Editor’s note: The below interview contains spoilers for Hacks Season 4 Episode 6.When a series has a killer first season, the pressure for Season 2 to meet (and ideally, exceed) expectations is insurmountable. Hacks was one of those shows that nailed its inaugural season, and remarkably, co-creators Jen Statsky, Lucia Aniello, and Paul W. Downs have managed to not only maintain that quality, but keep its stories and characters fresh and organic — earning that Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy In the process.
Hacks, which follows the toxic, charming, and lovable relationship between famed comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her 20-something comedy writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder), manages to raise the stakes and shift the power dynamics smartly each season. Ava and Deborah have truly been through it all, including but certainly not limited to slapping, sex dreams, and sincere bonding, but Season 4 features the duo in a way we’ve never seen them before. After that shocking Season 3 finale twist in which Ava blackmailed Deborah into giving her the head writer position at Late Night, the messy pair we’ve been in the trenches with has never been more at odds. Sure, they’ve physically and emotionally hurt each other plenty of times, but this season, it really does feel like the relationship is forever changed.
Aniello and Statsky — two of the three masterminds behind every move Ava and Deborah make — knew that nailing this tone and striking a balance between our two leads in Season 4 was not going to be an easy task. During this interview with Collider, Statsky and Aniello talk about the early days of their comedy collaborations, why Hacks works just as well when Deborah and Ava are at each other’s throats versus living in harmony, how real-life coyotes inspired part of Deborah’s storyline, and more.
COLLIDER: Before we get into Hacks, I know you two have worked together for a really long time. I think one of the first things you did together was making sketches for a group called Landline. Is that true?
JEN STATSKY: [Laughs] That’s right.
LUCIA ANIELLO: That’s right. You’re going there.

Image via Max

What were your first impressions of each other as people and as performers?
STATSKY: Oh, wow.
ANIELLO: I don’t know if I remember first impressions.
STATSKY: I remember the moment I met you.
ANIELLO: [Laughs] Is that true?
STATSKY: [Laughs] No, no, I don’t remember first impressions. Go ahead.
ANIELLO: No, I mean, we were the only kind of… so Landline was kind of like a loose comedy collective, I guess we would say, right?
STATSKY: Mmhmm.
ANIELLO: But I guess Jen and I were the only two women kind of in the collective. It wasn’t exactly like a “group” exactly, but eventually, we were no longer on the emails. [Laughs] So, I think it was at that time where we had… I think we must have gotten along enough to make some of those videos. And I think once we kind of were not really involved anymore, I think we were like, we should still hang out or something.
STATSKY: Yeah, yeah. We had a natural, shared comedic sensibility. So when we met each other, it felt like that made sense.
ANIELLO: Well, the thing, the truth is, is that we both remember when she met Paul. [Laughs] And that’s actually true. We all remember that meeting.
STATSKY: Lucia had been dating Paul and making videos with Paul, and I had known Lucia through the group. And so it was always like Lucia was burning together these two sides. We had a very iconic meeting at the 71 Irving coffee shop in New York. But I’ll tell you what I do remember from making — now this whole interview is going to be about Landline TV — but what I do remember about Lucia that is, still… I remember we made this video where she played Janeane Garofalo.
ANIELLO: Yes.
STATSKY: She has an excellent… plays an excellent Janeane Garofalo, very funny. But I remember she was directing the video too. And I remember when she was directing the video when in the part that she was going to be playing Janeane Garofalo, I think she’s on the toilet. That’s what I seem to remember. She was like, “Oh, okay, I’m going to do this. Will you just kind of direct me as I do this? ‘Cause I’ll be directing myself, but I’ll be in it.” And I remember in the moment I was like, “I can’t do that. I can’t do that. I’m going to fuck it, whatever.” And it was the first introduction to what I think is so wonderful about Lucia as a collaborator is that she knows and believes you can do things before you know it, and I think Paul would say that as well. I remember that, and I always think about it because she gave me the confidence to literally just go, “Yeah, that was good, you did it, let’s go.”
ANIELLO: So I guess it’s official, Jen Statsky directing episodes of Season 5 of Hacks.
STATSKY: [Laughs] Maybe, yeah. I have to think back to this moment and know that I could do it. Anyway, yeah, we’ve known each other a long, long time.
ANIELLO: Yes, we’ve been friends, we were friends for a while before we actually… I think, truth be told, it was like, we were friends, we wanted to hang out more. So we were like, “We should write something. We should do something.” And we actually ended up writing, the three of us, writing a feature before we did Hacks. We had the idea for Hacks, but we’re kind of, like, slowly letting that be a thing. But then the three of us wrote a feature on spec, but it was really just as an excuse to hang out, but also to be like, “Does this work? The three of us working together?” And it was so fun.
STATSKY: Yeah, super fun.
ANIELLO: It was a summer, I think. Summer of 2017?
STATSKY: 2017, exactly. Good memory.
ANIELLO: And we had just so much fun waking up and driving over to Jen’s back house and putting cards up on the board. And it was just such a fun time that I think that that’s when we were like, “OK, that idea we’ve been talking about” — ’cause it was always Hacks then — “we should start getting on that.” And that’s really after no one bought the movie.
STATSKY: [Laughs]
ANIELLO: That’s when we said, “No! We’re gonna keep doing it!”
STATSKY: Now that we’re reflecting on it, thank God. What if someone had bought that movie, and then we went into production on that movie? Hacks wouldn’t exist.
ANIELLO: Yeah. Or maybe not… it still would not, yeah, I don’t know. We wouldn’t be here right now if somebody bought the movie, though we’d still like for someone to buy the movie.
STATSKY: Yeah, now we can make the movie.
‘Hacks’ Co-Creators Carefully Crafted Ava and Deborah’s Tense Season 4 Storyline

Jumping into Hacks Season 4, something that really impressed me this season was how long it takes for us to really get Ava and Deborah to a place of homeostasis, kind of like where we are used to seeing them for all these seasons. Was there a lot of talk in the writer’s room [about]: “How long are we going to make the audience work for this relationship to come back together?”
STATSKY: Yeah, yeah. It’s always a balance. Season 3, we talked about “When do they come back together? When do we do that? What will be too soon? What will be too late?” And same here. You’re always kind of modulating their relationship, and when does it feel real and authentic that this would happen, but also keeping in mind how interesting will it be to watch and how fun will it be to watch. It’s a constant figuring out of when it feels right and when is the right time, but always it’s character first and story first, and we feel like we need to have the characters go through what they need to go through to get to the point where they’re going to be able to finally come back together.
ANIELLO: And luckily, I don’t think it feels… it still feels fun when they’re not together. Your heart wants them to be together, but it’s still fun watching them be rude and struggle and have that tension. For us, it doesn’t feel like it’s not the show when they’re fighting. It feels like it can be the show whether they’re together or apart or on the journey on the direct, in the direction of either one of those destinations. And they’re always just temporary, aren’t they? With these two wild chicks.
Was that the working title of the show?
STATSKY: These Two Wild Chicks.
ANIELLO: It’s not bad.
STATSKY: It’s not bad. I would watch that show.
The ‘Hacks’ Writers Had a Blast Brainstorming Methods for Deborah’s Revenge in Season 4

Image via Max

There are so many creative decisions that go into each episode. I’m just clocking them as I’m watching. Was the first way Deborah was going to get back at Ava going to always be the underwear in the boss’s office? How many of these things shift around?
ANIELLO: Well, that one was definitely an early one.
STATSKY: That was early on, but we certainly went through a lot of variations of ways Deborah would try to get her fired. Things kind of in this mean prank torture zone. There was a lot. [Laughs] One of our — it’s making me laugh — one of our writers, Ariel Karlin, at some point she was using it as, I think, just like a placeholder for a pitch? She was like, “You know, like Deborah glues all of Ava’s shoes to the ceiling.”
ANIELLO: She kept referring to it. [Laughs]
STATSKY: It was a placeholder. Sometimes when you’re in a writer’s room, you’re like, “you know, like something like that.” But it then just made us laugh. It still, to this day, makes me laugh so much.
ANIELLO: She kept saying, “Well, when she glues her shoes to the ceiling…”

Related

‘Hacks’ Season 4 Is Keeping Deborah and Ava at Odds — Good!

“So much for our truce, huh?”

STATSKY: Like that, which of course, as you know, we didn’t have that happen, but it really makes me laugh.
ANIELLO: It would be so funny if we broke into her house one day and then glued all her shoes to the ceiling.
STATSKY: It’s a great prank.
ANIELLO: It’s a good prank.
STATSKY: But then you have to buy her a new home and all her shoes to do that.
ANIELLO: For a bit, pay the price. [Laughs]
STATSKY: But yeah, we went through… the writers, we all pitched on a lot of things like that, but pretty soon… we knew panties was a winner.
ANIELLO: Well, because it was kind of funny, but also humiliating. You know what I mean? You could see it as, that’s actually really fucked up, but also you’d be like, “Ha ha.” It kind of had to toe the line of being both.
When Ava was just like, “George Clooney would do this kind of thing!”
ANIELLO: George Clooney and his pranks becomes a runner. You’re not done with it yet, I’ll tell ya that. [Laughs]
Deborah’s Dark Coyote Storyline Was Pulled From Lucia Aniello’s Real Experiences

Image via Max

Speaking of recurring bits, the coyote was very dark. It would really shift the tone of the show into a really dark spot. When did that come up in the writing process, that idea?
ANIELLO: Well, it started by the fact that Paul and I really are being stalked by some coyotes. That’s true. This is a true fact.
STATSKY: Yes. Paul and Lucia where they live, like a canyon, there’s some very intense… living in LA, you often hear at night coyotes attacking, and they have so many coyotes around them.
ANIELLO: There’s like a pack of 10 that lives basically just outside of our yard in this kind of wild-ish area. They are constantly killing things. We’re ripping what we know from the headlines of our life. But in terms of how it was started to be used as a metaphor and as symbolism for Deborah’s attackers and her feeling less comfortable in the wilds of Los Angeles, was just something that kind of felt like it kept coming up as we were writing and, I don’t know, it just feels like this omnipresent malignant energy.
STATSKY: Yeah, and it felt like Deborah would be feeling, of course, all these anxieties about the show and pressure and all her attackers, like Lucia said. And we wanted that to have some sort of physical manifestation in her world. And especially coming to a new… she says at the end of Episode 2, LA, it’s crazy with the coyotes. She’s out of her comfort zone, which is Las Vegas. And so we wanted to make her feel as uncomfortable, perhaps, as possible. These creatures are native to LA, and LA people deal with quite a lot. We felt like it would be good to depict her having to confront them, and how would she deal with it?
I love to watch the credits, and one thing that always strikes me every episode — if the episode itself didn’t make me tear up — the credit song, the end credit song, always gets me. Who picks that song? It’s always eerily perfect to what happened in the episode.
ANIELLO: A lot of people. Paul and Jen and I are often writing towards songs. Our editors play songs. Our music supervisor, Matt Biffa, often will pitch songs that end up in there. It really is. It can come from anything.
STATSKY: Yeah, it’s a variety of people. I think we try… a lot, most, all of our editors are incredibly skilled, musically. So we try to employ people who I think have a natural inclination to that. Lucia is incredibly skilled musically, Paul, like, I think it is just like a natural, baked into the type of person that works on the show that we gravitate towards. So yeah, thank you for noticing that and saying that. It’s a big part of figuring out the episodes, always.
ANIELLO: And there’s a couple episodes this season where we’re still toying with the last song.
STATSKY: That’s, I would say, number one on the to-do list for today after this — is figure out a song. So we hope we do you proud in what we choose.
Yeah, it’s always eerily perfect to the episode. I actually took out my phone. “I have to get the song. What is the song?”
STATSKY: Actually, this is helpful. (Laughs) Are you talking about any episode in particular in Season 4?
It was Episode 2, maybe?
STATSKY: “Queen of Las Vegas”?
ANIELLO: Oh yeah, “Queen of Las Vegas” is fun because they’re like, “Oh, we’re going to Vegas!” “Queen of Las Vegas” is the end of 2, which is really fun.
STATSKY: Episode 3 is that Joe Egan, “you caught me once.”
ANIELLO: Oh yeah, not my favorite, but it’s good. “Bless the Telephone” is at the end of 4.
STATSKY: That one’s really good. That one’s really good. What did you think of 5?
ANIELLO: Yeah, what did you think of Episode 5? Look it up really fast. Oh, wait, what is it right now? I don’t know. It’s a debate.
STATSKY: We’re still, we’re still toying with it, but, glad you’re —
ANIELLO: And 6! That’s not, that’s not —
STATSKY: 6 is, yeah.
ANIELLO: 6 is still up for grabs. But anyway…
STATSKY: But glad you’re Shazamming it. Maybe it was the Chi Coltrane song at the end of the premiere. That’s a very beautiful —
ANIELLO: Oh, yeah, [“You Were My Friend”].
New episodes of Hacks Season 4 air Thursdays on Max.

Hacks

Release Date

May 13, 2021

Network

HBO Max, Max

Showrunner

Lucia Aniello

Directors

Desiree Akhavan

Writers

Pat Regan, Ariel Karlin, Carol Leifer, Joe Mande, Guy Branum, Andrew Law, Samantha Riley