In the fifth and final season of Hacks, mistaken and less-than-flattering reports of Deborah Vance’s (Jean Smart) death send her and Ava (Hannah Einbinder) back to Las Vegas, more determined than ever to secure her legacy as a comedian.

The series is certainly leaving quite a legacy of its own. Season 5 has received a record-breaking haul of Emmy nominations, while its production design gives us plenty more to pore over.

Across more than 200 sets spanning California, New York and Paris, Emmy-nominated production designer Rob Tokarz and set decorator Jen Lukehart were responsible for an astonishing average of 2.8 new sets a day. These ranged from a fully realised 1970s sitcom interior and an exhibition devoted to its fictional history to a jewel-box closet worthy of Deborah Vance.

Film and Furniture spoke to Tokarz about the furniture, interiors and objects that shaped the final season of Hacks, including the vintage sitcom sofa found on Facebook Marketplace, the design of Deborah’s long-awaited closet, the ingenious transformation of one set into multiple New York hotel rooms and what became of some of the show’s furniture when filming finally wrapped.

Creating a 1970s sitcom set and finding a perfect vintage couch

Film and Furniture: The final season of Hacks explores Deborah’s legacy, with Who’s Making Dinner?, the fictional 1970s sitcom from her past that was loosely based on her relationship with Frank, becoming a prominent callback. Can you walk us through how you created the set for the show and then its exhibition?

Rob Tokarz: Up until this season, Who’s Making Dinner? has only been alluded to without being fully realised. Our job in this episode was to build a history for something culturally significant enough to be honoured 50 years later. Working with showrunners Lucia Aniello, Jen Statsky and Paul W. Downs, we worked out who exactly this couple was beyond the knowledge that they were loosely based on Deb and Frank’s actual relationship.

We filled out their backstory by seeing them as an upper-middle-class couple in a mid-sized Midwestern city, something fairly typical on television at the time. Our job is always to tell a story through architecture, finishes, and dressing, and in this instance it would do a lot of the work of giving the show Who’s Making Dinner? its punch.

As set decorator Jen Lukehart explained, so much television has used 1970s furniture as a shortcut for making something feel dated that it can be difficult to dress a set actually set in the seventies in a way that feels both authentic and beautiful. Of course, in our sitcom world, that had to start with the couch.

Few sitcoms, then or since, have gone without a couch at their center. We looked at dozens of options for something that would support our design as well as draw the eye. Jen found the hero couch on Facebook Marketplace and bought it from a family in Pasadena. In our invented backstory, one of the show’s producers took ownership of the couch when the series wrapped. He kept it and other key pieces of set dressing in storage ever since, eventually passing them on to his children.

We reference sitcoms and shows throughout the design process. We looked at Mary Tyler Moore as a character study and pulled tones from All in the Family. We would also research backstage footage and photographs dating back to the beginning of television. We went so far as to source the doors and louvered kitchen pass-through from an episode of Will & Grace that was itself recreating I Love Lucy‘s living room. We wanted it to feel not just period correct but “right.” We blended wood tones with custom-designed in-house wallpaper that we had printed with Astek Wallcoverings, in colours that evoked the era from a style-forward perspective. We wanted this couple to feel modern for their time, something Deborah canonically is.

With that handled, we still had the exhibition to flesh out, and that meant we needed a lot of 50-year-old photography. We took the set we built and expanded on it. We added period tile from Linoleum City to create a camera aisle with pedestal cameras and live audience seating. We also created a collection of fictional 50-year-old photography, photographing young Deb and Frank alongside a period-dressed crew to populate the exhibition and build out the history of the show.

At the Academy Museum, we populated two large spaces with the history of the show. In the Exhibition Area, we built dividers full of the blown-up photographs. Realistically, the set for the show itself would’ve been destroyed, so instead we blew up elevation photographs of the walls in scale and used them to highlight some of the dressing from the set. We created pockets of exhibition that showed Frank’s work in the kitchen next to Deb’s work at her publishing job. We wrote exhibition cards, mounted throughout the spaces, that explained the backstories of a lot of the key pieces of set dressing.

In the Dome, we would have even more photographs and more set dressing, each telling one part of the story of the show. Given this was more of the cocktail and presentation area, we found really fun lounge furniture from Form Decor to bridge the space between mod shapes and a retro colour palette. We pulled vintage props and made up backstories for them to populate the party. Through both spaces, we’d work closely with costumes to dress mannequins in period clothing, presumably from the show. In our story, if you were a fan of Who’s Making Dinner?, you knew what each piece was, down to the episode. You wanted to feel the nostalgia. We do a lot of parties on Hacks, and it was nice in this space to take it all in and feel the world.

Inside Deborah Vance’s Las Vegas closet

F&F: You also expanded some beloved pre-existing sets, including Deborah’s Las Vegas mansion. Can you walk us through creating a closet worthy of Deborah Vance?

RT: One of my dreams on the show was to expand on the mansion in some way. It’s such a special set, and it has evolved so beautifully across the years. Deborah Vance has a distinctive style that is a big part of her character. We’ve seen her warehouse and the attention to detail she places on her appearance.

That’s why getting to design her closet, her sanctum sanctorum, was such a fun opportunity. I wanted it to feel intimate and striking, like a jewel box, yet also to be a space as far as possible from the public image she maintains.

When it comes to all of Deb’s spaces, we try to keep within the design language we’ve developed over the years and nod back to her past. I wanted to frame one end of the closet the way we did the tour bus bedroom, with a fluted upholstery wall and a built-in bench.

I chose the icy blues and Spoonflower “Golden Flamingo” wallpaper on grasscloth to nod back to her wig room in season one and to tie the color language into her room. We rented the bench next to the island from Universal but reupholstered it in a beautiful fabric that set dec found. We pulled designer bags and shoes to fill out the open bays in the space.

One of my favorite pieces in the room is the crystal chandelier from Omega Cinema Props we hung above the island, something that first appears in her Palmetto dressing room at the beginning of the series. Was it Deb’s? Did she steal it? We may never know.

Designing the New York boutique hotel interiors

F&F: From Las Vegas and New York to Paris, Season 5 is also a journey across hotel rooms. Can you walk us through how you crafted the perfect NYC boutique hotel, and when not building on stage, how much freedom do you have with your set decorator to change aspects of hotel decor?

RT: We’ve seen Deb in a lot of hotel rooms, but this was New York. We wanted everything in New York to feel different, so instead of a large penthouse we decided to lean into the boutique hotel scene to feel part of the city. We looked at hotels like the Bowery, the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and the Gramercy. Our aim was to make this feel like no hotel she’d been in before, something poppier yet darker, bold but urban.

We also knew the room would serve as three different hotel rooms, and we designed it accordingly. For Ava’s room we built her bed to work for both spaces: it gave Deb her grander bed chamber, and for Ava’s, it covered the double doors that led into that space and made it feel smaller overall. Deb’s bed placement covered up Ava’s entry door and Deb’s bathroom door would become Ava’s entry door. It was another instance of how creative art direction can accommodate an ambitious shooting schedule, especially since we’d often have as little as half a day to change a set over.

We leaned heavily into saturated tones throughout the space. We paired that with dark marble and stained wood to give it visual weight. On a television schedule we don’t have the luxury of long lead times, so we rely on the incredible prop houses we have in Los Angeles.

A lot of the furnishings came from Warner Bros. Property (the matching blue couches, for instance) and Ob•jects. The choices were intentionally bold, something we were able to pull off on the backs of the many great shops we have access to. Unfortunately, with the industry contraction in Los Angeles, we seem to lose more of these once-enduring institutions every year. And with them a lot of the palette of furnishings decorators have to flesh out their worlds.

What happened to the furniture from the Hacks sets after filming?

F&F: Hacks accumulated quite a collection of unique set decor elements and furniture. Can you tell us whether any of those pieces found new homes after filming?

RT: Over five seasons, we’d accumulated a lot in storage as dressing got used and reused as we needed it. In the end, the majority went to the studio’s asset warehouse. In renting dressing, though, things inevitably get damaged and dinged. Normally that leads to a damage fee, but oftentimes you can trade some of your purchased set decoration back to cover it. So some small portion ended up there too.

There were also a number of choice pieces that passed through to crew members. Jean Smart personally tagged a lot of posters and graphics from Deborah Vance’s 87-92 suite and history to give away to the show’s PAs and assistants. I heard that some of the salt and pepper shakers may have wound up in some crew members’ homes. Maybe.

In particular, Paul W. Downs’ parents lost an auction for a set of chairs between seasons 2 and 3 that, as it turned out, had been dressed into Deb’s breakfast nook. I can neither confirm nor deny that they finally ended up with Paul’s parents once we’d finished. All rumours.

Rob Tokarz’s favourite furniture and design details from Season 5

F&F: This season, you created over 2.8 new sets per day with over 200 sets total across two continents. What were some of your favourite interior design pieces and furniture featured this season, and how did you and your set decorator source them?

RT: There are honestly too many pieces to do the show justice, but here are a few touch-points. We bookended the season with themes of resurrection. First, Deb’s public resurrection at her memorial, once it becomes known she’s actually alive after Singapore. Second, the resurrection of classic Las Vegas as told by Deborah Vance at The Diva.

The memorial was an all-hands situation, filled with custom florals, props, inside jokes and details accumulated over the life of the series, from Diet Coke pillows and a crucified Deb doll to a poster begging her to RIP: “Return If Possible”.

There was also the task of tracking down the established gate elements from season 1, which was no small feat. Each pillar that held up the welded gate was topped with a sculpted peacock. At first we could find only one, and we searched high and low through storage trying to figure out where the other could be. It turned out we’d decorated Deb’s breakfast nook with it, never realising what it had originally been for, since it predated any of us on the show.

The peacock would come back again at The Diva, as dressing in the Pavo Real club upstairs. Not every detail can make it onto the screen for any given set. With so many sets per episode and so much we wanted to cover in this final season, capturing it all would have been impossible. That doesn’t mean we don’t try to pack each set with detail. We had custom pink velvet felt printed for the gaming tables that ended up mostly obscured by the crowd.

Jen was working to clear some Bob Mackie showgirl illustrations when his team overnighted the original work so we could take high-resolution scans, print them onto milk plexiglas and install them in lightboxes around the room. The illustrations were coordinated with two pink neon showgirls, while, in a happy piece of serendipity, the background costumes also chimed with the design.

In the end, despite the count, each set has to be considered down to every detail, supporting the story, the comedy, and the aesthetic. I look at our work as the art of accretion: gradually, or not so gradually, adding layer on layer to arrive at something greater than any one object. Whether it was nailing authentic New York photographs and graphics in Amanda Weinberg’s Madison Square Garden office build, or finding just the right patinaed antique dresser for Deb’s private spaces, or tracking down the right replica memorabilia for a Montecito closet museum, we worked to get every detail right.

Huge thanks to Rob Tokarz for taking us behind the scenes of Hacks and sharing the stories behind some of the furniture, interiors and extraordinary sets created for its final season. We’ll certainly miss having Deborah Vance’s maximalist world to pore over.

Hacks Season 5 is available to watch now on Sky Atlantic and NOW in the UK, and on HBO Max in the US

Find more furniture, décor and homeware from Hacks, for your own home, in the Film and Furniture Marketplace.

 

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