Happy Monday! I’ll keep the introductions quick this morning, as I’m on my way to Los Angeles for a busy week of Emmy FYC season. Come back later this week for the inside scoop on The Ankler’s invite-only Women Shaping Television luncheon at Spago on Wednesday in Beverly Hills, where Ankler CEO Janice Min and I will celebrate Emmy nominees Shailene Woodley, Janelle James, Kate O’Flynn, Sarah Pidgeon and so many more. It’s going to be a blast with a very fun program!
For today, though, I’m sharing my conversation with Hacks co-creator and director Lucia Aniello and cinematographer and producer Adam Bricker, a pair of longtime collaborators who have shaped the look of maybe TV’s best show about collaboration.
They walk me through what it took to pull off four of the most memorable scenes from the comedy’s final season:
1. Paris 🤝 Fake Paris
Hacks will always have Paris – both versions of Paris, actually.
In the bravura final shot of the HBO Max comedy’s final episode, Hannah Einbinder’s Ava and Jean Smart‘s Deborah walk down the street in Paris brainstorming jokes together and then continue their conversation in the streets of Las Vegas, a match cut between the real Eiffel Tower and Vegas’ fake one making for an effortless transition. Well, it looks effortless, at least.
“It was obscenely technical,” says Aniello, who co-created the series alongside Jen Statsky and Paul W. Downs and is Emmy-nominated for directing the series finale. “A lot of people worked really hard on that shot.”
“But it was the right way to do it creatively,” adds Bricker, the director of photography for Hacks’ entire five-season run, whose Emmy nomination this year is for the show’s penultimate episode. For production reasons, the Las Vegas half of the shot was captured first, and it was only thanks to fortuitous reshoots that the Bellagio fountains made a cameo toward the very end. With the Vegas half of the shoot marking the show’s goodbye to Deborah and Ava, Bricker says, “We could be a little freer in Las Vegas for those very final moments of the season. And then we suffered the ramifications of that by then having to match to that [in Paris].”
Both the finale and the penultimate episode — in which Deborah finds out she’s been cheated out of her triumphant Madison Square Garden performance and pivots to a Central Park show instead — required Aniello and Bricker to adapt the visual language of Hacks in ways both obvious (Paris is very different from Las Vegas!) and almost entirely imperceptible to viewers. Throughout the show’s entire run, Aniello says, “We really wanted the photography to push the language of what a comedy could be.”
2. The Empty Garden
In the ninth episode, “The Garden,” Deborah does intensive prep for her Madison Square Garden show only to learn at the 11th hour that she’s been stymied by her former boss, Bob Lipka (Tony Goldwyn). In a petty act of vengeance for being called out in public at the end of season four, the studio head has bought out every ticket — leaving Deborah without an audience. As the betrayal dawns on her, Deborah walks through the arena’s concourse — actually an arena in Ontario, Calif., but it’s a convincing MSG! — in a sequence that looks very different from what you might normally see on Hacks.
“We would rarely use an optical zoom on the show, but I thought it was so great,” says Bricker, describing how the camera zooms out on Deborah as she takes in the empty hallway. Adds Aniello, “I wanted it to feel odd. I wanted you to feel very confused and disoriented. The in-camera zoom does that for the audience because you’re so not used to it in our show. So it does add to the weirdness of what’s going on.”
That surreal feeling continues as Deborah confronts Bob on the empty arena floor, with the pink and purple lights still flashing for the show that will never be. “I was thinking a lot about what the show would have looked like, but I also wanted it to be an intimidating, intense scene,” says Bricker. “The thing that happened at the very last minute was I added this moving light to that scene. It sort of felt like you were almost at an amusement park, but there’s nobody there, and it’s super tense because all the lights are still happening.”
3. The Casino Club
Deborah eventually triumphs by moving her show to a free Central Park stage, and then wins again at the start of the series finale, opening her new casino, The Diva, in Las Vegas. The hotel is campy, unabashedly feminine and totally convincing as a palace you might want to visit on the Las Vegas Strip — and, of course, it doesn’t exist.
“The Diva is unbelievable because it was so many different locations that were different versions of it,” says Aniello, revealing that multiple closed or partially renovated Vegas casinos stood in for The Diva as a work-in-progress throughout the season — with a Los Angeles theater subbing for what would become the Deborah Vance Comedy Club. The job for imagining all of these went to the show’s production designer Rob Tokarz, a four-time Emmy nominee for Hacks.
“I think that we’re underselling Rob and his team’s contribution to this,” adds Bricker. “The production design connecting these six different locations all over the southwestern U.S. and making it cohesive. And it’s so beautiful, and it feels so real. He just really crushed it.”
Both Aniello and Bricker speak fondly about shooting in Las Vegas, even though the ambitious outdoor shoots — like the finale’s closing one — required the cooperation of multiple private corporations. (How very American, I told them.) “Vegas is a dream to shoot in,” Bricker says. “For one, it’s just so visual. But then two, when you know the right people, you can do anything.”
Case in point: When they were shooting exterior Vegas scenes with guest star Christopher Briney, playing a musician who has a brief romance with Deborah, the crew ran into Lisa Vanderpump, who recently opened her own very Diva-esque hotel. “She was just chilling outside holding her little dog,” Aniello remembers. “She came over and introduced herself to Jean — she was a doll, by the way — and she said, ‘I really look up to Deborah Vance.’ And Jean was like, ‘So do I, babe.’”
4. Avorah Forever
The Paris-set finale is, yes, a big departure for Hacks, hopping continents and focusing almost entirely on the two main characters as Deborah considers ending her own life after a cancer recurrence. The cinematography, Aniello explains, is “a little looser, a little bit more handheld, a little more documentary-ish. It feels like we’re in their trip, but also we’re just getting to see that our friends are having a really good trip.” They even avoided having people in the background whenever possible, she continues, “so it felt like they were alone in the city.”
But the finale is also making good on promises the show made many seasons earlier — who remembers Deborah telling Ava she’s never had real bread unless she’s been to Paris? That full-circle feeling is present in the episode’s cinematography as well, starting with the long opening take following Ava on the set of her new show, which perfectly mirrors the shot that introduces Deborah in the pilot.
For most of their trip to Paris, Bricker says, “They’re just really close to each other, and we’re right there with them.” But when Ava and Deborah argue in their hotel room about Deborah’s decision to end her life, Aniello points out, they’re placed on opposite couches in a way almost identical to how they faced off in an early pilot scene. “It’s like they are now so together and a little yin and yang,” Aniello says. “But at moments they’re still back at their place where they have completely different points of view.”
Paris was the final shooting block of the final season, and Aniello called cut for the final time while they were all shooting in the Louvre — quite the place to wrap up something you’ve spent more than a decade working on.
“It’s so rare that you get to work on a show where you get to end it on your own terms,” says Bricker, who is now at work on a different HBO series he can’t talk about yet. “While we were shooting, there were so many goodbyes and so many wraps that were very emotional.”
Bricker says that, looking back, it was great to get to wrap in L.A., Las Vegas and Paris. But he still could’ve used another one. “I need one more wrap. We need to shoot one more thing.”
I suggest they can do something together at the Emmys, where Hacks is up for 24 awards, a record for a comedy series. But from the way Aniello reacted to Bricker on the call, it sounds like another project could be on the horizon for them. After all, as the ending of Hacks proves, the best collaborations never have to end.
