This is Deborah Vance’s world, and we’re just living in it.
“Hacks” showrunners Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky have spent the last few seasons establishing the visual aesthetic of Deborah (Jean Smart) — it’s big, bold and splashy; production designer Rob Tokarz, who landed an Emmy nomination for his work on the Max comedy, sought out ways to expand on that vision whenever the opportunity arose, especially when it came to new spaces.
In episode 8, Tokarz’s Emmy-nommed “Yes, And,” Deborah finds herself double-booked. She’s scheduled to appear at a Palm Springs Pride event, and she’s being given an honorary degree at UC Berkeley. She’s faced with a tough choice, but she needs to get some buzz going, and the university is the place to do it. It’s the final push for her to get a hosting gig on a late night show, and a lot is riding on it.
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Several scenes take place at a fraternity party, a new space for Tokarz, but he was able to draw from personal experience, going back to his days in grad school. “I was going to paint the room that I was living in. I was so bold about this choice, and it did not work at all,” he admits. “I saw that color choice for this room and thought it would make things look above and beyond.”
He wanted the room to feel “visually sticky and messy,” he adds. He put in an amalgamation of dressing such as a lizard tank, a weight bench, bongs and posters, with the idea being for the room to look like a mishmash of things and “not decorated.”
Things don’t go so well for Deborah when old video clips of her start circulating, and subsequent events keep her grounded on the campus. She misses the Palm Springs Pride event, which entailed a Deborah Vance fan space.
However, Tokarz still had to build the Palm Springs Deborah Vance activation space, so he spent time diving into research. The production team found a house that screamed Palm Springs mid-century modern with an open background, a pool and spectacular views.
In decorating it, Tokarz had conversations with Aniello, Downs and Statsky, and the approach echoed that of making any other set — start with more and scale back.
“We brought in everything we could conceive of from past episodes of the world of Deborah Vance, with things that she would have sold on QVC, and just filled the house with it,” he says.
From there, he branded it with signage and a bright blue color. “We wanted to make it beautiful because it’s Deborah Vance and it’s her lifestyle collection,” Tokarz says. “We wanted it to feel like Pride.” Tokarz also got to work with the familiar.
This season, Deborah’s love for the holidays finally manifested with a Christmas episode titled “The Deborah Vance Christmas Spectacular.” Tokarz turned her sprawling Las Vegas mansion into a winter wonderland, complete with fake snow and an enormous gingerbread house.
He called back to previous seasons when it came to building out the set. “We used the nutcrackers from Season 1, and we had a Christmas room full of Deborah’s decorations that we folded into it,” he says.
What is the one color Tokarz would never use when he’s working on existing spaces or new ones for Deborah Vance’s universe? While gold is a yes, yellow is a hard no: “It’s not complimentary to her world.”
