Jean Smart wins a fifth Hacks Emmy and ties the acting record
At the 78th Primetime Emmys on 14 September, Smart took Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for the fifth straight season of Hacks. She is the first performer to win for every season of a series and now shares the eight-win acting record with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Cloris Leachman.
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Jean Smart won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series at the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards on 14 September for the fifth and last season of HBO Max's Hacks. The win closed a run that no other performer has matched: an acting Emmy for every season a series has aired.
Smart, 74, now holds eight acting Emmys. That total ties Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Cloris Leachman for the most acting Emmys won by a performer. Five of Smart's eight statues are for Deborah Vance, the ageing Vegas comic she has played since 2021. The other three came earlier: two guest actress prizes for Frasier and a supporting actress prize for Samantha Who?
Louis-Dreyfus won the comedy lead prize six years running for Veep, from 2012 to 2017. She did not win for every season of that show. Candice Bergen and Don Knotts also collected five or more Emmys inside a single series. None of them swept every season. Smart pointed at the distinction herself. She told interviewers she still thought of Louis-Dreyfus's six-year streak as the heavier feat and called her own clean sweep a technicality.
A last season that set a comedy nomination record
Hacks ended in May. Its fifth season arrived at the Emmys with 24 nominations, the most ever recorded for a single season of a comedy. The previous high of 23 was shared by FX's The Bear and Apple TV's The Studio. Going into the night, HBO Max's hospital drama The Pitt led the field overall with 25 nominations. Apple TV's horror comedy Widow's Bay led the earlier crafts ceremonies with eight wins.
Smart beat Quinta Brunson (Abbott Elementary), Ayo Edebiri (The Bear), Elle Fanning (Margo's Got Money Troubles) and Lisa Kudrow, who was back in the category for the first time in a decade for the final season of The Comeback.
On stage at the Peacock Theater she kept the speech short. She thanked Hacks creators Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky and said the series began and ended with them. "What a ride," she added.
Other early winners on the same night
Mariska Hargitay hosted the live NBC and Peacock telecast. Partial official tallies through the first hours of the show put Noah Wyle of The Pitt as lead actor in a drama and Rhea Seehorn of Pluribus as lead actress in a drama. Allison Janney won supporting actress in a drama for The Diplomat. Tom Pelphrey won supporting actor in a drama for Task.
In comedy supporting races, Stephen Root and Kate O'Flynn both won for Widow's Bay. Matthew Rhys won lead actor in a limited or anthology series for The Beast in Me. That prize put him in rare company. He had already won a lead acting Emmy in another genre for The Americans, and he was also nominated in comedy lead for Widow's Bay. Coverage of the night treated him as the first performer to hold lead acting Emmys across drama, comedy and limited series.
The Traitors won outstanding reality competition program.
What the fifth Vance prize actually changes
Award records are easy to over-read. Smart's fifth win does not alter the economics of late-career television. It does freeze a precise fact that other long-running comedies have not been able to claim. Hacks ran five seasons. The lead actress prize followed it every year. That is a different statement from a long winning streak that skips a season, or from a show that lasts longer than its awards luck.
The series was built around a two-person engine: Vance and her young writer Ava Daniels, played by Hannah Einbinder. The premise was not new. An old star and a younger minder have been a television template for decades. What the show kept doing was refuse to turn Vance into a mascot. The writing treated her as a working comic with bills, a catalogue, a damaged family and a habit of using other people as material. Smart's register, dry and slightly late on the laugh, made that design hold for five years.
Television academies often reward a final season as a farewell. This vote is harder to dismiss as sentiment. The same voters had already given Smart the prize four times. A fifth ballot, against Kudrow and Brunson, is a decision to keep the same performance at the top of the category after the show itself has closed.
The remaining series prizes were still being read out as the early list circulated. Whatever The Pitt or Hacks takes in the show races will sit next to a cleaner line: Deborah Vance never lost her category.
