“Hacks” Gave Us an Odd Couple for the Ages Over five stellar seasons, Jean Smart’s and Hannah Einbinder’s characters became unlikely artistic soul mates, whose brilliance grew out of their creative friction.

“Hacks” ended last night, after five stellar seasons and a dozen Primetime Emmys. Fortunately, it had long since evolved past the woke-vs.-joke rivalry. By the end of the first season, Deborah and Ava have reached a fragile symbiosis: Ava has learned to appreciate her boss as a female trailblazer, while Deborah has let Ava push her out of comedic cruise control, with a new act that probes more vulnerable terrain. (“Hacks” came on the heels of Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette,” which blended standup special with feminist performance art.) Their antagonism peaked at the end of Season 3, when Deborah achieves her dream of landing a late-night chair and Ava blackmails her way into the head-writer job. By this final season, though, the show had nearly given up on engineering conflicts between the two, positioning them as artistic soul mates and surrogate mother and daughter. (Deborah has a strained relationship with her actual daughter, a recovering addict, while Ava clashes with her high-strung mom, played, respectively, by Kaitlin Olson and Jane Adams.) “Hacks” is, most richly, a show about collaboration, about how creative friction breeds originality; in the battle between boomers and Zoomers, it points the way toward an armistice.

The depth of Deborah and Ava’s unlikely bond led the show, in its home stretch, to what many viewers considered its best episode. In this season’s seventh installment, “Montecito,” directed by Downs and written by Guy Branum, Andrew Law, and Bridget Parker, Deborah has to persuade another comedy veteran, Kelly Kilpatrick (Cherry Jones), to hand over a Bob Mackie jumpsuit for Deborah to wear at an upcoming gig at Madison Square Garden. Kelly, an out lesbian with traces of Ellen DeGeneres (including a femme younger wife, played by Leslie Bibb), mistakes Deborah and Ava for a closeted gay couple, and they play along with the ruse during a weekend at Kelly’s country estate. “Montecito” is “Hacks” at its best: sharply written, a little outrageous, and fuelled by the chemistry of its two stars. I won’t soon forget Smart’s delivery of the line “Don’t you dare bring up A-S-S after you said I eat it.”