This is Deborah Vance’s world, and we’re just living in it.
“Hacks” showrunners Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky have spent the past few seasons establishing Deborah’s (Jean Smart) visual aesthetic — it’s big, bold and splashy; production designer Rob Tokarz, who earned an Emmy nomination for his work on the Max comedy, looked for ways to expand that vision when the opportunity arose, especially when it involved new spaces.
In episode 8, Tokarz’s Emmy-nominated “Yes, And,” Deborah is double-booked. She will perform at a Palm Springs Pride event and will receive an honorary doctorate from UC Berkeley. She faces a tough choice, but she needs to stir up some excitement, and college is the place to do it. It’s the final push for her to land a guest appearance on a late night show, and there’s a lot that goes into it.
Several scenes take place at a fraternity party, a new space for Tokarz, but he was able to draw on personal experiences, dating back to his days in high school. “I wanted to paint the room I lived in. I was so bold about this choice, and it didn’t work at all,” he admits. “I saw that color choice for this room and thought it would make things look above and beyond.”
He wanted the room to feel “visually sticky and cluttered,” he adds. He added a combination of clothing such as a lizard tank, a weight bench, bongs and posters, with the idea of making the room look like a hodgepodge of things and “undecorated.”
The student room had to feel ‘sticky’.
Things don’t go well for Deborah when old video clips of her start circulating and the subsequent events keep her grounded on campus. She misses the Palm Springs Pride event, which brought with it a Deborah Vance fan area.
However, Tokarz still had to build the Palm Springs Deborah Vance Activation Room, so he spent time diving into research. The production team found a home that screamed mid-century Palm Springs modern, with an open backdrop, a pool, and spectacular views.
Rob Tokarz filled the House of Vance with items that Deborah Vance sold on QVC.
In decorating it, Tokarz had conversations with Aniello, Downs and Statsky, and the approach mirrored that of creating any other set: start with more and scale back.
“We took everything we could think of from previous episodes of Deborah Vance’s world, with things she would have sold on QVC, and just filled the house with it,” he says.
From there, he outfitted it with signage and a bright blue color. “We wanted to make it beautiful because it is Deborah Vance and her lifestyle collection,” says Tokarz. “We wanted it to feel like Pride.” Tokarz also started working with the familiar.
Production designer Rob Tokarz looked at installations for House of Vance.
This season, Deborah’s love for the holidays finally found expression in a Christmas episode titled “The Deborah Vance Christmas Spectacular.” Tokarz turned her sprawling Las Vegas mansion into a winter wonderland, complete with fake snow and a huge gingerbread house.
He called back to previous seasons when it came to building the set. “We used the Nutcrackers from Season 1, and we had a Christmas room full of Deborah’s ornaments that we folded in,” he says.
What is the one color Tokarz would never use when working on existing spaces or new spaces for Deborah Vance’s universe? While gold is a yes, yellow is a hard no: “It’s not complementary to her world.”