Jean Smart closed out “Hacks” the way her character Deborah Vance would have wanted: with a standing ovation and a trophy in hand. Smart won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series on Monday night for the fifth and final season of the HBO Max comedy, completing a perfect run that makes her the first performer in television history to win the category for every season of the same show.
Zendaya presented the award, and Smart, 75, rose to a standing ovation before opening her speech with a joke about the physical toll of formalwear, noting dryly that only the men in the room got to remain standing while the women sat back down. She quickly turned serious, dedicating the win to “Hacks” creators Lucia Aniello, Jen Statsky and Paul W. Downs, telling them the show began and ended with their work.
She thanked HBO, Universal and her representatives before singling out her children, Forrest and Connor, calling them her anchor. She closed with a simple summary of the five-year run: what a ride it had been, before tossing her Emmy in the air and catching it on her way offstage.
The win pushed Smart’s career total to eight acting Emmys, tying her with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Cloris Leachman for the most ever won by a performer. Her path there ran through three different categories: two guest-actress wins for “Frasier,” a supporting-actress win for “Samantha Who?” and now five consecutive victories for “Hacks,” a sweep of the sitcom acting trifecta that few performers have managed. Louis-Dreyfus came closest to matching Smart’s perfect record during “Veep”‘s run, winning lead comedy actress in six of that show’s seven seasons.
“Hacks” entered Monday’s ceremony already a record-setter, having earned 24 nominations for its final season, the most ever given to a comedy’s closing chapter and the most for any single season of a comedy in Emmys history. The show followed the volatile mentorship between Smart’s aging Las Vegas comedian and her much younger writing partner, played by Hannah Einbinder, across a run that transformed Smart, already a decades-long fixture of American television, into one of the medium’s most decorated stars in the final stretch of her career.
