When “Hacks” co-creators Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky were originally shopping the show, their pitch was 35 minutes long. It included the characters, some possible episodes, and — perhaps surprisingly — the ending.

“We pitched the last scene,” said Downs. “Which is, I think, a rare thing, to be honest.”

The show was picked up by HBO Max in 2020 (in mid-pitch; according to Downs, then-Max exec Suzanna Makkos greenlit the project before she ever heard the finale). And now, production for the fifth season is underway.

“Hacks” is dramedy about Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), a comedian in her 70s who teams up with younger comedy writer, Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) to plot the next chapter of her career. In Season four, which aired earlier this year, Vance realize her long-held dream to host a late-night show only to have it implode around her.

Statsky and Downs spoke with “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal about the process of writing, whether they worry about sticking the landing in what may be the show’s final season, and about the state of late-night and comedy writ large.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. To listen to this interview, use the audio player above.

Kai Ryssdal: First of all, thank you for coming all the way downtown.

Jen Statsky: Thanks for having us.

Paul W. Downs: That’s OK. We love L.A., we love driving around.

Ryssdal: As do we all. We should say here that you guys are only two of the trio that run this show. Lucia Aniello, (Downs') wife, partner in professional and personal things, is, I understand, actually at work today?

Downs: She is, she’s running the room.

Statsky: Yep, she’s running the writers room right now.

Ryssdal: What does that mean, running the writers room? 'Cause don't you just put a bunch of people in a room and they write?

Statsky: A writer's room is kind of like a nine-hour-long meeting, which sounds, I think, scary.

Downs: Nine is actually humane. I think some rooms are 16 hours.

Statsky: But so, Lucia is in the room right now. And yeah, when we say run the room, just kind of guiding the conversation amongst our writers, whether it's talking about a story, figuring out the beats of it, or if we're more into a script, like maybe a script has been written and we're going through it and and tweaking dialogue and punching it up.

Ryssdal: I read somewhere that when — specifically you three — work together and look at each other's scripts, it's more positive than critiquing, shall we say. You just highlight the stuff you like, and then you go from there.

Downs: Yeah. I mean, that's something that we, Lucia and I, learned early on, was that positive reinforcement was the most helpful. So we would write the same scene at the same time, swap and then highlight things that we liked. And then we would come together to combine them. And we've done that (with Statsky), too.

Statsky: It's a good method. The problem is it takes more time. As we get closer to production, we then realized we can't be writing the same scene. We need to divide up the scenes.

Downs: Yeah, there's such a mind meld that I do feel like it would be a little bit redundant to do the same scene at the same time, because we know. We do have a hive mind.

Ryssdal: Well, I mean, especially at this point, right? You're working on season five. You have incubated these characters now, and these stories, for literally years. So there can't be a whole lot of 'Oh my goodness!' moments, right? I don't know. Maybe there are.

Downs: We try to have them, and it's great when you have them still. I mean, I think that's the goal.

Statsky: Yeah, that's the challenge. I think we've all had that experience of a show that you love, that then kind of starts hitting the same beats and you maybe don't feel as taken care of.

Ryssdal: Am I right that this is it? Right? It's Season five, and then you're done?

Downs: Well, we know where we're ending. We've known that for a long time, and you really want to service all the stories in the ensemble and sort of give them their due. And so we're trying to figure out now how many episodes that will take, and it may take more than we can do in one season, which is 10.

Ryssdal: Sorry, I'm gonna jump ahead of my list of questions. How worried are you about sticking the landing on this thing? Because there's a long and bloody trail of amazing series that haven't done that. Should we not talk about that?

Downs: No, we're terrified! That's the other reason that we hesitate to want to finish this season even, because we're like, 'Let's push off the very, very very last moment.' That said, the thing that's hard are the flips and tricks that get you to the landing. I think the landing we feel good about. It's still scary, because you do have people who now love it and feel these characters are real, and so their reactions to anything they do is really intense, which is cool. I mean, that's, you know, the dream.

Ryssdal: I want to talk about topicality for a minute. And Jen, most of this goes to you, since your background is late night and writing and you've been in those writers rooms. I'm going to assume people have seen the show, or at least know about the show. Deborah Vance, stand-up comic —

Statsky: If not, pause this now!

Ryssdal: Well actually wait, before I get to this question. How do you guys feel about spoilers, by the way?

Statsky/Downs: For Season four, it's OK.

Ryssdal: Alright, so Deborah gets her dream job: late night host. And then it, for a whole bunch of reasons, kind of implodes. You wrote this before the (Stephen) Colbert thing happened, before late night sort of was on the corporate chopping block, as it were. How did you feel watching that happen in real life?

Statsky: I mean, just as fans of late night and the institution and fans of Colbert, we were really saddened and taken aback by it. One of the things we wanted to explore was always this intersection of art and commerce and how the entertainment industry, especially now, is changing more and more. And so we knew going in to having Deborah have a late night show that would certainly be something she encountered and dealt with, because she'd never really dealt with that before. She's been really kind of like a lone wolf, but now she's put into this corporate-meets-art environment, and there's a whole different set of rules. And especially in our current day, there's, like, a lot of rules that are changing as we're seeing and so it was, yeah, it was pretty crazy to have written that and then see that play out.

Ryssdal: Paul, you have nice things to say about HBO and the corporate suits, as it were. And, you know, just because that's where the bread is buttered, I suppose. But I will say, huge Helen Hunt fan, I hated that character. Oh, hated that character.

Downs: Intense. She's intense. I know. I know.

Ryssdal: I feel like you guys ruined Helen Hunt for me.

Downs: I'm so sorry. Well, that was her, you know, she, she honestly, I don't know, she channeled something.

Statsky: She really did.

Downs: Because I love Helen Hunt too, and she was so not her when we were working, you know, when we were acting together. It was bizarre. But yeah, she represents somebody who is also feeling, I think, pressure from the top down.

Ryssdal: And look, she was trying to help, it was a little sideways.

Downs: And I actually loved that moment in the season when she says, ‘I started my career, PA-ing for Terrence Malick, I would love to just support artists. I don't just want to, like, give people a digital spinoff, that's not where I get my joy, but it's the world we live in, you know?’ And so she really wanted, I think, Deborah’s show to succeed, though, I think to Deborah, it just seemed like a contrived way of doing business that wasn't the best thing for the comedy. And as a comedian she's a purist, and that was the most important thing to her.

Ryssdal: Do you all worry that once you're done, it's gonna be tough for a show like this about comedy, to go someplace, or if the show is good enough, it’s going to make it right?

Downs: I think if the idea is compelling it can make it, but you need people to champion it. And that's why I have spoken so highly of our partners at HBO Max, because even though, yes, that is where the bread is buttered, as you said, they really have been so supportive of us creatively and took a risk on a show that, when you hear the pitch about a woman in her 70s and this young, entitled writer she's forced to hire, it's a little inside baseball. What we always strive to do is make it as universal as we can and make it appealing to people that aren't in the industry in any way.

Ryssdal: What was the pitch, by the way?

Downs: Well, it was a script. It was a long script.

Ryssdal: So you wrote it wrote it?

Downs: Oh we wrote it.

Statsky: It's a 35-minute pitch.

Downs: It was sort of like, here's the log line of the show, and here's what it's really about, and here's this character in her backstory —

Statsky: And here's what some episodes would be, which ended up being episodes we've done —

Downs: And here's what the ending is.

Ryssdal: Already? Back then, you knew the ending?

Downs: Oh, we pitched the last scene. The last scene of the last episode in the pitch. Which is, I think, a rare thing to be honest. I don't know.

Ryssdal: That’s a gutsy move. I mean, I'm no writer, but that seems like a gutsy move.

Downs: And it was discussed by a lot of people. We talked about it a lot, like —

Ryssdal: So wait, there are people out there who know! Sorry to keep interrupting, but there are people out there who know (the ending)! Does that not terrify you?

Downs/Statsky: I don't think they remember.

Downs: I think if they didn't buy the show, they don't remember.

Statsky: Honestly, executives, I think, hear so many pitches that — to their credit, they have to hear so many. I've actually had an executive who passed on this show years later be telling me what a fan they were, and then say, “Thank God I didn't pass on it.”

Downs: But you know what, HBO Max doesn't know, because Suzanna Makkos, who we pitched to, stopped us before we finished and said, ‘I'd like to make this with you,’ which was amazing.

Ryssdal: What's that feeling like?

Downs: I'd never had it before. It was amazing.

Statsky: Because a pitch is so, you know, it can feel so laborious, and you're like, ‘Is this hitting?’ Especially, with COVID, we started doing them on Zoom, and so there's not that in-the-room feeling. So it can be really scary, and —

Downs: You're so exposed. You're so exposed, you're saying your ideas, and someone can say ‘no,’ and that's hard.

Statsky: And the waiting period after is terrible. So to get someone to immediately say yes, you don't have to, like, wait and go through that is amazing.

Ryssdal: Can we talk mechanics here for a minute? You (Statsky) are a writer, you're a producer, you're about to be a director. You (Downs) are a writer, producer, director, actor. Each of you, pick one. What's your favorite? 

Statsky: Oh, wow. I — producing.

Downs: Shocker.

Ryssdal: Why shocker?

Statsky: Well, I don't know. Maybe that's not true. I guess writing. At the end of the day, writing is my favorite. Producing, is, is a little bit, yeah, I guess writing.

Downs: The one that I think I get the most kicks out of is acting. It's, to me, the one where I turn everything off. And so it feels like the least amount of work. Like I find directing to be a lot of work. There's so many things to weigh in addition to the creative. Whereas, you know, when you're acting, you're just listening to a scene partner.

Ryssdal: Now, let me throw the showrunner bit out there too, because years and years and years ago, we had Michael Schur on the program a couple of times. And he has worked with executive producer [of “Hacks”]. I asked him about the showrunning thing. And I said, ‘How do you learn to do that?’ And he said, ‘The only way to learn how to do it is to do it.’ Yeah. Speaking of terrifying and working 40-hour days and all that jazz. Paul (Downs), you specifically, how do you act and direct and run the show. How do you do that?

Downs: Well, luckily, I have two partners that really help me. I mean, how Mike Schur does it alone, I don't know. The thing that you really need to do to learn how to do this is be in writers rooms, potentially have set experience, and watch people do it. But, you know, that's something that the writers strike was really fighting for was more time on set, because people need to be trained to make shows. And if they have short orders for streaming shows that they're there for 16 weeks and then they're gone, they're not there for the whole process to see all that it takes to make it.

Ryssdal: So that actually goes to the pipeline question — not just comedy, but what it is that you all do, right? You start as a baby writer, and you're in that room and you don't know anything, and then you you proceed and develop. Is that harder now?

Statsky: It's certainly harder to find those opportunities. The model has been upended in the last decade or so. Streaming has kind of really turned everything upside down. And, network TV and even cable TV, the way it was done for so long, was exactly what we're talking about: You had a staff, and they sat in that writers room, and they learned from people who had done it longer than them how to do it. And then you got on set and you saw how the process worked. And those are all incredibly valuable steps to learning how to run your own show, and if you don't follow those steps, the quality can suffer once you have your own show.

Ryssdal: Are you hopeful for the industry?

Downs: I am.

Ryssdal: There was a little bit of a pause, let me just say.

Downs: Well, I am. It's so funny because we're now talking three weeks after Colbert was canceled, right? This, like, late night institution, which is the place that a lot of writers get their first job, a lot of baby writers start there, and a lot of stand ups and comedians break on the show breaks. So I am optimistic. I think, like, our show tries to be optimistic. Deborah Vance leaves her show willingly, because she says, I'm not going to do this. I've said this before, but Colbert was the number one-rated late night show. I think the fact that it was losing money isn't a Stephen Colbert problem, to me, it's a business problem. And I think we're in the creative arts to figure things out, and so I am hopeful that it can happen, but it is scary that there's less opportunity now.

Statsky: I think there's less opportunity because there's so much outsized pressure put on these properties. Like Comedy Central was so great because young people or just people who hadn't done it before, were given a shot at the way, you know, Abby Jacobson and Ilana Glazer were given a shot for “Broad City.” And that's, you know, was a show that was massively important to —

Downs: That was Lucia (Aniello)’s first directing job. She had never directed TV.

Statsky: It was part of Comedy Central. It was part of a cable package. There was just less pressure on each individual property. There's so much pressure now for a show to be a hit right away, to grab subscribers — because it's all been funneled into the streaming model — and to travel globally. And yes, comedy does not travel as well always as other genres. And so I think that it is a business problem that is being sometimes said as a comedy problem. And I don't think it's a comedy problem. I think it's a business problem.

Ryssdal: Last thing, and I'll let you guys get back to the writers room so that Lucia (Aniello) doesn't have to do all the work. Season five. You know where the end is. It might seem far away now, but you know, you guys are winding down-ish. I'm not going to ask you what's next. I'm going to ask you whether you have time now to think about what's next. Or are you just going to take, like, six months off and decompress?

Downs: I would love that. I would love to take time off.

Statsky: Six months would be great. But I don't think we're —

Downs: No, we're not going to do that. We took two days between seasons four and five, so I don't think we're going to do that. We are thinking about what's next. And the benefit of making something with your friends is that we also socialize, so that when we turn off —

Ryssdal: Do you not get sick of each other? Sorry. I mean, come on, I love the people I work with, but I'm not gonna —

Downs: But we did it the other way. We like, found friends and made —

Statsky: Yeah, exactly, exactly. We weren't put together. We found each other.

Downs: It's a chosen family.

Statsky: There were some personal issues that came up throughout this, and we've really been like, I think, forged in fire. The three of us running the show, and just the entire cast and crew.

Downs: There were births, there were deaths. We have really become very bonded.