The Siren and the Hack

Eliana Rozinov analyzes the interplay between two recent shows, “Sirens” and “Hacks.”

By Eliana RozinovAugust 15, 2025

• Television

• Gender & Sexuality

Editor’s note: This review contains spoilers for the recent seasons of Hacks and Sirens.

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THOSE OF US who hesitated to partake in the “she walked so she could run” trend, or insisted that the saying should be the other way around, may rejoice that two unlikely archetypes have since traversed this path of women’s rights—and wrongs. What gendered and ethical lines of thought emerge from the bizarre duo of the siren and the hack? At their core, these terms elicit violence: a “siren” warns against it, while a “hack” inflicts it. The former is employed by an alarmist, while the latter gives reasons for alarm. However, two recent TV series, which themselves have gone somewhat viral, demonstrate that perhaps the distinction is not so clear-cut.

Though there are disparities in the kinds of work each show’s women do and the personal traumas they overcome, both HBO Max’s Hacks (2021– ) and Netflix’s Sirens (2025– ) subvert the terms in their titles. As each series dramatizes the effects of censorship, capitalism, and competition on women across generations, it becomes difficult to determine which vantage point—“the siren” or “the hack”—these female characters assume. The problem of who is in danger and who should come with a caution label is always in question; the one certainty is that we must be on alert.

Such power struggles are enacted not only through the age gaps of Sirens’ and Hacks’ protagonists but also through a generational divide in terms of language. The siren of Greek mythology seduces passersby with a voice too beautiful (“hey, hey”), while the hack of contemporary media performs with a voice so banal it is grating. This rift in cultural history is intensified by the animal imagery associated with each figure. The age-old siren of Homer’s Odyssey, whose physical appearance in the ancient poem is an enigma, evolved over centuries of art to be depicted with the body of a woman and the wings of a bird, while the “old hack” bears the name of an overworked (“hackney”) horse. Today, these origin stories are mired by memes in which “the siren” is erroneously pinned with the tail of a mermaid, as “the hack” is made into a data breach.

What makes Sirens and Hacks so provocative, separately and together, is how these series do away with such conventions, offering viewers a wild version of femininity distinct from the archetypes they evoke. Yet it is, curiously, in this very breaking with tradition that the siren and the hack encounter one another. What does the crossover between the siren and the hack tell us about the public tasks that women are privately asked to carry out? And what happens when they choose to disclose what has been asked of them?

These questions are not just rhetorical, since they are deeply embedded in the substance of both shows. (I don’t mean in the Demi Moore/Margaret Qualley–type way, though there’s a bit of backstabbing.) With Sirens and Hacks problematizing one woman’s capacity to speak, as she is lured into—and cut off from—another woman’s legacy, the question becomes: what comes first, the siren or the hack?

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In season four of Hacks, comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) gives a bittersweet monologue unlike any stand-up set she has performed before, one that elicits more tears than laughs and culminates in her stepping down as host of Late Night. The issue, as Deborah explains to the audience, is that the network is pressuring her to fire her head writer, Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder). Deborah refuses to let Ava go, “not just because she’s [her] creative partner but because it’s a slippery slope.”

It begins when Deborah is told to cut a joke about a famous actor’s sexual escapades and a frustrated Ava vents these details to a friend, who also happens to be a journalist. CEO Bob Lipka (Tony Goldwyn) demands Ava’s termination, but to succumb to these demands goes against the art that Deborah seeks to create: “So, what will they ask of me next? Where’s the line?”

In Hacks, it is only when Ava becomes a metaphorical siren—and voices her concern over the censorship at Late Night—that Deborah draws the line, announcing that it ends right “here, right now.” But such delineations were not always in place. As early Hacks fans may recall, the Deborah of season one dismissed the need for boundaries in comedy. After a somewhat entitled Ava shares the tweet (about a closeted senator sending his son to conversion camp) that gets her fired from her earlier job prior to working for Deborah, Ava muses, “I guess I crossed a line or whatever.” To her indifference, Deborah responds with the biting words from which Hacks’ first episode gets its title: “There is no line. It’s just not funny.”

It would be easy to perceive the nod to this line in Deborah’s final monologue in “A Slippery Slope” as a moment when things come full circle, signaling the interdependence on which her and Ava’s character development is predicated. The first person of “what will they ask of me” is always already a “we.” Indeed, the reason that the actor cannot take Deborah’s joke is that its vulgar punch line alerts other women to his predatory behavior. With Deborah and Ava both refusing to stay silent on this front, there is more siren work afoot.

Yet the series, which HBO Max has renewed for a fifth season, does not end on a high note sung in unison. Rather, Hacks’ fourth season concludes in a satirical “Heaven” (episode 10) to which Deborah travels with Ava, as a noncompete prevents her from performing in the United States. In her Singapore hotel suite, the comedian screeches about a premature obituary that depicts her departure from Late Night as the source of the entire franchise’s demise.

In her fit of anger, Deborah appears to have forgotten that, the night prior, she had also spelled out the demise of Ava. Several martinis in, Deborah tells her twentysomething employee that she has no friends, no partner, and no purpose other than working for Deborah. The reason Ava is so hurt by Deborah’s account is that it is true.

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The meek Ava of “Heaven” is almost indistinguishable from the “big, brave girl” of Hacks’ first episode, who waltzes into Deborah’s mansion, which she compares to a glorified Cheesecake Factory, concedes to knowing nothing about her work, and makes clear that she wants no part in it: “The last thing […] I want to do is move to the desert to write some lame jokes for an old hack.”

But she does.

What becomes of Ava from the point of her initial encounter with this “hack” is precisely where Sirens comes into the picture. Like Hacks, Sirens centers on the relationship between two women, nearly 30 years apart in age. Twenty-five-year-old Simone DeWitt (Milly Alcock) is hired by the ethereal Michaela “Kiki” Kell (Julianne Moore) as her personal assistant. In the ostentatious beach town of the show’s setting (think Nantucket), Simone tends to more than Michaela’s property and bird aviary; she checks her breath, snaps her boss’s photo for light sexting purposes, and shares her chewing gum. In Sirens’ conclusion, Simone takes Michaela’s position and her husband, Peter (Kevin Bacon), becoming “Mrs. Kell,” as Michaela is ousted from her mansion and out to the sea. But Simone’s supposed takeover of Michaela’s life is, in fact, a slippery slope—who will supplant the supplanter?—one whose course of action neither she nor Michaela can foresee.

Returning to Sirens’ fourth episode, “Persephone,” viewers are struck by how much its opening scenes evoke Ava’s first meeting with Deborah. Sitting across from one another in a bright foyer, Michaela conducts an interview with an intimidated Simone, who admits that she has googled everything about her prospective employer and wants to work for her more than anything.

That Sirens was created by Molly Smith Metzler, who also wrote Netflix’s Maid (2021), is telling of its attention to class difference. Despite the fact that Michaela oozes refinement, she and Simone are cut from the same cloth. Both grew up beneath the poverty line and were awarded the same merit-based scholarship to Yale.

The most interesting dilemma Sirens poses is not who is but rather how one becomes a siren. This dilemma is twofold. On one hand, it is a matter of how the rise and fall of Sirens’ women redefines the term’s mythical origins. With a bit of plastic surgery and a lot of molding by Michaela, Simone becomes her. On the other, it is a matter of how the mythical—which also prefigures the “sirens” code word that Simone’s sister Devon (Meghann Fahy) sends over text—relays a message about how readily the power these women attain can be taken away.

As Sirens progresses, its grounds for alarm proliferate. Simone is kissed by Peter as a photographer captures a photo of them, which he shares with Michaela, who fires Simone. In her turn, Simone tells Peter about the infidelity case Michaela has been building against him, so Peter discards of his wife. The hypocrisy that underlies this sequence of events reaches its climax in Sirens’ fifth and final episode, whose title Metzler borrows from Margaret Atwood’s poem “Siren Song.” In the poem, the siren-like speaker does not seduce. Instead, she addresses her listener to “come closer. / This song / is a cry for help.” But who, indeed, can hear this cry?

The speaker is tired of singing, lamenting that “alas / it is a boring song / but it works every time.” That is, until it doesn’t.

Still, the siren who sings this boring song works overtime. Her song also echoes the speech of the hack, whose words have become trite from overuse.

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“[Y]ou’re on cruise control up there,” Hacks’ Marty Ghilain (Christopher McDonald) tells Deborah in the pilot episode. Having slept with Deborah on and off for years, Marty is now breaking the news that he will be replacing her time slots at his Las Vegas casino with an a cappella group. Deborah explodes at the restaurant, causing a scene, crashing out, if you will. It is in the aftermath of this crash-out that Ava arrives.

In each season of Hacks, viewers see Ava put a fresh spin on Deborah’s old sets so that Deborah can take herself off cruise control. In this way, Ava functions quite differently from Sirens’ Simone. Whereas Simone learns to speak through Michaela, who shows her how to navigate the ropes of “high society,” it is Ava who comes to speak for Deborah, as she also brings her employer down to earth.

Deborah herself says as much in Hacks when she apologizes to a fed-up Ava and admits, “You are my voice.” But in becoming Deborah’s voice, Ava becomes too accustomed to Deborah’s struggle to make a name for herself. Ava reverts to the most genuine version of a hack, working hard without recognition. She reminds us of the Simone who first sits before Michaela in Sirens and professes to do the same.

Yet, as Sirens develops, Simone uses Michaela’s voice against her, cutting ties with “Kiki” through Michaela’s own motto: “If it doesn’t serve you, let it go.” Whether this separating from Michaela will ultimately serve Simone remains ambiguous. But if Hacks’ “Dance Mom” has taught us anything (besides boofing), it’s that no amount of fame comes without destruction. And unfortunately, dance instructor Abby Lee Miller was right when she told her girls that “everybody’s replaceable.”

It is the knowledge of such replaceability, which looms over Simone as she steps in as the new “trophy wife,” that makes it impossible for her to fully let go of Michaela. That Hacks has always situated itself on the brink of this impossibility, with Ava and Deborah unable to relinquish their duties to their jobs and to each other, makes them welcome interlocutors for the women of Sirens.

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If Sirens’ and Hacks’ women are conversant with one another—if the sirens are sometimes hacks, hacks sirens—it is because they are mirrors of each other’s desires. Just as Ava (who oscillates between siren and hack to Deborah’s work) reflects Simone (who moves between hack and siren to Michaela’s life), so too does Deborah reflect Michaela, in moments when the comedian shows the socialite what she wants.

For her part, Deborah wants to be anything but a talentless hack. She lives and breathes her job, identifying as a comedian first and a woman second. Her husband leaves her for another woman (her own sister, no less), and her daughter, DJ (Kaitlin Olson), grows up in her absence. But in the decades that follow, Deborah’s hard-driven work goes unappreciated. Her hustle, albeit strategic, makes her work ethic an ironic metonymy of her run time on QVC. She stays true to quality, value, and convenience, while her male counterparts use dated, un-PC jokes and dirty humor to ascend.

It is striking, then, that as a woman who pursues the opposite trajectory in Sirens, forgoing the professional for the personal, Michaela ends up in a position no better than Deborah does in Hacks. When Michaela meets Peter (who has not yet ended his previous marriage), she gives up a thriving legal career to be a wife and mother, only to have Peter leave her for Simone and punish her for being unable to carry a child to term. Having signed a medieval prenup and produced no new “heirs” to the Kell fortune, Michaela resorts to searching for loopholes in her marriage contract, as Deborah does in her media contract.

And still, as Michaela leaves with nothing, she prides herself on giving Simone her “wings.” In an inimitable line delivered by Julianne Moore with sincere expression and slightly caustic tone, Michaela tells Simone: “Don’t you look beautiful in that dress I had made for you?”

Along with these metaphoric wings, Michaela teaches Simone to fly. By way of her maternal instincts, she conditions Simone to watch for warning signs of a woman’s “exile” before the sirens sound. Through these lessons of authenticity—which range from spotting fakes to ensuring that Simone does not marry a fawning neighbor—it is as if Michaela takes the words out of Deborah’s mouth in Hacks to tell Simone, “When you’re in the public eye, people love to turn on you and tear you to shreds.” But Michaela has said her piece as “Mrs. Kell,” and Simone deserves as much, even if it will not last and comes at Kiki’s own expense.

It is in the wake of Simone’s flight—toward an uncertain future over a return to a traumatic past—that Michaela departs. Sitting on the same ferry by which Simone came to the island, and hearing Devon say, “You’re not a monster, Michaela,” Michaela empathetically responds: “Neither is she.”

Michaela knows that, like all great leviathans, the most alarming monsters are not solitary heads. Rather, these monsters gather in a crowd that repeatedly chimes in beneath the “Siren Song” (and no, they are not singing “WAP”). This unpleasant chorus is comprised of women made to resent successful women with “clickable faces”; of “assholes,” like Marty Ghilain and Bob Lipka and Peter Kell; of rivals, who incite the power-hungry to belittle; and of extortionists, who add injury to their insults. But this cacophony of voices is hushed, paradoxically enough, under the siren’s own willing silence. It is this very silence that provokes the hack’s surprising eloquence.

As Ava and Deborah (the truest of “wingwomen”) come together, and Simone and Michaela come apart, they come to the same conclusion: that a woman achieves her dreams not through a rejection but through a re-entrenchment of the rigid terms that capitalism has put in her place, illuminating that the ultimate reclamation may entail sacrificing this position for another woman. Handing their perilous place to the next generation, Deborah and Michaela can only hope that, as they fill their mentors’ shoes, Ava and Simone can hold on to what they earn, instead of having to walk or run away.

In the intersections of these characters’ lives and desires, Hacks and Sirens illustrate how no “old hack” can flourish without her siren, and no new siren can move forward without a hack to the feminine ideal she once embraced. In doing so, these women reveal that, in a world full of sirens and hacks, perhaps it is most alluring to be neither. Descending the slope of social expectations, they beckon us to close our ears to the piercing sounds of sexual favors, to break free from overused clichés that women are “asking for it,” to lose control, and, finally, to cross out the line.