"I love chaos" Emmy nominee Rob Tokarz on designing 'Hacks' jet-setting season 4

When the wildfires began tearing their way through Los Angeles in January of this year, HBO’s Hacks was still in the thick of production on season four. “It was a really a bizarre week,” recalls the show’s Emmy-nominated production designer Rob Tokarz.

The fires destroyed the property used as Deborah Vance’s (Jean Smart) LA home, a residence which had become a more permanent fixture since season three when the veteran comedian leaves Las Vegas for LA, eying up the job of hosting a late-night talk show.

“You get to know these families that own the houses, you build up a shorthand with them, you know what the rules are,” Tokarz reflects. Thanks to his work on the show, he was able to provide the family with detailed floorplans and photos of the house that they could use for insurance purposes. “That was kind of a positive that was able to come out of something terrible.”

Paying homage

Long before Hacks had the extra impetuous to honour Los Angeles, Tokarz had been keen to pay homage to the iconic city in season four. Prep work began in July of 2024, four months before cameras rolled, but Tokarz had been thinking about the aforementioned Late Night show long before that.

“There was a five, six-month hiatus in between filming and so I started doing a bit of sketching then,” he explains. “I always knew that I wanted to honour LA since it was such a big move [for Deborah].”

Mark Indelicato as Damien, Carl Clemons-Hopkins as Marcus, Rose Abdoo as Josefina inside the LA House; Source: Max

He started looking towards the city’s iconic Art Deco scene for inspiration, “namely the shapes and finishes of the Griffith Observatory and the Eastern Columbia Building”. This was incorporated into the set with blue and gold arches and columns, the former also a nod to Johnny Carson’s 1972 set when he moved from New York to Burbank.

Tokarz also wanted to honour Deborah’s journey from her Las Vegas residency audiences saw in seasons one and two, to becoming the first female host of a late-night talk show. From displaying both city’s skylines in the backdrop to using the same chevron flooring from Deborah’s Vegas tour bus, and even adding several hundred marquee bulbs to the set.

“We were actually shooting in Las Vegas and walking down Fremont Street where there were all these amazing bulbs, all these amazing old school lighting ones,” explains Tokarz, who then sent the sketches to set decorator Jennifer Lukehart. “We wanted to create this flashy Vegas underneath.”

Jetlag

This series of Hacks also takes Smart's Deborah and her co-lead Hannah Einbinder's Ava to Singapore, after the former finds a loophole in her Late Night contract which allows her to do stand-up with a translator.

The initial plan was to shoot entirely on location, with minimal production design, thanks to Max and Universal Television partnering with The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) Singapore and Singapore Tourism Board (STB). “I thought ‘great, I’ll just get to hang out on set and all that’,” Tokarz joked. “Of course, it never ends up that way.”

Jean Smart as Deborah, Ho Ai Ling as herself; Source: Max

Instead, the production designer was tasked with dressing Singapore's iconic Victoria Theatre, used to house Deborah’s translated performances. “We found this really beautiful pipe organ [to put behind Deborah on stage] that was really lovely, very textured,” explains Tokarz. “But it was so distracting that we needed to bring in a set that made it feel like a stand-up show.”

No stranger to designing Hacks' comedy show segments (“I think we went through over a dozen in season two”), Tokarz took a new direction this time, focussing on Singaporean inspiration to highlight the where Deborah was now. For the bold red on red curtains - a colour which symbolises luck - he took inspiration from a photo of a Chinese model selling earrings. The semicircle centrepiece came from his "fixation on this picture of a fan I saw.” 

Having only 12 days in Singapore, with production services provided by Akanga Film Asia, the production designer needed to do much of his prep back in LA. After a full day working with his usual art department, Tokarz would then check in with the Singaporean team well into the evening. “I was basically running two departments,” he says. “But it was really easy because everyone was so talented and capable.”

Prep for Hacks series five is already underway, though Tokarz says it is too early to tease what is coming up. “We don’t even have any scripts yet,” he insists. “We only know the brushstrokes.” He is however looking forward to more challenges. “I love chaos,” he declares. “And I love making sense of the chaos even more.”