This story contains spoilers from “Hacks” Season 4, Episode 10.

The Season 4 finale of “Hacks” wasn’t just 10 episodes in the making. It was the payoff of four stressful and comedy-obsessed seasons.

“It’s only after all that they’ve been through in Season 4 that Deborah’s able to make that choice,” series co-creator and executive producer Paul W. Downs told TheWrap.

After Ava’s old show learns the network encouraged “Late Night with Deborah Vance” to bury a thorny interview with an actor who’d been accused of sexual harassment, the penultimate episode of “Hacks” Season 4 forces Deborah (Jean Smart) to make a nearly impossible decision. Either she throws her head writer and creative collaborator Ava (Hannah Einbinder) under the bus, or she tanks her own career as well as the show she’s spent her entire career trying to host. Initially, “A Slippery Slope” makes the audience believe Deborah’s going to sacrifice Ava and once again put her career first. But instead the episode ends with Deborah telling her audience the truth and ending her show on her own terms.

“It’s because of their ups and downs and all that they’ve been together that they’re forged in fire. It really required all of that for Deborah to have the clarity and the courage to do it,” Downs explained.

But if Episode 9 was Deborah’s big sacrifice, “Heaven” is the uncomfortable aftermath of her choices. Lucia Aniello, who also co-created and executive produces the award-winning comedy, assured TheWrap that Deborah doesn’t resent Ava for what happened.

“In the end, Deborah did it out of love for Ava, but also because she’s protecting the show. She doesn’t want to make a show that has to make these concessions and has to supplement itself with a spinoff and also all the social media. It’s just not the show she ever wanted to make,” Aniello explained. “She’s realizing that what late night is now isn’t the late night of her dreams.”

“Because she’s a comedian, it’s about the integrity of her work as a comic. That’s the other side of the coin,” Downs added. “There are ways throughout her career that she compromised her work, she leaned into parts of her that were a joke and she went for maybe the broader laugh. But it’s because of the ways in which she’s evolved via her relationship with Ava that have made her pretty resolute in that decision.”

Most of “Heaven” follows Deborah as she shuffles around, trying to figure out what she can do for the next 18 months she can’t perform comedy due to a non-compete clause in her contract. She mindlessly buys souvenirs and tries to convince Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) to work for her again. Even her grand scheme to bring Ava to Singapore is a step backwards. After finding a loophole, Deborah starts performing comedy via translator, a decision that quickly sees her reverting back to tired jokes and long nights out with strangers. The more Ava tries to push Deborah to work on new material, the harder the comedian leans into old, bad habits.

It’s only once Ava declares that she’s leaving that the seemingly unthinkable happens. Ava wakes up to a series of headlines and phone calls all connected to Deborah’s death.

Of course, Deborah doesn’t really overdose at the end of Season 4. You can’t kill Jean Smart’s iconic character that easily. But this fake-death experience was based on real life.

“It was really the Alfred Nobel effect. His obituary was misprinted, which called him the merchant of death. It really was a wake-up call for him, which is what led to the establishment of the Nobel Peace Prize,” Downs explained. “It’s another thing that we’ve always talked about since Season 1, the idea that someone famous could have an obituary leak. It’s happened a lot. We loved that as a narrative device as to what that could do to a character.”

For Deborah, seeing an obituary define her legacy by her failed talk show was enough to pull her our of her grief.

“Deborah is in this process of mourning the loss of her dream. What is the thing that can shake her awake, bring her back and reinvigorate her drive? And we were like, ‘That’s a pretty good one, especially for a woman who’s felt like her story was written by other people,’ ” Downs said. “For her ultimate story — your obituary — to be written with your biggest loss first is just too much for her to bear. It was like rocket fuel to motivate her into a very different fifth season.”

“She will not let this be the way that she remembered, and she will not let her biggest loss, the loss of this show — even though it was a moral and emotional victory — define her,” Jen Statsky, the third co-creator and executive producer for the Emmy darling told TheWrap. “She is going into [Season 5] with the mission to figure out, ‘How do I redefine my legacy?’ “

Though “Hacks” has spent so much time zeroing in on Deborah’s evolving relationship with her own art and legacy, the creators of “Hacks” are still very much cognizant of Ava’s artistic journey and interested in exploring it further.

“A real strength of Ava’s is that she has unwavering belief in the work that she and Deborah do together, the power and strength of it, and the fact that they are better together than apart, certainly creatively,” Statsky said. “Ava has really grown in that way over the course of this series to understand that is what she wants to be spending her time doing. So I think first and foremost, she will always want to take advantage of this really unique, special kismet connection that they have.”

All episodes of “Hacks” are now streaming on Max.