Lucia Aniello always knew it would end this way.
A decade ago, she and her writing partners, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky, began sketching out a comedy of generational divide between a boomer standup diva and the millennial joke writer who jolts her out of her routine. In 2019, they pitched the show to HBO, detailing their plans for a five-season series. They even described the final scene.
Six years later, they shot it. “We’ve always been going toward that idea,” Aniello said.
The fifth final and season of “Hacks,” the HBO comedy that has won 12 Emmys, including for best comedy series in 2024, will premiere on April 9. The show has reignited the reputation of Jean Smart, who plays the comedy legend Deborah Vance, and kindled the career of Hannah Einbinder, who plays the writer Ava Daniels. And it has confirmed the talents of the three showrunners as creators of deft, ambitious comedy with pockets of surprising seriousness.
“Hacks” has both a sturdy jokes-per-minute 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 wept often. Even Smart, a tough cookie, misted up a few times. The creators’ eyes stayed mostly dry, out of busyness and necessity. In a video interview in early March the creators admitted that the show’s ending hadn’t hit them yet. They had only just finished shooting the finale, which had taken them from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to Paris, and were still editing it.
“It’s so many feelings, it’s a little bit hard to take in in the moment,” Statsky said.
Aniello joined the call from a Zoom window shared with Downs, who co-stars in the show. (She announced their marriage during the 2021 Emmys, and they now have a 4-year-old child.) She thought that she would feel it when the new season ended, on May 28.
“Personally, where it will all come crashing down will be the night of the finale airing,” she said. “Because once that happens, then it’s out there and there’s no more to give, there’s no more for people to see. After that night it will only be farther and farther away from me, which will be really devastating.”
In the fourth season, Deborah achieved what the show understands to be the pinnacle for any comedian — her own network late-night show. Then she walked away from it rather than betray Ava. So what was left for Deborah to achieve in this final season?
“Ultimately the season is an exploration of how she redeems herself, but also how what she comes to learn truly matters in life and what is worth living for,” Statsky said.
Perhaps Deborah articulates this best in the season’s first episode. “I refuse to be remembered on other people’s terms as a quitter or the person who killed late night or some hysterical woman,” she says. The writers have offered her a more generous finish. And one for Ava, too.
“Hacks” has often seemed timely, even prescient. The late-night plotline, in which the network exerts pressure on Deborah, was written before Stephen Colbert’s show was canceled and Jimmy Kimmel’s suspended. This season, Deborah is hamstrung because that network also owns a streamer and various media outlets. (This was all written before Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO, was put up for sale to other conglomerates.)
“Hacks” has argued for the importance of comedy, even as the landscape of comedy — the rise of YouTube, the decline of late night, the erosion of monoculture — has continued to evolve dramatically since that initial pitch. But it has concerns beyond comedy.
“What we try to do with ‘Hacks’ is speak truth to power and put a show out there that is first and foremost funny, 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 hard work, expressed through the working relationship between Deborah and Ava, which bridges the generational divide. It takes a lot of effort — and a lot of love — to land so many punchlines.
“It still is, in a way, a dark mentorship,” Aniello said. “But it is also a love story, and the language of love in this world is oftentimes comedy.”
“Hacks” is also a love story among its creators, who learned early that their friendship mattered more than a disagreement over any particular scene. They feel that the show has made all of them better writers and better showrunners, and they have plans to work together on another series, not yet announced.
On the call, their prevailing emotion was gratitude — for cast, for crew, for one another, for the fact that the show happened at all, given wildfires, Covid restrictions, the writers’ and actors’ strikes.
Smart lost her husband just before the series premiere and later experienced a cardiac event. Aniello went into labor early. These things are not funny! And yet the show was and is. Its very last scenes were shot at the Louvre, which had offered filming permission, then rescinded it, then at the last possible moment offered it again.
“Every season was like, Will we finish the season, much less the show, in the way we want?” Downs said. But somehow they had.
“The mood isn’t sad,” he continued. “It’s like, what a thrill we got to do it.”
