,” she recalled of her time in late night. “‘Hacks’ is almost being shot like a movie, it’s really a careful shoot they’re doing. I can’t get over the amount of coverage. We’re sitting in a room full of cards, and that’s a standard for talk shows — you put up ideas on a board with a tack on it to say what’s coming and what’s going. Don’t forget, the thing about a talk show is you have to keep feeding it day after day after day, so you need things that could repeat.”
“When I sat down in that room for the first time, I was compulsively reading all the things that they had written on those board on the cards, which I don’t think anyone can read on screen since they’re not really part of the script, they’re just behind us. But they were great! They were really good ideas,” Markoe further praised. “I thought that was interesting, that whoever was writing those cards understood how to write for a talk show.”
As Aniello put it — and as Jean Smart’s Deborah tells Hannah Einbinder’s Ava this season — in order to make a good comedy, whether its a scripted sitcom or a daily talk show, you have to make it for yourself first.
“We try to divorce the writing process from being observed, we just can’t think about it. We really just write the show for each other and I think that is true for our amazing writing staff as well,” she said. “We just try to make each other laugh and do the show that we think we should make, because you cannot please everybody and we totally know that. So we just do our best to try to make a show we want to watch, and that’s all we can do. Or else, I don’t know what the alternative is.”
As for Markoe, who was romantically linked to Letterman for a decade in the ’80s and is now represented by manager Sheri Kelton, she knows first-hand what Deborah and Ava are going through as a pair, even if they’re fictional.
“A character like Deborah is used to doing every single thing for herself, like all stand-ups are. The first three seasons, they had Ava writing for her, but she’s used to being in control of everything. A lot of it just slips past you, and also all the pressure that comes when you’re on TV every day,” she explained. “That was one of the biggest takeaways I had when I would try to re-imagine that situation. You get a rating every day. The guys that I knew would roll out of bed and heard a rating every day. Imagine your job every single day going, ‘Well, you were better yesterday. Today, not so much, but maybe tomorrow.’ It’s just a nerve-wracking thing to do to people.”
“Also, you don’t really know how an audience is going to react and the reaction is everything. When I used to write for the ‘Letterman Show,’ I would stand in that doorway right by the stage and my heart would be beating like I was going to faint,” Markoe added. “Because if it wasn’t the right amount of a laugh, no matter that it was really smart or that I thought it was the greatest joke ever, it meant that it had just failed. The laughter is supposed to be the gauge.”
The acclaimed writer also opened up about the evolution of late night television in the 43 years since she launched “Letterman” — although, she doesn’t quite watch it herself any longer.
“I stopped watching after I left my own position. I watch it in clips that come by on the Internet, but it seems to me that it’s gotten way more political than it used to be. In my era — Dave and Jay [Leno] — neither one of them really did a whole lot of political stuff. Dave did some sort of generic political stuff, but not too much specific,” she recalled. “On the other hand, we didn’t have a president quite like this one. So I’m happy that it evolved that way.”
“When we started, it was Johnny Carson and before that, Jack Paar was a big show — and that was actually more political, now that I’m thinking of it, but it wasn’t about political opinion so much as it was having political people on,” Markoe noted. “I looked at the ‘Carson Show,’ which I am one of the few people who was really not a fan of that show, I didn’t like how it was with women. It was either flirty or pretty much nothing with women and a very specific kind of woman came on there and I just didn’t relate to him. I know all the guys thought he was the cool uncle that you’d want to hang out with. For me, he looked like a guy who was icy cold and would ignore me at a party, so I wasn’t into it.”
“We were told that we couldn’t do three things on the show that followed him: he didn’t want a monologue, he didn’t want the announcer to sit down in the chair by the desk to chat with the host and he didn’t want us to do ‘Stump the Band,’ which was a thing they did all the time. Those were his three asks,” she recounted. “I remember laughing and thinking, ‘So that just leaves every single thing in the whole world.’ I didn’t want to do any of those things. We ate up so much territory. Now the guys each are sort of more tailored to whatever their personalities are. It continues to be a wide open space for people, which is good.”
However, despite high-profile attempts from Taylor Tomlinson, Lilly Singh, Busy Philipps and even Joan Rivers, late night is still overwhelmingly a man’s sport.
“If I could explain the United States of America right now, I would be amazed at myself. I have no idea. It just makes completely no sense to me,” Markoe said, matter-of-factly. “There’s always been a lot of women who could do a nice job at it, but there’s been weird things just in my lifetime. When I first started writing comedy and was in L.A., I was told there weren’t really any women on the radio. The reason they said there weren’t — before it got defanged and then there were lots of women on the radio — was people don’t like to listen to women’s voices. They just said that. What do you say to that? Anyway, it got overthrown and maybe at some point in the future it’ll just be one of those things where you go, ‘Really?’”
“Taylor Tomlinson did a good job doing the game show, because she’d be in there pitching for the same guests with the same roster,” she pointed out. “When you go outside of that roster of guests, which is what we did on the ‘Letterman Show,’ then it’s the whole world. But you’ve got to find people who deliver when you go to them. Just because you think your veterinarian is hilarious doesn’t mean when you put them on a stage you’re getting anything.”
Markoe also revealed which moments from “Hacks” this season stood out to her as most relatable.
“There was a scene where Ava goes to Deborah and has a long bunch of jokes for her, and Deborah scans it and goes, ‘What else you got?’ The hosts can be brutal that way,” she said. “They’re used to doing it all themselves. When you’re a stand-up, you’re used to going to your own material, you’ve always got control of it. You don’t necessarily like what someone hands you, that’s just the way it goes.”
“Sometimes later on you show them the same stuff … a real interesting, specific thing that happened to me was I used to be in charge of the remotes. We’d go out and do a lot of shooting at various places, and I would sometimes do pieces about my dogs, because I was sort of worming my own point of view in there a little bit where I could,” she shared. “I did this thing called ‘Dog Poetry,’ and it was my dog reciting a poem with a voiceover and it played really well. But it took me three different times to get it on the show. Dave kept saying, the phrase he used to use, it’s ‘laugh-free.’ And it wasn’t laugh-free, as it turned out, it killed.”
“So the panic of being that guy who’s going to show up in front of the camera and be responsible for everything that does or does not get a laugh is huge,” Markoe continued. “The opening of the season, they had Deborah sort of making herself faint, having a panic attack, because it is massively a bigger task than you imagine it to be. And people are cruel with the way they just review it. I don’t even know what it’d be like now, because most of my tenure doing this was without the Internet. I can’t even imagine how much crueler it is with the Internet — and instantaneous as well. Just everybody judging everything without empathy.”
Luckily for “Hacks,” it was already renewed for a fifth season ahead of Thursday night’s finale.
“The show is about a woman in the later stages of her career looking to leave her mark on the world. Season 5 is going to be very much solely about that. As much as the late night show was a white whale for her, that’s not, ultimately, what the series is about. So we get to explore next season what it really is about, which is about how these two women change each other and change the world,” Downs further shared. “This was just a chapter in the story of ‘Hacks,’ because while it was something so important to her character, and while late night is an institution that is so valuable and important in America, we got to also put in Deborah’s mouth a lot of the things that we are experiencing in our industry that are changing. Next season is going to be really exciting.”
And as someone who has undeniably left her mark on this great American institution, would Markoe do anything differently given the chance?
“Given the circumstances that I was in at the time, I can’t imagine having made any other decision. There’s other things I like to write as well. If something really amazing showed up, if you put me back in time in exactly the same spot and you gave me one of these other things that I always really wanted, I might think, ‘Well, you know, I already did this one. Now I’ll do this one,’” she concluded. “I can’t imagine how they could work me into Season 5, but maybe they can.”
“Hacks” Seasons 1-4 are now streaming on Max.
