How the ‘Hacks’ Production Team Created a ’70s Sitcom Set and Overcame Las Vegas-Sized Challenges
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- Rob Tokarz, production designer on "Hacks," built the fictional '70s sitcom set "Who's Making Dinner?" with an avocado, orange, and cream palette drawn from "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "All in the Family," featuring reclaimed pass-throughs and doors from the "Will and Grace" archive.
- Set decorator Jennifer Lukeheart found the show's signature couch on Facebook Marketplace after an extensive search, with Tokarz noting it had "the texture and tones" the team was working with.
- For the Las Vegas Strip blackout in episode 8 ("The Cube"), Tokarz's team built 130 feet of the Strip on a soundstage — including custom-built olive trees matching those at Caesars Palace and sidewalk joints matched down to the sprinkler heads — because a real Strip blackout wasn't feasible.
- The Plexiglas suspension cube was engineered with steel framing and an eight-foot-wide door, with each pane weighing nearly 300 pounds; the structure required engineer-stamped approval after custom Plexiglas was manufactured in Texas.
- Measurements were complicated by Formula 1 setting up its Las Vegas circuit during the team's reference-gathering day, forcing tape measures "through chain-link fences," per Tokarz.
- The '70s sitcom set reappears updated in the series finale as Ava walks through the space — walls repainted, wood finishes redone — with Tokarz framing it as "echoing the beginning of Deborah's journey" but shifting into Ava's own legacy.
Why it matters: The Las Vegas sequence shows how a prestige comedy invests in physical production to sell one impossible gag: Deborah's magician stunt had to read as real Strip, requiring 130 feet of stage build plus an engineer-stamped 300-pound door per pane — practical ambition that VFX supervisor Martin Hall then stitched together from three separately-shot elements.
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