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In the “Hacks” universe, “Who’s Making Dinner?” is a fictional sitcom celebrating its 50th anniversary at PaleyFest with a screening and party. The story goes that the sitcom was created in the 1970s by Deborah (Jean
Smart) alongside her late husband, Frank.
However, Frank conned her out of a creator credit, leaving himself with sole writing credit. Between the PaleyFest celebration and the clips from “Who’s Making Dinner?,” “Hacks” production designer Rob Tokarz faced a challenge: “How do we make this?”
Tokarz drew inspiration from classic sitcoms like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “All in the Family,” that have endured and still resonate with audiences. “That’s where we started from. This show needed to feel as important,” he says.
Tokarz drew from tones for the living room and décor from “All in the Family,” landing on a color palette of avocado shades, oranges and creams. “We wanted to live in that space with the wood paneling because it’s such a tip to that era. While we did pull out tones from ‘All in the Family,’ we wanted to uplift the actual architecture,” he explains. “And of course, when it comes to sitcoms, the couch is so incredibly important — it’s the focal point of just about everything we’ve ever seen.”
Finding the right couch proved to be a mission.
Jennifer Lukeheart, the show’s set decorator, searched far and wide. Ultimately, she found the seating in a surprising location: Facebook Marketplace. “It had the texture and tones that we were working with, and it had all the beats,” says Tokarz. The couch wasn’t all that paid homage to the past — the pass-through and doors used on “Hacks” were assets taken from the archives of TV history from the “Will and Grace” set, specifically from the episodes where the show honored “I Love Lucy.”
As part of the PaleyFest sequence, Tokarz and his team took a few pieces from the set dressing and built that out.
“We didn’t think the set walls would last, so we settled on photographing our set and blowing them up as photographic elevations,” he says. “It was the same scale as our set — just photographs.”
Tokarz took pleasure in creating factoids that were featured throughout the exhibit, highlighting details about where a decorator may have found an item or the estate sale the clock was bought at in 1965 -“little details like that you never see on camera,” he says. They added gravitas to the history of the set.
That set makes an appearance later on in the series finale, this time as Ava (Hannah Einbinder) walks around — but it looks very different. Tokarz updated it to make it feel contemporary, and approached it with realism.
“We took the walls that we shot for ‘Who’s Making Dinner?’ We got rid of the wallpaper, repainted over the wood finishes, which is something that probably would have happened if that were a real space,” he says. “We have that shot where we’re echoing the beginning of Deborah’s journey. But now we’re in Deb’s legacy with Ava. Now Ava has her own legacy to build with her own show.”
As it turned out, re-creating a set that paid homage to sitcoms of yesteryear was the least of Tokarz’s challenges.
In episode 8, titled “The Cube,” Deborah stages a publicity stunt to announce her Madison Square Garden show. She’s still barred from performing due to the fallout from quitting her late-night show in Season 4, so she decides to have a magician suspend her in a Plexiglas cube above the Las Vegas Strip to announce the show.
The sequence required the entire creative team to help solve the problem of how to pull it off, so it was shot in pieces and out of order.
The episode was, at its core, a story about a box and a lot of creative problem-solving across all departments. Tokarz needed the cube to play both on stage in Los Angeles and on the Strip in Las Vegas, so the sequence was broken into three bits and, with the magic of VFX and editing, seamlessly woven together.
The cube itself was made of steel and Plexiglas. “It sounds simple, but the actual construction needed to be engineer-stamped and approved because we were going to lift Deb up in it on stage,” Tokarz explains. “We had to get Plexiglas custom-made in Texas, and then make sure that all of the joints would work.”
The cube also needed an eight-foot-wide door, which was engineered onto the structure with each pane weighing in at nearly 300 pounds.
Considering the physics behind what happens when the door swings and the pressure it puts on the hinges, “it was all about finding the right hinge that would be able to maintain that,” he continues.
But that was just the cube. The team then had to figure out how to re-create a blackout on the Las Vegas Strip, which occurs as Deborah is hoisted into the air in the cube. While it could not be done practically, Tokarz and his team built 130 feet of the Las Vegas Strip on a stage.
“They’re not going to let you shut off enough lights, and there are way too many lights. Shooting on the actual Strip as a blackout wasn’t going to happen,” he says. So they found a solution. “We sent a team out. We matched every detail down to the joints in the sidewalk, the sprinkler heads and the balustrade on the wall. “We built olive trees from scratch so that they reflected the trees that they had at Caesars Palace.”
The team spent a full day taking measurements, photographs, color samples and references. Making things even more challenging was that Formula 1 was setting up its Las Vegas circuit.
“There were a lot of fences in the way, a lot of tape measures being thrown through chain-link fences to get measurements,” Tokarz recalls. “Then, we built it all on a soundstage.”
First, the cube work on stage involved raising and lowering Deborah against a sea of solids to capture the visual effects elements, led by VFX supervisor Martin Hall.
“We shot it in parts. We shot the visual effects elements of the cube on the soundstage, surrounded by solids. It was a really dark space with a lot of creative lighting elements,” Tokarz says. “The helicopter was really just a light on a rig that circled around to make sure she was lit properly. We had it going up and down so that we could match the camera angles.”
The team also built a softbox enclosure, which was the size of an entire stage in order to properly light the scene.
Once they had that lit and built, the ambulance and news trucks were brought onto the soundstage.
But the true star of the scene was Hall. “He was our visual effects supervisor who did a fantastic job stitching it all together because all that had to make sense, and it was shot in three different elements,” says Tokarz. And it worked. “You just have to trust the process to come together.”
