Jean Smart’s Hacks Emmy record is five wins from five seasons
Jean Smart won a fifth Emmy for Hacks, becoming the first woman reported to sweep acting Emmys across every season of one show.
By Poppy Nakagawa · Culture Writer
3 min read
Jean Smart’s Hacks Emmy record is now five wins from five seasons. Smart won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series in 2026 for playing Deborah Vance on HBO Max’s Hacks, according to the Television Academy’s official results.
The trophy completed a full-series sweep: Smart won the lead-comedy-actress Emmy for each of the show’s five seasons. USA Today and Variety reported that the result made her the first woman to win an acting Emmy for every season of a single television series.
What is Jean Smart’s Hacks Emmy record?
The record is narrower, and more unusual, than a long streak of repeat victories. Smart received the acting award in every season of Hacks, with wins in 2021, 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026, according to Variety’s awards reporting.
That means there was no Hacks season for which Smart was nominated in this category and then lost. The list of award years includes a gap between 2022 and 2024, but the record concerns the show’s five seasons, not five uninterrupted calendar years.
- 2021: Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, for Deborah Vance
- 2022: Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, for Deborah Vance
- 2024: Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, for Deborah Vance
- 2025: Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, for Deborah Vance
- 2026: Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, for Deborah Vance
The Television Academy lists Smart as the 2026 winner in the category and identifies her character as Deborah Vance. Its Hacks awards page currently lists 86 nominations and 14 Emmys for the series.
How does the record compare with Veep?
Julia Louis-Dreyfus had a longer run of wins on Veep, taking lead comedy actress six times during the show’s seven-season run, USA Today reported. But she lost for the final season, to Fleabag star Phoebe Waller-Bridge, so her run was not an every-season sweep.
Variety reported before the 2026 ceremony that Bill Cosby had won an acting Emmy for all three seasons of I Spy from 1966 through 1968, the only prior such sweep for a scripted series that lasted at least three seasons. The same report noted that Blythe Danner had done it on the two-season drama Huff.
Smart’s Emmy total reaches eight
Smart’s latest win is her eighth career Emmy, USA Today and Variety reported. Alongside the five Hacks awards, she won twice as a guest actress in a comedy for Frasier, in 2000 and 2001, and once as a supporting actress in a comedy for Samantha Who?, in 2008.
The Television Academy biography page still says Smart has seven Emmys and four for Hacks. That bio appears not to have been updated with the 2026 result, while the Academy’s show results page confirms the fifth Hacks win.
This story draws on original reporting from Variety.