The Creators of Hacks Really, Really, Really Hate AI

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2:12From Wired, this is The Big Interview, where we'll get to know the people beyond the headlines, in conversations that explore the intersection of technology, power, and culture. I'm Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director. The Emmy award-winning show Hacks takes its final curtain call this month. The hit HBO Max comedy series follows the professional and personal relationship relationship between young comedy writer Ava Daniels, played by Hannah Einbinder, and legacy comedian Deborah Vance, played by Jean Smart. It's now in its fifth and final season, where we find Deborah struggling to mount a comeback and under a restrictive contract.

2:50Ava! No results. Unbelievable. Yeah, they've taken down every late night clip. This is criminal. Hang on. Oh, shit. What? They took down my bad too. What? It's funny, moving, and ultimately has a lot to say about the business of show business. The series tackles a range of issues from the challenging relationship between Ava and Debra to the creep of AI into Hollywood to network censorship. It's also one of my favorite shows, so if you haven't seen it, pause this podcast episode, go watch seasons one through four, and then come back. because the statute of limitations on spoilers from seasons one through four is now over, and I will do my best not to spoil anything I've seen from season five.

3:39I am so pleased to welcome two of the show's creators and showrunners, Paul Downs and Lucia Anielo, who also happen to be married, which I was just telling them I had no idea until I started getting ready for this taping. So congratulations on being married and welcome to the big interview. Thank you. Thank you so much. You should have been there. You should have been there. Why didn't we bring you? That's crazy. Next time. Next time. We are going to renew our tenure at the same place, though. Are you? Where was the wedding? It was in Italy. It was in Tuscany. That's all I'll say. Lucia was born there.

4:12Lucia was born in Italy, so it was closer to a lot of family. And you were married in what year? 2021. Okay, so I have some time. So I have, like, another five years to— You have time. Okay. To find your look? Yes. You have time. Don't stress. A major priority for me in my life is perfecting my look. Very important to us at Wired is having our look down. Well, congratulations on your final season. That's Wired. That's Wired. Fashion First. That's you guys, right? I mean, I do. Well, it's funny because we are, no, Fashion First is not my motto or Wired's, but we do work at Condé Nast. And I, you know, my boss is Anna Wintour.

4:53So Fashion First has become maybe more of a priority for me than it used to be. It's like Fashion Third. you know? Right. Fashion third. And that's 25th. Fashion third. But I will say my husband and I blew through a bunch of season five this weekend. I'm excited to talk to you guys a little bit about that, about the show. And I want to actually start by talking about women, a subject close to my heart as I am one. But I also run a magazine that historically, you know, was run by men for years. I'm surrounded by men. They're everywhere in my life. They're everywhere in our coverage. And this show I love in particular because it centers around this relationship between these two women.

5:31I think two women who are very powerful in different ways in their own right. And they have this very complicated relationship and this big generational gap. And Lucia, I'm curious, you know, obviously you have another co-creator, Jen, who's not here. But how did the three of you think about writing those characters? Like what was important to you in centering the show around the relationship between these two women? Well, I think one of the things that was appealing to us was the idea that, yes, they are two women of different generations and who are both comedians and they have a lot in common and a lot not in common.

6:03But we were really interested in the collaboration between two female artists because that is what they are. They are comedians who love creating work. And that is in the end of the pilot. Spoiler if you haven't seen, but you should go see it. They don't get along in their initial meeting at all. And they just argue. but there's a little spark and that little spark is they're making jokes about each other they keep pitching on them and they try to make it better and you can see that it's a creative turn-on for them and so for us the idea that these women in the process of creating art together become more and more entrenched in each other's lives and it does change them as people and then therefore changes the work as well.

6:48I think we're really interested in the way that the material comes from their lives and their lives then bleeds back into the material. And so for us, you know, that was something that I don't think we had really ever seen before. And it was really exciting to us to kind of explore. Gender comes up in the show over and over, right? I mean, both of these women in a variety of ways deal with sexism, with gender dynamics, with sort of gender tropes. What about what you have seen and experienced in Hollywood and in the industry sort of feeds into the way that's shown, the way that's portrayed to the audience?

7:22Well, you know, one of the things that is really central to the show is that these are two women who were cast aside from the industry. You know, Debra had to carve her own path and get a residency in Vegas after a very public divorce and sort of a media shaming. And, you know, I think that we really wanted to explore what it means to be a woman in comedy in particular, because so many women in comedy didn't have the same opportunities that their male counterparts had. One example being hosting a late night show, which becomes a central part of our series. And, you know, I think it also comes out at a time when luckily we're having a reckoning with the narratives around gender and around women in particular.

8:03You know, when we were pitching the show, it was around the time that the Britney Spears documentary was coming out or, you know, whether it's Monica Lewinsky or Paris Hilton or, you know, any number of women who we got wrong. I think that was another thing that sort of was a lens through which we wrote the show was, you know, about just women's stories being either untold or misconstrued because they weren't the ones who were getting to author them. In terms of sort of your backgrounds in show business and your experience in the industry, how much of that informed creating the series, creating the supporting characters and sort of delving into what you do in seasons one through five?

8:41Like how much of it is pulled from or inspired by real life? You know, not a ton very directly, just because, you know, we came up from making Broad City. That was like kind of our first big break. So we worked on all five seasons of that. We had also done a little bit of work on the web series before it was a television show. And then we went on to work on some other projects. For example, I worked on a show called Aquafina's Nora from Queens. And the day one of going into that writer's room, there were women in that room that were literally emotional because it was the first time they were in a writer's room where they weren't only one of two women.

9:17It was predominantly women. And I was like, oh, babe, this is my life. This is what my life is like. I only work on shows like this. For the record, I only work with women. I haven't worked with men. Don't know if I will. I really try myself by cool women. Yeah. And so, I mean, if anything, we've had such an opposite experience of what Debra Vance had. We had that if anything, we're just like, this is the way that we see the world, which is definitely more of an Ava experience. I don't think Ava has necessarily had the experience of her being a woman getting in the way of her career. I think she's the person who's gotten in the way of her own career.

9:55Yeah, yes. But, you know, again, and I directed one movie. It was called Rough Night that Paul and I wrote. But I was the first woman in 20 years to direct an R-rated comedy. So that's crazy. That is crazy. That's crazy. Yeah, that was in 2017. And so if anything, we've been so blessed and lucky to have such a different experience than Debra had. But I think we appreciate and understand the kind of path that women like her had to forge for us to have these lucky experiences. And so we are so grateful. And I think in a way, the show is an homage to the kinds of women who had to deal with so much sexism and not having the opportunities that their male counterparts had.

10:37And so this is our way of saying thank you. Oh, I love that. I think in some ways it is very pulled from our own life, though. There's a lot of meta in the show just in terms of, you know, we were doing sketch and improv comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater and this other theater called the Magnet Theater in New York. And there was a sense of like what cool comedy was, what progressive alternative cool comedy was. So we were interested in the idea of like cool comedy versus someone who maybe had aged out a little bit. But and also because the show ultimately is about these two women and their creative collaboration, the fact that Jen, Lucia and I have found each other, we found our comedy people like in that way, maybe not really in terms of like our experience of gender in the industry, but in the way in which the story is, I think, backbone is their the love language that they share in terms of their creative collaboration.

11:24That is very much pulled from our life. I want to talk a little bit about some of the themes that you have tackled, whether intentionally or not throughout the series. I want to start with media censorship, which is very salient for us at Wired. It's something we think about a lot. It's something we cover a lot right now, unfortunately. And at the end of season four, Debra has this this huge moment, right? She's finally hosting her own late night show. It's been her dream. And she gives an impassioned speech supporting Ava. She blasts the network. She quits the show. It's a very dramatic way to end.

11:55Yes. Yes, there are some finger gestures being made at me on screen right now. It's exactly that. You can't see it. But it's a huge moment for her. And I remember when that happened, I think it came out a couple months before Colbert was canceled. Right. That was the timing. That's right. And you were seen as prescient, right? Psychic that you sort of saw this coming, this episode of, you know, what was ostensibly about cost cutting, but appeared too many to be more about censorship and sort of getting a merger through the Trump administration before you were seen as prescient, like before you knew that that was going to happen.

12:32what were you trying to say in that moment at the end of season four? Was it purely sort of a plot decision and a creative decision, or was there a bigger message that you intended to be conveying there? We really wanted to explore in the season the intersection, the complicated intersection of art and commerce, because as Debra says in that episode, she knows it's not regional theater. It's a business. You know, what she's doing is a business. But ultimately, what the show keeps returning to is the sanctity of their work. You know, the fact that comedy is sacred for her. And so the one thing that she can't abide is censoring herself and also firing her voice, which is the thing that makes the show good.

13:10You know, she admits and she acknowledges that she's a capitalist pig herself and that she loves to make money, but she cares more about comedy than making shareholders happy. And so we wanted to talk about this thing, which we're experiencing, this disruption in our industry, of what was a very lucrative industry for a century and has become something different because tech has disrupted it. And because whether it's tech or not, more and more under capitalism, it's about growth. It's not just about profit. It's not enough to be profitable for the creatives and the executives. It has to be grown.

13:42The profit has to grow. And the only way to do that is to exploit. And so we did want to explore that, even though we had no idea. You know, we knew that there was a decline in late night in terms of the viewership. But the fact that then Colbert experienced censorship, and rather than being able to say, well, I'm going to quit, they told him it was over. It was really weird. It was really crazy. It was really crazy. And we're still in crazy world. I mean, we're now looking at beyond Colbert. You have the FCC investigating, you know, ABC affiliates over diversity. But really, it's because and my fact checkers are going to be upset at me here.

14:22But really, it's because Jimmy Kimmel made a joke that the president didn't like about his wife potentially becoming a widow. I mean, how do you feel sort of sitting where you sit and overseeing the show that you oversee and watching that stuff play out, especially as sort of, you know, comedians yourselves and people with careers in this industry? How do you watch this and what do you have to say about it? I think part of the reason that it in some ways was prescient that that happened is because, you know, we are spreading authoritarian regime here. You know, we have concentration camps in our backyards.

14:55You know, this AI is becoming something that's being forced upon us in so many ways and whatever. and as these looming nobody can afford health care nobody has can pay their rent whatever gas crazy whatever my point is it's becoming increasingly unlivable to live in this country and as a result people are really frustrated and this government is clamping down further and further and then who's on the front lines of saying hey this is really bad most often comedians are the people speaking truth to power yeah it's of course the first people they're clamping down and on are the people who are saying, hey, this is really bad.

15:34This administration is not great. People can't live. This is really bad. And because people can take those messages or more likely to absorb those messages when it's done in a humorous way, it's the way that you're able to spread this truth telling, which is, hey, society right now is unlivable. And because comedians are able to get that message across the most effectively, naturally, that's the first group of people that they're going after in terms of free speech. And journalists. And journalists. And journalists. We've all eyes, which is why I'm a member, and I love my Wired subscription. Subscribe now.

16:13We are so grateful, and thank you so much. I'm going to have you record that as a separate ad. I absolutely will. I will sing it, and I can't even sing. Wow, thank you. Audiences will love that. If you want subscribers, don't do that. The consolidation piece in the media industry and the entertainment industry is really interesting to me. And it's something that the show absolutely touches on and comes back to in a few different ways. I think one of the ways that stood out to me in season five, without giving too much away, is Deborah having this very startling realization that she pissed off the wrong boss.

16:48She pissed off a guy who had the ability to take a lot of her work out of her hands and ensure that audiences would not be able to access it. I'm wondering how you see sort of that parallel with what's happening in your industry now in terms of fewer and fewer players at the top having that kind of control over so many different networks, so many different streaming platforms. What does that mean for you in the real world outside of the show Hacks? Well, it's really terrifying because that was something that has happened. Things are removed from streamers and then you can't find them. In an era where physical media is becoming less and less common, it's really scary.

17:34We feel very, very lucky that we've been able to make this show. We've been able to say what we want on the show. We've been very supported by HBO and HBO Max. So we don't have complaints there. But it is scary that even in our position, it's still something where you're like, well, it could be deleted. Yeah, yeah. It could be deleted and go away. And you hear stories of people's personal vendettas against other people being the reason why their show's down. And those rumors are chilling because it is like, oh, yeah, one person can just be like, oh, all of your work can just be deleted and then no one can ever see it.

18:12And it's like, you know, of course, this is a career and it's a livelihood, but it's an expression of oneself. And for those things to be taken down is really scary. I want to be thoughtful about your careers and your livelihoods, but you have overall deals with Warner Brothers, right? Which is, you know, so you're getting a new dad. You're getting a new big dad at some point in the next few months. And I have a lot of friends in the news industry who are affected by that acquisition as well of Paramount Skydance taking on, you know, Warner Brothers and everything that that encompasses. How are you thinking about that right now?

18:47Does that worry you? We just don't know what it will look like. So, of course, anything new is scary. But I mean, Warner Brothers has been so amazing, obviously, as HBO Max and have the support that we have there, but also in our overall deal. Like you said, Channing Dunne is just like an incredible boss. If you look over at the TV side, you know, Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdi have made hit after hit after hit for that company. It's been a generational run, just like nonstop huge hits. And so you look at these people who are running, you know, the departments and you're just thinking these are people who obviously are so good.

19:25And so for us, we just would love to continue to work with these people who have been nothing but supportive, so fabulous to the creative process and have been just the best. So for us, all we can do is say we love working with these people. We want to continue to work with these people. And that's all we can say or know. You know, it's just like kind of the unknowable, of course, is scary, but like I just hope that they keep those people around because they're the best. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.

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22:29I have to ask you sort of like a reality check question that fills in a blank spot for me in terms of what I do and don't know about how contracts work. So Debra's contract becomes a major plot point at the end of season four going into season five. She has this on-screen, on-air sort of outburst, this impassioned speech. She quits the show, which it turns out, as per her contract, means she cannot perform for 18 months after she leaves the show. For the non-entertainment industry among us, have you seen non-competes like this? Like, is that pretty standard protocol? How does that typically play out?

23:04This was a big topic for us in the writer's room. And luckily, Guy Branham, who's a great stand-up, wonderful comedian, and very funny comedy writer, is also a lawyer. So went to law school, is a lawyer, and he helped us really make sure that we threaded the needle in the right way because non-competes are very hard to uphold, apparently. In California. In our world, Debra was paid out through her exclusivity clause, which was also under Florida law, which notoriously has not been the most friendly to employees. So because Florida law governed and because of this thing, we were able to say, okay, there can be a restraining order put in place so that if she were to perform or to break that restraining order, then legal action could be taken.

23:52You were really rigorous with how you skewed to reality on that one. We really kicked the tires because we were painting our character into a corner, which gave us a lot to explore. But we also wanted to make it justifiable and have people not say, well, that could never happen. And, you know, the fact is, is that truth is so much stranger than fiction. Things that are happening with late night hosts and in the world. Don't we know it. Yeah. I'm like, that could happen. It feels absolutely within the realm of reality. Yeah. I mean, I was sort of like, you know, who fucked up there? Like, why didn't Jimmy read the contract more closely?

24:28Great question. And make sure that this woman was not like signing a deal with the devil. So, Paul. I think Jimmy did know. I thought, not to defend my man. But Jimmy knew the contract. And I think Debra knew the contract too. She just never ever could have imagined a world where she would have left the show. Because she was living the dream. So why would she ever? She's like, I might get fired. Fine. Then they have to pay me out. I'm not going to leave. You know, that seemed so far fetched to her. But as she says in the show, she didn't realize it, but her dream changed. You know, the landscape changed, and so did she.