It often seemed like the production of “Hacks” season three was cursed. After 32 Emmy nominations and six wins over its first two seasons, the one surviving hit HBO Max, er, Max program took two years to return to the streamer. There were unfortunate health issues for star Jean Smart and both the WGA and SAG strikes last summer, but the Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky comedy series finally returned this spring with, perhaps, its finest season yet. And a cliffhanger, that will have fans hoping they won’t have to wait another 24 months until a just greenlit season four drops.
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A lot happened throughout season three. Ava (Hannah Einbinder), not only found her own career track but found and lost a girlfriend as well. Deborah (Smart), found herself more popular than ever thanks to a comeback comedy special and then was almost (justifiably) canceled. But that finale packed a wallop and after screening the entire season in April, we couldn’t wait to catch up with Aniello, Downs, and Statsky to talk about it.
And, it goes without saying, there are major spoilers for the third season of “Hacks” in the context of this interview.
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The Playlist: Considering the two year delay, is this season the hardest thing you’ve ever worked on?
Lucia Aniello: Kind of, yeah. I mean, I think it’s because we just have high ambitions for amazing guest stars and big sets and crazy things that we want to do with Jean’s surgery, and then these two strikes; it has been two years, and we started shooting in 2022 and finished in 2024. So it was like an absolute gauntlet, but I really feel like it is so worth it because it’s, I think, the best season so far, and we’re really, really, really, really excited for people to see it.
The Playlist: Over that span of time, did anything change with the storylines? Was it hard not to go back and be like, “Oh, let’s rewrite this script or do A, B, C, and D”?
Lucia Aniello: Not during the strike, but yes.
Paul W. Downs: The truth is that we write as we go in a way. There are always changes on the day, or there are things we’re thinking about, and we also edit as we go. So, inevitably, over the course of the making of any given season, adjusting things or we’re saying, “You know what? We should add a line to bridge this gap between these scenes,” or it just helps us contextualize what we have left to shoot. And so that happened, but there weren’t wholesale big changes.
Lucia Aniello: Not any more than any other season, to be honest.
The Playlist: From what I know, a lot of things shot out of order, correct? There’s stuff in the second episode that you just filmed in Vegas a few weeks ago, and then in the same episode, there’s stuff from two years ago, correct?
Jen Statsky: Yeah, we started shooting this season in November of 2022, and we finished in January of 2024. So there’s quite a gap and we block shoot, which just means that you shoot scenes all out of order. And, actually, the very first shot of the season is the last thing we ever shot. So, it’s incredibly out of order.
The Playlist: We knew about Deborah’s heartbreaking experience of wanting to be a late-night talk show host decades ago, but was the plan back then to always make it a central storyline of season three?
Paul W. Downs: We did know that we wanted this sort of elusive white whale to be the thing that she was chasing. We also knew that we wanted her to guest host because that does happen oftentimes in reality; if a host is sick or something, especially if there’s a comedian on, they’ll fill in. So, we knew we wanted to do that. We weren’t exactly sure when in the season that would happen, but yeah, we’ve been building to this for a while. Yeah.
Lucia Aniello: Yeah.
The Playlist: When in the process did you realize this is the conflict between Deborah and Ava, something you wanted to end the season with? Or was it something that came late?
Jen Statsky: It was pretty early. We knew exactly what the blackmail would be. It was something that we figured out as we were breaking the season, but we really knew we wanted to have a moment at the end of the season where Ava is forced to use essentially the lessons she’s learned from Deborah over the course of these three seasons and is forced to kind of decide whether or not she wants to use this, let’s call it “power” against her. Ava says in that really big fight in the finale, “I wanted to do this with you.” And she’s realizing she can’t; Deborah’s not going to allow her to do it with her. So, if she wants to do it with her, she needs to learn all those lessons she’s learned from Deborah, which is how to blackmail and get what you want and be ruthless and be a shark. And she needs to decide whether she wants to employ that. And she decides in the end she has to do it, but she has to do it to protect Deborah because the show won’t be as good if Ava’s not a head writer. And Ava knows that. So, she’s almost like saying to Deborah, “I have to do this to protect you, and because you don’t understand yet how this works.” She says, “Don’t you get it? It will be better because of our relationship.” Deborah doesn’t know that yet, which is insane, by the way. But it’s true. And so Ava’s kind of doing this because she has to. She’s like, “I don’t want to do this, but I have to.”
The Playlist: Ava’s character has a big arc this season to get from where she was at the beginning to where she is at the end, and Deborah’s character seems like she’s taken steps, but would you agree as she has not grown as much as maybe Ava thought she has?
Paul W. Downs: Well, that’s the thing. When we pitched the show, we always said Deborah would take one step forward and two steps backward. She’s really calcified in where she is in her career, and even though she’s learning these incremental lessons…she learns that she can apologize for a joke. She learns that there is such a thing as a bisexual person; there are things that she is absorbing, but…
Lucia Aniello: She gets a reusable cup.
Paul W. Downs: She gets a reusable cup. That’s huge. But there’s also, especially when it comes to her experience in the entertainment industry as a woman, there’s a lot of fear around it. And so there are things that she’s like, “I know how this works.” And in some ways, she might not be wrong that a network would feel comfortable with a male head writer transitioning the show. But I think Ava’s also not wrong that if you want it to be the best it can be, we’ve got to do the thing that you called me back for, which is working together and making each other better and funnier.
The Playlist: Episode 5, “One Day,” when Deborah and Ava get lost in the woods, is almost a standalone episode. Whose idea was that and was there any particular inspiration to go down that road?
Lucia Aniello: I dunno whose idea it was.
Jen Statsky: it wasn’t a late addition to the season. We had actually mostly broken most of the season, and we felt like because this was a season that was so clearly from the onset about Deborah getting late at night, it was so goal-focused. Every episode was here’s the goal, how do I get, here’s the goal, how do I get it? And we felt like there wasn’t quite enough time for them to develop their relationship and move that further down the field without having a little bit of a midsection break. And so that episode is a slightly later addition to the season, just as an opportunity for them to talk about the things they don’t always get a chance to talk about. There’s that scene where they’re walking and talking about being in a relationship and why they would want to be in a relationship. Deborah’s POV is that it’s not Ava’s time to do right now in her life. She’s like, “You need to concentrate on your career. You need to do what’s best for you.” Of course, a lesson that Ava will employ later this season. But that kind of casual conversation we felt didn’t really have a place elsewhere, and we felt like it was necessary. We haven’t yet really done full-bottle episodes, but we like to have every episode have its own feeling, like this is this one or This is that one. So, it was kind of nice to have a slight departure from it both in the fact that they’re literally apart from everybody else, and that’s the only “A” story, but also, it’s just a slightly different feeling. It’s very much outside of Vegas, set in Pennsylvania, and also has its own visual language, which is a nice respite.
The Playlist: I love that in a third season, you all had no fear of going down that road and trying something different.
Lucia Aniello: Yeah, yeah. I think we never want to limit ourselves. And we feel so lucky to have the fans and audience and we want to keep surprising them. I think their audiences are really smart and more than ever, they’ve watched so much TV and so many movies, and you got to give them something different. It’s the challenge of season three. You have to give them why they watch the show and what they’ve come to know and love, but you also have to level up and keep giving them something different and better. And so for us, I think we just want to always do that. And because of that, no ideas off the table, no ideas too weird or different, as we have a handle on what this show is, what the tone is, and what the characters are. And then from there we kind of just trust ourselves that we can do whatever with it.
The Playlist: Was there any particular storyline this season that you guys were most nervous about being able to pull off? The one that pops to me is episode eight, “Yes, And,” the “canceled” episode where her former jokes come out, and she goes to a college to basically say who she is, and she gets super lucky. Someone writes a news story that helps spin it. That scenario could have been very hard to believe, and I did believe it at the end.
Paul W. Downs: Oh yeah, that’s the one. I mean, we had pitched that as an example episode when we pitched the show, so we had known that we wanted to have her old material come back to haunt her in a way. Not only did it feel most appropriate when the stakes were so high because she was on the precipice of this job, but it was also really scary. It was a really scary one to wrap our arms around and to be able to show both of their opposing viewpoints but stick the landing. It was a really tricky episode for us to figure out. I mean, even writing material of hers that has now aged poorly was a really very specific needle to thread. So it was definitely, I think the most scary episode to write. Yeah, I mean, and the finale. The finale is actually emotionally the most scary. To do that with the characters was scary for us. And we were like, are people going to be so upset with what happens, even though it’s also so exciting and appealing, at least for us, we try and make it wish fulfillment for us as viewers of the show.
Lucia Aniello: Also I would say the premiere, we were wanting to make sure we make up because we really start on Deborah and what she’s up to in the year since we’ve seen her. And then we go to Ava and just sit in Ava’s life in her story. And so we’re not intercutting, and that’s a new thing for the show to just be, it was almost like chapters like Deborah’s chapter, Ava’s chapter, and then the Montreal chapter where they do run into each other. And so that was also a slight departure for us, and I think that is a risk because people haven’t seen it for two years. Structurally, it’s different. You’re keeping our two main characters apart until, I don’t even know, 18 minutes in or something. So, how does that feel for an audience? And that was also a risk.
Paul W. Downs: Yeah, I guess we’re scared all the time. I guess we’re always taking risks and scaring ourselves.
The Playlist: Well, you should and shouldn’t be, but you guys pulled it off. One other moment I really loved, is in episode seven, where her gay fans realize that they have sort of lost her to the bigger world. And I’m curious: whose inspiration was that on the writing staff to come up with that?
Paul W. Downs: Another one that we always wanted to tell, we always wanted to talk about fandom and what it’s like to be a fan. And also, I think we wanted to talk about particularly women like Deborah who have a queer audience, and what their relationship to women like Deborah is. And so we actually had a version of a scene like that at the end of last season. We were like, this isn’t exactly right. And it really dovetailed so nicely with Marcus’s storyline because Marcus [Carl Clemons-Hopkins] started as a fan, came into her life, and became a colleague of hers. They work together, but there’s always that thing of still being a fan, and it was a really nice way for us because we want to also level that character up and set him free in a way. We also wanted to let him reconnect with his being a fan, and it was kind of nice to do that with Tim Bagley, who’s so fantastic in the episode. There’s that thing about people like this that I think really resonates…
Lucia Aniello: Especially with the gay community.
The Playlist: If you could tease anything for a season four, what would it be?
Lucia Aniello: I mean, I think that their relationship is going to be more insane than ever because Deborah finally has a worthy adversary. She finally has somebody who she knows is going to put up a real fight and that she knows Ken, and I think that’ll be new and different for her.
Paul W. Downs: The dynamic is such now that we get to do things that are almost larger than life, but you actually will believe them because they’re both backed into a corner.
“Hacks” season 3 is available on MAX.