It isn’t often that a critic gets to tackle three seasons of a television comedy at once. Still less frequently may he do so after binging the whole gut-busting run-in-progress in a matter of days. Yet here I am, fresh from 27 episodes of HBO’s hilarious, wise, and, yes, generous series Hacks. If the following contains typos, forgive me. My body and brain still ache from laughing. 

Hacks would seem, at a glance, a strange candidate for a midrun testimonial. (HBO has just renewed the show for a fourth season.) An Emmy winner for acting, directing, and writing, the series ought to be on the lips of the entire clickbait intelligentsia, filling digital column inches from the Ringer to Slate. Oddly, however, the show has received a mere fraction of the attention given to lesser productions such as Hulu’s The Bear. The reason is clear enough: Hacks has political jokes but no ideological hook to rival The Bear’s working-class bona fides. If Veep, another very online darling, existed to take down our hopelessly mercenary office-seeking class, Hacks is merely funny. Indeed, it is far funnier.