Jean Smart recalled that the production was only permitted to bring ten people total into the Louvre for the series’ final day of filming, which captured the scene in which her character Deborah Vance rents out the museum for her writer and closest friend Ava Daniels. Her regular makeup artist wasn’t among the ten allowed in. “I said, ‘I think I need a little bit of powder,'” Smart recounted in the show’s post-finale Bit by Bit segment. “Lucia got so excited. She goes, ‘Oh, let me do it!'”
The intimacy of that stripped-down shoot matched the emotional weight of the scene itself. Hannah Einbinder recalled co-creator Lucia Aniello pulling her aside during the Louvre visit to remind her what the moment meant. “She was like, ‘This is like the last day you’re gonna be Ava,'” Einbinder said. “And I was like, ‘What?!'” Smart described the final moment: “Lucia said, ‘That’s a wrap.’ We were in this giant hall, just the two of us, on our backs. That was it.”
Behind the scenes, the Louvre access itself was hard-won and uncertain. The museum was dealing with the aftermath of a jewellery heist, leadership changes, and staff strikes, which meant the production schedule remained fluid until the end. The constraints ultimately gave the finale sequence an unplanned intimacy — a bare-bones crew witnessing the show’s last breath in one of the world’s grandest spaces.
In the finale, Deborah takes Ava on a Paris trip that begins as an end-of-life farewell — Deborah has decided to travel to Zurich rather than pursue cancer treatment — and the two shop for skincare, tour the Louvre, debate Van Gogh and go dancing. As they are about to part ways, their jokes start flying again. Deborah realizes her illness might be fertile ground for a new special and decides she wants to write it with Ava — choosing treatment over her plan to end her life. “The purpose of having her be sick was for the ultimate redemption, the idea of the comedy and writing together saving her life,” co-creator Aniello said.
The episode ends with Deborah and Ava walking arm-in-arm down the Las Vegas Strip to “Happy Days Are Here Again.” The finale was directed by Aniello from a script she wrote with co-creators Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky. The entire five-season run is now available to stream on HBO Max.
