Why Talk Show Legend Merrill Markoe Felt Right At Home On ‘Hacks’ After Years Of Real-Life Writing For ‘Letterman’ – Guest Column

Editor’s note: In 1980, Merrill Markoe became the head writer for The David Letterman Show, which won a Daytime Emmy. She then went on to share three Primetime Emmy wins for her work as the original head writer on Late Night with David Letterman. And before all that, in 1978, she was part of Mary Tyler Moore’s variety show, Mary. So it seems sensible that HBO Max’s hit comedy series Hacks, which is currently enjoying a comedy record-breaking 25 Emmy nominations for its fifth and final season, would be a favorite watch for Merrill. When Jean Smart‘s Hacks character Deborah Vance finally achieved her dream of hosting a Late Night show in Season 4, Markoe could relate, and then some. So it makes perfect sense that Hacks co-creators Jen Statsky, Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello would ask Markoe to join Vance’s on-screen writers’ room. In Markoe’s guest column below, she recalls the deeply-meta, surreal experience of playing a fictional version of herself, with her own name, in a fictional late-night writers’ room — and just how much she felt an affinity with Deborah and Ava (Hannah Einbinder) as they did battle in a male-dominated world.

The best and the worst thing about being alive is that you never completely know what any given day will bring. Let’s take, for example, April 6, 2023. I was having kind of an average day worrying about Ukraine, and Israel/Gaza, nervous about the upcoming Writers Guild strike and excited about the Stormy Daniels trial, which had just begun jury selection.

Then, much to my surprise, I got a message from Sheri Kelton, the woman who sometimes represents me, saying that the creative team behind Hacks, my favorite show, wanted to hire me for ‘a blue sky room’ the following week. I was unfamiliar with the term ‘blue sky room’ but I instantly said yes, hopeful that I had not said yes to anything involving paragliding. Though truthfully I liked Hacks so much that I didn’t really care what color room this was going to be.

From the very first episode, I loved the two main characters and the actresses who played them. And it was easy to relate in a personal way to Ava’s struggles as a writer in Los Angeles, scrambling to find work while butting heads with the bigger-than-life narcissistic personalities who control everything in all areas.

Much to my delight, I was being recruited as a consultant for a series of Zoom meetings that were intended to help the show’s creators gather ideas for use in Season 4, when they intended to give Deborah Vance, the brash vainglorious comedian at the center of the show’s premise, the late night talk she had been dreaming about for years.

I don’t mean to brag but I have to admit they definitely came to the right person. In the 1980’s I participated as Head Writer in the start-up of three different talk shows, all starring that internationally beloved talk show host David Letterman. Before we launched his Late Night show, we did a pilot for a syndicated afternoon talk show called Leave it to Dave and after that went nowhere, it was quickly followed up by a live NBC morning show, The David Letterman Show, which ran for 18 weeks. After that crashed and burned, the NBC Late Night show was born. So I felt like I had a million — no, two million — story ideas about starting a talk show that I could contribute.

I began reading what was written on those cards (by the real-life Hacks writing staff) and was duly impressed that so many of them were ideas I would have wanted to do when I was Head Writer at Letterman.

And in that blue sky room, discussing talk show stuff with Hacks co-creators Paul W. Downs, Lucia Aniello and Jen Statsky turned out to be a lot of fun. Though by the time it wrapped up, the writers’ strike had begun. Next thing we all knew, there was picketing and strike teams and everything else about television writing came to a halt. 

Meanwhile, Season 3 of Hacks had begun to air, and of course I watched it with even more enthusiasm than I felt in previous seasons, if such a thing was possible. I got chills at the end of the season finale when Ava, after realizing she had been lied to by Deborah and denied the Head Writer job she had been promised, decided to resort to blackmail. Obviously, that was where Ava and I parted ways. I was born without a functioning crime gene and could never have voluntarily clashed with any existing penal code. But I was even more eager than usual to see what the Hacks writing staff were planning for these two hyper-emotional characters as they tried to work together inside the fraught workplace conditions of a daily Late Night talk show. What nightmarish scenarios would these two characters be facing?

What I had no way to suspect was that among the things they would be facing would be ME.

When Paul W. Downs first asked me if I would want to join the Deborah Vance writing staff, I laughed out loud. In real life, after my talk show work on the Letterman NBC show ended in the late 1980s, I’d never taken a job on another talk show. And I was very clear about why I didn’t want to do that again. It was because in my time at The Letterman Show, we had come up with so many unusual ideas for pieces, that I had literally trained myself to walk through the world and imagine everything I encountered as an idea for a possible talk show segment. Anything I experienced or came upon or read about would immediately start to reassemble itself in my brain into an Act 1 or an Act 4, or a cold opening or a remote. So when I would try to envision myself taking part in any other version of a talk show, I could see myself sitting there, staring, brow furrowed, eyes squinting as I responded to every pitch with a comment like “Yeah…but see, we did that in Season 1 of The Letterman show.“ Or, “The thing is, and I don’t know if this matters to you, but we did something almost exactly like that in Season 2 of The Letterman Show,” or, “Look, I’m sorry to be such a spoil sport. But we did that exact thing in Season 3 of The Letterman Show, and it never actually worked the way we wanted it to.”

I do believe I added a poignant moment to Episode 6, despite the fact that the real Hacks writers had a vision of me as a character that didn’t completely match my own. My ‘Deborah Vance Show senior writer’ persona was kind of a rude complainer with an incipient alcohol problem.

Yet it now came to pass that after decades of saying no to talk show writing, I happily said yes to pretending to write on a pretend show. And it was definitely kind of surreal to be sitting at a table in a lookalike version of a talk show writers’ room perusing a wall full of index cards bearing show ideas. Reflexively, I began reading what was written on those cards (by the real-life Hacks writing staff) and was duly impressed that so many of them were ideas I would have wanted to do when I was Head Writer at Letterman.

What also rang true for me was the way that, in the course of the season, Deborah said no to so many of the ideas her writers had supposedly submitted.

Of course, playing a writer named Merrill Markoe and being a writer named Merrill Markoe actually had almost nothing in common. It was definitely a surreal touch that none of the other Deborah Vance show ‘writers’, all of whom were actors and/or stand-up comedians, were being referred to by their real names. Only me. But gone was the tension of worrying about pleasing a high-strung, perfectionist host. Gone was the terror of wondering if the piece that was about to air was going to get big enough laughs from the live audience. And in its place was the absolute pleasure of watching Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder play their characters perfectly on my favorite show, just a few inches away. Everyone in the cast was so impressive. Michaela Watkins playing an HR chaperone and Jane Adams as Ava’s mother both knocked me out as I watched them take over the room, trying out versions of their lines. These fake talk show employees were all astonishingly hilarious.

The whole experience was ultimately a good one. With the exception of LA catching fire in the middle of shooting. Then I was totally surprised and thrilled when I got to make a Season 5 guest appearance. Especially since Season 5 has a shocking total of five guest actresses nominated for Emmys. And no, I was not one of them, but I do believe I added a poignant moment to Episode 6, despite the fact that the real Hacks writers had a vision of me as a character that didn’t completely match my own. My ‘Deborah Vance Show senior writer’ persona was kind of a rude complainer with an incipient alcohol problem. Luckily those were details that were not hard for me to locate in my ‘acting tool box’. But in real life, if Ava had said “You good?” to me, I probably would have responded “Yeah. Perfect.”