Lucia Aniello always knew it would end this way.
A decade ago, he and his writing partners, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky, began sketching a comedy about the breakup between a boomer standup diva and a millennial comedian who pulls him out of his routine. In 2019, they pitched a show on HBO, detailing their plans for a five-season series. They even explained the last scene.
After six years, they shot it. “We’ve been looking at that idea,” Aniello said.
The fifth and final season of “Hacks,” the HBO comedy that won 12 Emmys, including best comedy series in 2024, will premiere on April 9. The show brought back the reputation of Jean Smart, who plays comedy legend Deborah Vance, and resurrected the career of Hannah Einbinder, who plays writer Ava Daniel. And it confirmed the talents of the show’s three creators as creators of smart, ambitious comedies with pockets of surprising seriousness.
“Hacks” has both a strong comedy-per-moment ratio and a deep interest in the emotional lives of its characters. The jokes are funny. But most of them come from a place of pain.
As they shot the finale, Einbinder was constantly crying. Even Smart, a tough cookie, missed a few times. The eyes of the creators are always very dry, because of being busy with the need. In a video interview at the beginning of March, the creators admitted that the end of the show had not yet been decided. They had just finished shooting the finale, which had taken them from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to Paris, and they were still editing it.
“There’s a lot of emotions, it’s a little hard to get into right now,” Statsky said.
Aniello joined the call from a shared Zoom window with Downs, who co-starred on the show. (He announced their engagement during the 2021 Emmys, and they now have a 4-year-old child.) He thought he would hear when the new season ended, on May 28.
“For me, where everything will be hit will be the night of the final game,” he said. “Because when that happens, there is no more generosity, no more being seen by people, after that night it will be very far from me, which will hurt me a lot.”
In season four, Deborah earned what the show considers the most of any comedian — her own late-night network show. He then left it instead of betraying Ava. So what is left for Deborah to achieve in this final season?
“At the end of the season, it’s a test of how he frees himself, but also how important what he learns in life and what he has to live for,” Statsky said.
Perhaps Deborah explained this best in the first episode of the season. She says: “I don’t want to be remembered by other people as a quitter or a late-night killer or a troubled woman. The writers gave her a great ending. And one for Ava, too.
“Hacks” often seem timely, even scientific. The late-night show, when the network pressed Deborah, was written before Stephen Colbert’s show was canceled and Jimmy Kimmel’s was suspended. This season, Deborah is connected because that network has a different broadcaster and media outlet. (All written before Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO, was sold to other conglomerates.)
“Hacks” argues for the importance of comedy, as the nature of comedy – the rise of YouTube, the decline of late-night, the erosion of monoculture – has continued to evolve significantly since that first sound. But it has concerns beyond comedy.
“What we’re trying to do with ‘Hacks’ is speak truth and power and put on a show that’s funny first, but also reflects our values and speaks to what we feel needs to be said in the world,” Statsky said.
One of those values is the hard work, expressed through the collaborative relationship between Deborah and Ava, that bridges the generation gap. It takes a lot of effort – and a lot of passion – to get that many points.
“It’s still a dark pedagogy in some ways,” Aniello said. “But it’s also a love story, and the language of love in this world is often funny.”
“Hacks” is also a love story between its creators, who learn early that their friendship is more important than disagreements about any incident. They feel that the show has made them both better writers and better runners, and they have plans to work together on another, yet-to-be-announced series.
On the phone, their prevailing sentiment was gratitude – for the cast, the crew, for each other, for the fact that the show is happening at all, given the wildfires, the Covid restrictions, the writers’ and actors’ strikes.
Smart lost her husband shortly before the first series and later suffered a heart attack. Aniello started working in the morning. These things are not funny! And yet the show was and still is. Its final scenes were shot at the Louvre, which had given permission to film, then revoked it, and at the last minute may have given it again.
“Every season it was like, Are we going to finish the season, let alone the program, the way we want?” Downs said. But somehow they had.
“The situation is not sad,” he continued. “It’s like, what fun we have doing it.”
