The standard for a functioning TV writers’ room has changed in the pandemic era, according to Hacks co-creator Jen Statsky. “In a Zoom writers’ room, the goal is to get your pitch out without your WiFi fucking up,” she tells Vanity Fair’s Joanna Robinson in a long-ranging chat about her Emmy-nominated series on this week’s Little Gold Men podcast.
Despite shaky internet connections, Stasky and co-creators Lucia Aniello and Paul W. Downs helmed one of the year’s most successful comedies. Nominated for 15 Emmys, including outstanding comedy series, the show centers on a burgeoning collaboration between stand-up legend Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and budding comedy writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder).
Stasky, who has written for The Good Place and Parks and Recreation, says the show also aims to address prescient issues, including how we treat women in show business and why “cancel culture” hasn’t harmed comedy. “I think a lot of people in bad faith are using arguments these days about, ‘Oh, cancel culture, and you can’t say anything, and you can’t make joke,’” Stasky says. “And the truth is like, that’s bullshit.” She added, “There’s nothing more hacky than hitting a target that’s been hit eight million times unfairly. Look for new targets. Look to say something new in your comedy because that’s a much more worthy thing to be going up on a stage or putting on someone’s screen.”
Elsewhere on this week’s Little Gold Men, Katey Rich and Joanna dissect the zeitgeist-y finale of HBO’s The White Lotus—and what it means for next year’s Emmys. The pair also preview some of Vanity Fair’s exciting new projects, including the ongoing Reunited series and V.F.’s newest podcast Love Is a Crime.
That 10-episode series tells the story of 1940’s Hollywood power couple film noir femme fatale Joan Bennett and producer Walter Wanger. Love Is a Crime is hosted by the couple’s granddaughter Vanessa Hope and film historian Karina Longworth, who stop by LGM for a chat about the podcast. You can listen to the first episode of Love Is a Crime, and subscribe, by clicking here.
Take a listen to the episode above, and find Little Gold Men on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts. You can also sign up to text with us at Subtext—we’d love to hear from you.
Read a partial transcript of the Jen Statsky conversation below.
Debbie Reynolds was sort of an inspiration for Deb in terms of what happens to her after her marriage and how she has to rebuild her own fortunes. Were there other stories like that that you looked into when thinking about how the treatment of Deb in the show is part of a larger reckoning we’re having with the treatment of women in the industry?
Yeah, totally. I mean, we did a tremendous amount of research on women like Debbie Reynolds, like Carrie Fisher, and Phyllis Diller, and Joan Rivers. And all of these women had this kind of commonality running through their stories, which is they face such incredible hardship. It’s like they face such hardship that I’m like, we should still be talking about it to this day. It’s crazy. But these women were just expected to take it and like, keep moving. They just were not really celebrated for how much shit they had to go through. As we followed that trend throughout history, we also talked so much about, like you said, this moment of reckoning we’re having with women whose stories we got wrong, whose stories the media decided they got to tell, and the women themselves didn’t get to tell.
You see that when American Crime Story came out and Marcia Clark—we realized how horrible we were to her, or Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, all these women who, quite frankly, it’s more comfortable for society to go, “Oh, they’re a joke. They’re a joke.” We put them to the fringe and we laugh at them. It’s exactly why Deborah on episode six says, “I realized, they’d rather laugh at me than believe me,” because for so long, that is the best women could get in this world is that, well, I’m not going to be believed. I’m not going to be listened to. The truth of my story isn’t going to be actually heard and given any kind of reverence. It’s going to be that I can just make myself a joke and maybe that’s how I can contribute and still exist in this world.
We want the show, in a lot of ways, to be a love letter or pay due to the women who didn’t get to have their careers because they did suffer such horrible indignities and it made them go, “I can’t do this. I won’t do this.”
I know one of the reasons you went to Vegas, at least a few times, was to see Britney Spears. So, I was curious if you had Britney thoughts and opinions you wanted to share with me.
Yeah, of course. I mean, I have been such a massive Britney Spears fan for my whole life. She came to fame exactly when I was in the perfect window to really fall in love with her. And to be honest, I feel complicit now having gone to see her in Vegas, not one, not two, not three, but four times. And I’m like, “Oh, shit.” I guess I didn’t quite, none of us knew, like we knew that there was this weird situation, but I definitely didn’t know just how awful it was. So, I do now. I’m reckoning with my own…as we all are, we’re all complicit in this treatment of women in society of like, “Oh, right. What exactly was I being blind to just because I didn’t want to hear it or I didn’t want to see it?”
That’s the Ava journey, especially the sequence with Ava in the archive when she’s really digging in and figuring stuff out, that did hit home for me in terms of journeys that I’ve gone on around some of these women. It’s that sinking, awful feeling, that internalized misogyny.
You see it in comedy a lot, too. And hopefully we’re slowly inching towards progress in so many ways. But when I started my career, my first full-time writing job I was a monologue writer for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. And this wasn’t just a Fallon problem. This was every late night host across the board. Not coincidentally, all of them were white men. And I remember monologue jokes, like so many women were the butt of those jokes. Back in 2011, it was Kim Kardashian. It was very tragically Amy Winehouse. I look back now and I just say, “Making women the butt of the joke when there was like real trauma and tragedy and pain going on to what they were experiencing in their real life, it’s really horrible.”
And yeah, that is Ava’s journey. Ava’s someone who, as woke as she is, one of her fatal flaws is she has leaned so hard into what is cool and what is cool comedy and who gets to be cool. So, she writes Deborah off as a QVC moo-moo lady, as a joke. I know that Ava starts as maybe an unlikable or more unlikeable than other characters, but it is intentional because she has to go on that journey to discover, what so many people now hopefully are discovering about many women, is that they didn’t give them a fair shot and they didn’t listen to their story.
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