Redemption vs Self Forgiveness: On Hacks (HBO) and Vigil by George Saunders (2026)

“Tell me, do you believe it? Really believe it? Bad and good are the same? Damage does no harm? The guilty are innocent, the sinner and the saint shall both sit at the right hand of the father, enjoying equal portions?” Vigil, Saunders, p. 169

I haven’t watched the last few episodes of Hacks, but I'm going to start this post out talking about it anyways. Its about an unlikely comedy writing duo: the older and fabulous Deborah Vance with a passing resemblance to Joan Rivers who, when we meet her at the beginning of the series is going through the motions at her Vegas residency show, with a QVC show and a lot of zinging one liners; and Ava, a Gen Z comedy writer who was fired from her writing job for an unsavory joke tweet that feels pretty quaint, five years out.

They are thrown together by circumstance and ultimately realize that they are best together, both in their comedy writing and in their personal lives. There are a lot of reasons I love this show but the chemistry and comedic timing of both actors, Jean Smart and Hannah Einbeinder, is a big factor. (All of the supporting cast is equally enjoyable to watch in my opinion, and the writing is generally fast and smart).

All that being said, there is a major flaw in Hacks, or at least an element that a half hour comedy show can’t really explore in depth enough to be fully satisfying (for me at least). The creators have described the show as Deborah’s “redemption story.” And, five years in with these characters, of course we are rooting for them. The writing and the acting makes them likeable. But is it really that easy to be redeemed? Deborah’s character has been given a complicated and painful history, which does some to explain away her behavior, but while her character is nuanced, it’s also a part of a comedy show.

The writing is strong and often spits off one liners about her insider trading or ruining a former employee’s life. These are played for laughs, but because they’re not explored enough, they complicate the episodes where Deborah explicitly confronts her bad behavior. The episode “Yes And” is particularly hard for me to believe in its ease as it shows Deborah visiting a college campus at the same time a supercut of all her old “problematic” jokes gains traction on the internet. The students protest her event and she consents to a public forum instead, where she says quite easily and humbly, “I’ve said enough, I’ll let you speak now.”1

Knowing Deborah, I find that dialogue hard to believe. But knowing the politics of the writers, and the time slot, what else could she say?

I believe that Deborah has the capacity to change, and especially that Ava (who Deborah respects first and foremostly2 as a comedy writer) has particularly swayed her towards growth and an open mind for criticism. But I don’t believe that scenario would wrap up neatly in 30 minutes, not without a lot more struggle and pushback and eye rolls from Deborah.

The redemption is made easier to believe because of the great acting by Jean Smart, and because we are let into her quieter moments when it is easier to love anybody: when they’re vulnerable, when they’re alone, when they’re hurt. Does that excuse the things she’s said and the harm she’s caused? If she were a real celebrity I would not be in her bathroom with her as she stared painfully into the mirror, the knowledge that everyone she’s loved has betrayed her, I would only have her actions to judge her on. Does that mean we should be more charitable to people we don’t know? Or should we hold more powerful people to a higher standard, proportional to the harm they cause?

(I also think of fans’ love for Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a character whose redemption arc is much easier to swallow, despite all of the truly horrific things he’s done, because the complexity and depth is portrayed so well by the actor playing him.3)

Deborah’s redemption is an interesting story, but ultimately I’m left wondering what purpose it actually serves. In an episode where she and Ava get lost on a hike, they debate the merits of environmental conservation. At the end of the episode, Deborah has confronted her mortality and been convinced by Ava to relinquish her stock and change her consumption habits. It’s a happy ending!

But what good did that little story actually do? I already agreed with Ava’s argument, and Deborah is not real. All it’s done is provide a synthetic catharsis for the viewer, who does not have the influence or reach that Ava does to argue and enact change. We watch someone powerful change her mind and do good, while very few (if any) of her real life counterparts are doing the same.

As Deborah and Ava’s stories come to an end I am excited to see what note they end on. I am truly a fan of the show and I am sorry that there won’t be more quips and weird jokes of theirs in the future. The dissonance between Deborah’s characterization and her some of her dialogue and character growth choices don’t spoil my enjoyment of the show, but I am curious to see how it wraps up.

This week I read Vigil by George Saunders. Let it be known that I’ve never been one for his schtick: everyone loved Lincoln in the Bardo and I nodded along, feeling nothing. Not that it’s exactly his fault, I can’t get myself to connect with any of the well celebrated writers in his ilk: Kelly Link and Karen Russell don’t really do it for me.

Vigil follows “Jill” a ghostlike presence in an almost guardian angel-like role, or almost Clarence from A Wonderful Life, who is summoned to people’s deathbed to help them transition to the next world. But on this assignment, it just so happens that she’s got one of the biggest proponents of oil, one of the Bad Guys, who in the face of death is still clinging to his innocence, that he has done nothing wrong.

Half of the (very short) book is world building and going into "Jill”s backstory and how she died. As she tries and takes breaks from comforting the dying man she re-remembers her life, as though she’d forgotten it, as though she’s not supposed to be remembering. It is formatted, annoyingly, like this:

I began to experience familiar symptoms of an affliction that, when upon me, always caused me to become less powerful and effective than was desirable.

For example:

Near the golden statue, in a swath of tree-created moon-shadow, was what I knew, of the instant, to be “auto.” I myself, I recalled, had, in that previous realm, driven several “autos,” the first of which had been “Chevelle.” “Chevelle,” packed with “girlfriends,” as well as my cousin, “Steve” would be positioned so as to face a “movie-film” unscrolling upon a distant wall of white, surrounded by other autos, all of us learning from the movie-film such things as: Rome is romantic and interesting. And: when someone is lovely, the household staff may exchange happy glances regarding one’s sunny insouciance. And: later, those servants will help one achieve once’s fondest dreams, by keeping one’s confidence regarding a secret rendezvous.

As well as:

Dangling one’s feet in the “new aboveground pool” as crazy light-stars danced across the surface of the “heavily chlorinated water.” Having “hopped right in,” one felt, through “plastic liner,” one’s footprints imprinting upon the soft swells of underlying sand.

I wouldn’t be so annoyed at the quotation marks if it were at all clear to me why some words or phrases are in quotes and others not. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to get it, or maybe there’s nothing to get.

The absurdist, dreamlike, twilight zone stuff is what Saunders does so well and what I don’t really respond to. There’s a scene when two ghosts of the guy’s old cronies (or people who were even more evil than him), both named Mel and distinguished by last initials, come to comfort him in death:

Even as he spoke, a tiny man, in the exact same image of G., plopped out of the rear of G., then sat disoriented on the floor, rubbing its eyes.

Jeez, look at that, said R. You spawned that little guy right out.

Didn’t even hurt, said G. Much.

The tiny G. began to grow, and the more he grew, the more identical he became to the original G., until the two were perfectly indistinguishable and even the rate at which their business suits kept giving way to the lab coats and vice versa became synchronous, giving off, each time, a fain whoosh.

Friends, said the formerly tiny, now full-sized G.

Of your charge, said a tiny man identical to R., just then dropping out of R.;s rear.

Look, now i’m doing it, said R.

Work colleagues, said the R. replica. From way back.

Replicas of the replicas began dropping from the rears of the initial replicas and these secondary replicas grew full sized and began dropping out tertiary replicas, who also grew, until the room was so packed with full-sized versions of the original G. and R., all talking at once, that several of the replicas were nudged out through the wall and, while still in the process of introducing themselves, tumbled down to the yard below.

Alright, if that’s your thing, good for you. But I'll move along.

We learn as the story goes on, along with Jill as she remembers herself, that she’d died young and left a husband behind.

For a moment, we (and Jill) enter the mind of the person who caused her death.

Because I was now Bowman he suddenly did not seem strange to me.

At all.
Who else could he have been but exactly who he was?

He seemed, if I may say it this way, inevitable.

An inevitable occurrence, upon which, therefore, it would be impossible, even ludicrous, to pass judgment.

He had left his mother’s womb with a particular predisposed mind and started living, and immediately that predisposed mind had run up against various events, and been altered in exactly the way such a mind, buffeted by those exact events, would be altered, and all the while he, Bowman, trapped inside Bowman, had believed he was making choices, but what looked to him like choices had been so severely delimited in advance by the mind, body, and disposition thrust upon him that the whole game amounted to a sort of lavish jailing.

His feelings (of rage, of shame, of being worthless, of needing to lash out preemptively at even the slightest threat) were all real and he must suffer them every day, and why? Because he had been born him. But he had not chosen to be born him. That had just happened to him. And then life had happened to that him, exerting upon it certain deleterious effects, including, but not limited to, the desire to blow up Llyod, whom he perceived (correctly, by the way, in that relative sense) to be his enemy.

At what precise moment could Paul Bowman have become other-than-Paul- Bowman?

And how? How was the change, the opting out, the departure from the formed-in-the womb, the choosing to be other than what one was, supposed to occur, precisely?

This immediately put me in mind of the great line from Fleabag:

-I tried to kiss your sister on her birthday.

-My birthday!

-Your birthday. I mix up birthdays and I have a drinking problem, just like everyone else in this fucking country. But I am not a bad guy. I just have a bad personality. It’s not my fault. Some people are born with fucked personalities!

Which comes to my putting together the concepts of redemption and self acceptance. There are moments in Hacks when Deborah is confronted with her past actions or the hypocrisy of her actions and she makes significant steps towards growth, not for the sake of her own vanity or in an attempt to make her self look good. But- since it is a television show- she is a character we get used to and so we want to laugh at her the same way we always have. There is a space here for me to rope in the final season of Bojack Horseman, but this whole thing is getting way too long and convoluted as it is.

Jill’s epiphany when she enters the consciousness of her killer seems to be the antithesis of redemption. There is no way to apologize and make it better because it wasn’t your fault in the first place. One thing that annoyed me in Vigil was, for such a short book, how much it focused on Jill floating around as a ghost and interacting with other ghosts, and not relating it back to the oil guy as much. I don’t know, maybe it’s just Saunders’s style that I really don’t jive with. Even with that epiphany, she’s still trying to convince the oil guy to admit fault at the end of his life.

Nevertheless I entered the orb of his thoughts.

And found that he was not shocked. At all. By any of it. He knew about it, about all of it. Knew the extent of it, was aware of many examples of it, knew he was often called out for some imagined part he’d supposedly played in it, but he—now, hang on a minute—he just had a bit of a quarrel with the damn logic. There’d aways been droughts, yes? Were heat waves a new thing in the world?

Even at the end of his life he clings on to innocence, or denial, or some other and more powerful third thing. And when he’s not denying his culpability, he is actively suppressing it. What is Jill to do? She becomes more herself —which is not completely tied to the oil guy and her trouble with him, which I would have liked the correlation to be explored a bit more because as it is, it is just two different storylines happening in the same book at the same time.

In some ways, Vigil runs up against similar roadblocks as Hacks. How to express the inner hoops jumped through to justify one’s actions? The abstract ways that we build our own version of what’s happening, that just so happens to paint us as the hero in every story. The reality is that I’m not sure how much good it actually does to get to the “humanity” of someone who has so completely done so much harm.

There are powerful people making the world worse as we speak. It’s possible they’re actively destroying everything about society and the planet as we know it. Do they secretly hate themselves? Do they believe they are the saviors of the human race? Will they meet their match in a Gen-Z comedy writer and be convinced to start flying commercial instead of private? Will they be visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve in their twilight years and toss a coin down to a homeless boy on a street to go buy a roast goose, to be redeemed before death? How does that help the rest of us?

It won't undo the harm they’ve already enacted and enabled.

Vigil is saying something about this dynamic, but I’m not totally sure what. I found it thought provoking and frustrating at times, but ultimately I appreciate it as a work that doesn’t condescend to tell you exactly what it’s about like so much does these days.

Did you like this? You may have noticed that I didn’t post anything for May. I was taking the month off, and haven’t been reading much fiction. I started this project almost a year ago and I’ve proud of how consistent I’ve been with it, but through the spring it started to make me a little stressed so I thought I’d take some time off. I have been going back and forth with writing immediate reactions to readings or more considered and comparative posts like this one. I might experiment with doing a mix, but will probably not be consistent for a little while. I don’t know what the rest of the summer will bring— you’ll either be hearing from me here or you won’t.