Once again, Jean Smart took the Emmy stage and set a flawless record that no woman has before or since. On September 14, at 78 th Primetime Emmy Awards, the 75-year-old actor played the winner of the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, for the upcoming sixth and last season of Hacks. With this award, she became the first woman performer to win that award on every season of a television series.
Smart has now picked up the award a fifth consecutive year for her role as the razor-tongued Vegas comedian Deborah Vance, whose mismatched working partnership with young writer Ava Daniels formed the basis for the HBO Max series. Hacks concluded its five-season book in May and Smart’s win all but brought the curtain down on a rare Emmy hat trick of wins. The only other actor to win an award for every season of a show to have lasted at least three years was Bill Cosby when he took home the award for the three seasons of I Spy in the late 1960s. Which means Smart can be the only actress to have won five/ five.
That win pushed her overall number of Primetime Emmys to eight, tying her with Cloris Leachman and Julia Louis-Dreyfus for the top spot. That same night, Janney reached that milestone and raised her all-time tally to eight. Her previous wins were in the guest actress category for Frasier, and as support actress for the Zoe Duncan Jack & Jane/What I Like About You series.
When accepting the award, Smart simply and graciously thanked Hacks creator Lucia Aniello, Jen Statsky and Paul W. Downs for the win. “It all starts and ends with them. What a ride it’s been, ” she said. The cast and crew stood to give the actress a standing ovation, bittersweet in the moment as the show that had afforded this late-career high, the last in its awards path.
Hacks never fell victim to cheap jokes and overstated pathos. Smart’s Deborah Vance was never merely a parody of an aging comedian scuffling to stay relevant. She was hilarious vulnerable indomitable, and often painfully alone, and Smart brought each of those qualities to life deftly. The last season was about posterity, death, and that once-in-a-lifetime show, which gave Smart an opportunity to bring even more depth to her already complex creation. The spectacular consistency with which she told stories over five seasons made her win feel all but predestined, and so very deserved.