Ava (Hannah Einbinder), left, and Deborah (Jean Smart) have both grown up a lot since we first met them in Season 1 of Tips on Max.
Max.
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Max.
Ava (Hannah Einbinder), left, and Deborah (Jean Smart) have both grown up a lot since we first met them in Season 1 of Tips on Max.
Max.
It’s pretty sad to find ourselves referencing a third season of an Emmy-winning show as an example of streamers letting something run for a decent amount of time. And, even though many of us feel like “everything is undone so quickly!” » there are some nuances as to the truth of this. Part of it depends on how you approach the thorny issue of “limited series.”
But boy, it’s sometimes seems as if everything was canceled very quickly. And in this environment, seeing Tips Returning for a third season that is perhaps the strongest yet is a reminder that, given the chance, good shows often pay off over time in ways that can’t be achieved during their early, hottest series, establishing the premise and establishing character.
We met Ava (Hannah Einbinder), a young actress who thought she was very cool and very progressive, when she reluctantly went to work as a writer for Deborah Vance (Jean Smart). Deborah was slowly becoming ossified during her long gig at the casino, and she felt like she needed something new – not that she was really willing to listen to Ava that much. The two women have been through a lot since then, including a falling out or two (Ava wrote a horrible note about Deborah to people who wanted to destroy her; Deborah slapped Ava for calling her a hack; no one is perfect ). At the end of the second season, the two parted ways after Deborah found new success and realized Ava needed to work on her own career.
So naturally, as season three begins, we find Deborah enjoying a new type of success as a more interesting performer, but also…perhaps we could say “cooler.” (She just did a Super Bowl commercial!) Ava, meanwhile, is a writer on a good comedy show. Will their destiny bring them back together? Yes of course. We know it. But what makes Tips What’s interesting at this point is that Ava and Deborah are still themselves, but they’ve been affected by the things we’ve seen happen to them since the beginning of their relationship. The Ava we know now would never approach Deborah with the arrogance and disdain she did in the first season, and the Deborah we know now would never treat Ava as callously as she did in the first season. often did at the time.
They have also evolved professionally. There’s a good scene early in the new season in which Deborah realizes that popular success has made it extremely easy to laugh without much effort. In fact, she doesn’t have to be good — just like she didn’t in Vegas, when her audience sleepily accepted her material. But now, after doing all the work she’s done, she has more interest in being good; it destabilizes her to get the kind of adulation she once thought she wanted. Being a hacker, this scene suggests, is less about being bad and more about not caring whether you’re good.
And Ava is less understanding now, less withdrawn from the world of comedy. The gag about her being “canceled” because of a tweet is mostly over, which is a good thing, because there’s no more drop to be made from that idea.
This sort of thing, characters growing and changing, is far from revolutionary. This is the very reason why serial storytelling exists in the realm of character-based comedies, as opposed to pure joke factories. But you usually can’t accomplish that kind of change with a single season, or even with two series of six or eight episodes. What you see now with Tips is the very advantage of a little a little patience, to give two characters time to spend time together and apart and be affected by each other.
Jimmy (Paul W. Downs) and Kayla (Megan Stalter)
Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/Max
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Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/Max
It also helps change things that might be a little unbalanced at first. When Tips started, my biggest hesitation was that I couldn’t stay Ava. It’s not that she wasn’t nice (neither was Deborah, really). But Ava was so obnoxious and arrogant that she moved to a place where…I didn’t care. I wanted her fired and gone forever. It didn’t help that she rarely seemed funny enough to be a good comedy writer. Whether it’s me learning to understand her better, or the show and Einbinder presenting her a little differently, Ava is now more like Deborah, to me: flawed and messy and sometimes consumed by ego. , but plausibly talented and basically decent.
I also really grew to appreciate the dynamic between Deborah and Ava’s agent, Jimmy (Paul W. Downs, who co-created Tips with Jen Statsky and Lucia Aniello) and her assistant, Kayla (Megan Stalter). At first, despite a dynamite performance from Stalter, Kayla came off as a bit pitiful, begging for Jimmy’s attention with a sort of vulgarity to which he responded with exasperated disgust. But especially since Jimmy left his agency and he and Kayla struck out on their own, they’ve become a truly cooperative couple, and even though they’re still together, plotJimmy understands that his assistant has talents and abilities beyond her devotion to him.
I have my little gripes about the third season, most of which come with “but” statements: I definitely could have done with a little more Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins), but what the show gives us works very well. I’m not sure they needed a “students and cancellation” story later in the season, but they do a solid job once there. And there’s a creative decision made toward the end of the season that I know I’ll discuss with people who love this show, but I’m intrigued by how it fits or doesn’t fit into the season.
Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins)
Eddy Chen/Max
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Eddy Chen/Max
But this is all good. It’s tender and complicated, and it comes from a kind of wiggle room that giving a show eight half-hour episodes just won’t give you. The result is that a show that has always been funny, witty and full of wonderful performances is also, this season, a more compelling story about people.
This piece also appeared on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up to receive the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one and receive weekly recommendations on what makes us happy.
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