#hacks hhbo

[trying-to-get-somewhere-real]

this is a pretty niche post for people equally obsessed with hacks and the bear (so tagging @mollrat101 bc i feel like they will understand what i'm going for here better than anyone), but i needed to get it out of my brain and maybe it will also resonate for people who haven't seen hacks but still feel uneasy about where things might be going with claire (or hacks fans who just want to complain about marty :P) i only recently realized that claire makes me uneasy for similar reasons as marty made me uneasy by the end of s1 of hacks. it's not so much a question of whether i like them as characters or whether i am more invested in a competing ship, but about the work the writing needs to do to get me invested in a deb/marty or carm/claire endgame, and whether the respective shows realize they need to do that work. hacks s2 showed me that sometimes writers will just hand-waive what felt like Significant Issues and expect you to get on board with a relationship that they spent the entire prior season undermining, and i'm now paranoid about how easily storer et al. could do the same thing. if you introduce a character in one way and want me to root for them and their relationship with the protagonist in the long-run, you need to put in the real time and effort to develop them!!

at a high-level for anyone reading this who may not be familiar with hacks: marty was introduced in s1 as someone who had a romantic past with deb who then betrays her professionally about 2/3 through the season after sleeping with her again (seemingly for the first time in awhile). they end the season on very poor terms due to this betrayal. he is also written as someone who doesn't seem to understand why deb's work is so important to her and why her ex-husband's EXTREME betrayal (her creative collaborator who sabotaged her opportunity to be the first woman to ever host a late-night show and left her for her sister) would make her reluctant to be vulnerable with anyone ever again. tbh i believe the actors and characters have real chemistry—much more so than claire and carmy. BUT it never occurred to me that they could possibly be endgame because the writers made him such a villain in s1, and the time it would take to rehab him such that he would feel like a viable choice in the eyes of the audience was not something i expected them to give to that character in light of all of the other characters/plots/themes they seemed to want to explore and the focus on ava and deb as the central relationship (however you view it).

cut to s2: deb seems to kind of be over whatever marty did in s1 (with no explanation) and seems to be jealous of his new fiancee. and then we get an unexpected reveal that he proposed to her in the past and *she* turned him down. none of this really tracks with what we learned in s1, and feels like an easy way to paper over all of his quite serious flaws and make deb seem like the one responsible for all of their issues. there is no real effort to show him growing or making amends. it's just apparently fine now??????

claire is not a villain in the way marty was/is (to me, at least) but we didn't get to know her as an individual separate from carmy, we didn't get to see most of the big moments in their relationship happen in front of our eyeballs, and i generally did not feel that the writers meant for me to take her seriously as a long-term love interest because if they did, we would see the development of this relationship (and get to know this person) much better than we have. but the more i am seeing online references to a possible endgame for them, the more i have hacks s2 ptsd. i liked the bear s2 way more than hacks s2, and so at this very moment i trust storer and co. more. and to be completely honest i don't *really* want the writers to take time away from characters and relationships i care about more in order to develop claire. BUT if she's coming back and they're going to be something in the long-run and they don't take that time? it's just very poor writing to me. all shipping preferences aside, i need them to make me invest and believe that this is viable. you can't just tell me, you have to show me. right now, everything about her and them tells me i'm not supposed to care in the way i care about carm, syd, richie, nat, tina, marcus, etc. and i'm concerned that the people running the show might not realize that :/