Farewell then, Hacks. What began as a pandemic pleasure has come to an end after five seasons of machinations, meanness, regrets, jokes, arguments about jokes, intergenerational clashes at their finest, and friendship.I’ll miss the duo of Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), the veteran comedian and twenty-something comedy writer, as they alternatively sparred and supported one another through the vicissitudes of life and maybe, just maybe, had quite a lot in common after all.Hacks was a sparkling jewel in the Las Vegas desert from the start, and its creators, Lucia Aniello, Paul W Downs and Jen Statsky, have managed to sustain that dazzle while having the industry savvy to stop making the HBO Max show before its charms faded.The battle-of-the-generations theme they offered was replicated elsewhere on screen, but few of those other television series or films have pulled it off with as much humour and wisdom as the always three-dimensional Hacks.When we first met Deborah and Ava their careers had taken a downward turn. Both had professional egos that made this situation intolerable. Both were truculent and self-obsessed. This was already strong source material, but the genius of Hacks lay in the skill with which the writers also turned a 40-year age gap into gold.In that first encounter, Deborah, an old-school comic untroubled by her capacity to cause offence, was angry and bewildered because Marty (Christopher McDonald), her Vegas casino-owner friend, wanted to cut her dates to make room for a new act aimed at a younger demographic (hilariously named as the real-life a cappella group Pentatonix). Ava, a 25-year-old whose internal motor seemed fuelled by the anxieties and rules of her Los Angeles peers, was busy delivering an unsolicited update about her sex life to their shared agent, the long-suffering Jimmy (played by a double-jobbing Downs).The set-up was that Deborah was awful and Ava ridiculous, except for when it was the other way around. This wasn’t quite Boomer versus Gen Z, as Ava, who has turned 30 in this final season, just about cuts it as a millennial, but it might as well have been. [ The Four Seasons, season two: Steve Carell was right to bail on this show about pampered midlife AmericansOpens in new window ]At the outset, Deborah was the guarded and stubbornly obstinate one to the point of self-sabotage, while Ava was the open, headstrong yet crumble-prone wreck. “Oh, your life is ruined? Please! That sounds like a Tuesday to me,” the older woman told the younger. By the second episode Ava was writing jokes for Deborah that had no punchlines, and it was clear that Deborah had no time for anything as modern as employer-employee boundaries.In the fourth season, when they were at war with each other on the set of Deborah’s late-night talkshow, they were chaperoned by Stacey, an etiquette-upholding monitor dispatched from human resources. This useful character type is now popping up everywhere from the revival of Scrubs to The Devil Wears Prada 2.Hostilities did not cease. “I decided we should celebrate all of this month’s birthdays in the office at once. Some people don’t like the attention, and I don’t want to spring nonconsensual cupcakes on anyone,” Ava said, surrounded by a sea of balloons.Deborah’s mood-puncturing response was to pop each one in turn, with the air taking just a beat longer to hiss out of her final victim.The joy of Hacks was that the two women had more in common than not. As much as they riled one another, male entertainment-industry gatekeepers, AI tech bros and lying “stiffs in suits” riled them more.Over five seasons Deborah came to understand that, for all her outward bullheadedness, she had been stymied by a fear of failure, held on to her bitterness for too long and cared too much about what other people thought. Hanging out with a millennial had made her just a touch more enlightened.Ava relaxed into herself, learned that their outlooks were not entirely oppositional and discovered that a cut-throat side can come in useful when you’re trying to get ahead in life. “You are an evil bitch. I’ve never felt closer to you,” Deborah said.That the writers retained the show’s sharpness even as sentiment infiltrated the two-way mentorship, and conflict dissipated, is a credit to the assuredness with which they devised this central yin and yang and the able supporting cast of Jimmy, his socially oblivious sidekick Kayla (Megan Stalter) and business manager Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins), among others.On television, the phenomenon of young people eliciting bafflement or just an unnerving sense of mortality from older characters is now surfacing in everything from the defunct And Just Like That… to Steve Carell’s new comedy series, Rooster. At least some of this must be thanks to the success of Hacks, an Emmy magnet. The trend could get tired fast. Even rich seams are mined to the point of exhaustion. But who knows? As Deborah might say, a good joke is a good joke.