Lucia Aniello Says Goodbye to Hacks

“This season’s really about who’s your best friend and do you want to work with them more? Which is pretty autobiographical,” says Lucia Aniello, who created HBO Max’s Hacks with Paul W. Downs, her husband, and Jen Statsky, a fellow writer and longtime friend. After five seasons, the final episode of Hacks will air on Thursday.

Aniello, 43, previously wrote the 2017 film Rough Night and for Broad City, but Hacks was her first time running things. The show began filming in the fall of 2020, and the first episode aired the following May. Nearly five years and countless Emmys later, Aniello, who married Downs and had their first child during the show’s run, is saying goodbye. “So much bad and so much good has happened in every way over the course of making this show, but the show was always there for me, the way that I think it was for other people who love the show. To have that thing end is really scary,” she says. “It’s a kind of a death.”

Aniello spoke to ELLE about the impact that Hacks had, censorship in comedy, and seeing the show’s actors become stars.

What does it feel like to be (nearly) done with the show?

It feels crazy to not be working on the show 10 hours straight every single day. I’m really sad because I love making a show with all the people we make it with. I love the characters. I love the stories. I love thinking about that world.

Over the course of five seasons, Megan Stalter’s, Hannah Einbinder’s, and Jean Smart’s careers have transformed. What has it been like to cast people and then see how far they’re going?

The best part is to be able to see, know, or meet people that you think are special and be able to give them the playground to do what they are really, really good at. To watch them not only do it, but do it so well, and then for the world to see it and discover it is literally life-affirming.

Being able to help facilitate people sharing their gifts with the world is very special. There are so many people on the show that are so talented beyond our regulars. The people who come in just for one episode or under five and do something quickly and leave, they still add to this world of being able to show the world their gifts, even for a moment.

My favorite thing is to see people post on social media when their episode is airing and to see not only them be proud of their time on the show, but also see their little ecosystems of people commenting, being so proud of them. I love seeing, “I got to be a part of this show!” And then people being like, “I’m so happy for you. I’m so proud of you.” I think it’s a very tangible way to see people spreading and giving love for each other. That’s so beautiful.

When you wrote the first scripts, what did you think it was going to be like? Did you think it was going to be such a cultural force?

You always hope, but I think it’d be sociopathic to think this work of mine will be a cultural force.

The five years that you’ve been making the show have been very eventful for entertainment. Were there any stories or angles that you didn’t take on that you thought you could have done?

When we first pitched this in 2019, AI wasn’t really on the table, so that’s not something we thought that we would be tackling. I don’t think there’s anything we shied away from. There are definitely things we always wanted to do that we never got to. We always wanted to see them canvassing door-to-door for some politician. But I wouldn’t say that there’s anything that the external world made it less likely for us to do. If anything, weirdly, the things that have happened in culture have happened on our show. The idea of a corporate mandate ending a late-night show before the person wanted it to end, which is something that obviously happened in late-night, our show did that a couple months before it actually happened.

Aniello playing an animated real estate agent in the third episode of the season.

Even in season 3, the idea of sexual blackmail as something that would be used for power is something that I think certainly has become more and more prevalent in our society. We’ve just, I think, meshed more and more with current events.

What happened to Stephen Colbert is so similar to what happened to Deborah on the show, but when it aired a year ago, that seemed much more abstract than it does now.

We are living in an age of rising authoritarianism, and the first thing that authoritarianism wants to do is to quell free speech. Comedians more often than not are on the front lines of free speech. They have a platform, they have a microphone. Usually, they’re speaking truths to power, but I think we’ve experienced in the last couple years that many of those so-called comedians aren’t really doing comedy anymore. They’re inviting these kinds of right-wing authoritarian figures onto their podcasts to normalize them. I can’t really remember a time when comedians were on, in my opinion, the wrong side of history, but here we are. And it fucking sucks.

The show has only been on for five years, which isn’t that long a period, but you got married and had a child, and Jean so sadly lost her husband and had health issues. It seems like there was so much closeness and so much was shared, really deep things, in a brief period of time.

We started shooting in the fall of 2020, and now we’re in 2026. We became very close on set and off set. I mean, Hannah and Jean threw me my baby shower. The show’s so much about this, but when you have a deep creative collaboration with people, and this goes from the writers to the cast and the crew, it makes you feel really close because you are speaking a special language.

I read Jean say that Hannah was so supportive of her that, in season 1, when they had just met, Hannah helped her with the loss of her spouse. It was just so striking to me that a 24- or 25-year-old who hasn’t yet been married and who just met you could have that deep a connection.

That speaks to how emotionally mature Hannah is. She’s such a deep well of emotion, which I think is so obvious when you see her act. She’s such an empathetic soul and she’s really, really mature in so many ways. She’s also really come of age as Hannah throughout this process. I think she hadn’t acted at all. I always thought she was so brilliant from day one, but I think through our trust, all of our trust in her, she began to really trust herself. Now on the other end of it, we end up with a Hannah Einbinder who is not only so empathetic and sweet and kind but also knows her own self-worth in a way that is really beautiful.

Something that had never occurred to me before watching this season is that so much of the show comes from the fact that Deborah collaborated with her husband and it went so badly. Which is funny because the show came about because of a collaboration between you and your husband.

Listen, Paul and I met doing improv, so we’ve been working together for so long that I think if it was going to go south like that, it would’ve already—

I don’t think it ever would!

I hope not, but you never know. But no, I think so much of the heart of the implosion of that relationship onscreen was jealousy from Frank’s [Deborah’s former husband] side about what a huge star Deborah’s become. And while Paul has also become a star, no one’s happier about that than me.

Coming out of this, do you have a different sense of where you want your career to go or different things you want to try?

Right before Hacks, I had, let’s say, a semi-spiritual experience about how I wanted to live my life. I came out of it really realizing that the best thing for me would be to wake up and go make things with people I like to be around. Paul and Jen and I had talked about Hacks since 2015, but this was in 2019. And we were like, let’s just make this thing. The idea of the pitch is not the most marketable thing you’ve ever heard, but the idea of just “this is what we want to go do” cleared the path for something that felt really pure.

We wanted to make this show because we wanted to watch it, we wanted to work with each other, and we wanted to see the story [unfold]. That’s really what inspired us pushing this as the project we wanted to create. I hope to just continue to use that as my North Star.

This interview has been edited and condensed.