“Hacks” Season 5, Episode 5 (“D’Amazing Race”) was one of the most ambitious and off-the-wall episodes during the HBO half-hour series’ run, which came to an end this week. The idea for a crossover episode with the CBS reality show “The Amazing Race” was the dream of co-creator of Lucia Aniello, who on this week’s episode of The Filmmaker Toolkit podcast explained the inspiration was a script Kevin Hart had hired Aniello and her fellow “Hacks” co-creator Paul W. Downs to write about couple that gets divorced.
“[Hart] was like, “Okay, I want their separation to have been because they had a really bad blowup on ‘The Amazing Race,’” explained Aniello. “They couldn’t figure out a puzzle, and they yelled at each other, and then they got divorced. And I hadn’t seen ‘Amazing Race’ before, so I was like, ‘Okay, Kevin Hart, I will watch ‘Amazing Race.’”
Two months later the pandemic hit, and reality series became Aniello’s escape.
“I found myself just gorging on the show. We were in lockdown, and the show was showing me places all over the world, and also has incredible characters and incredible duos,” said Aniello. “Some of the craziest duos you’ve ever seen. For example, this woman put this girl up for adoption and they’ve never met, and now they’re going to meet and they’re going to go on ‘The Amazing Race’ five minutes later. I mean, you’re like, ‘What?’ And then they travel to Bosnia, and you’re like, ‘This is insane.’”
Aniello’s love for the reality series found its way into “Hacks” Season 2 — Deborah (Jean Smart) watches the show, leading her and Ava (Hannah Einbinder) to discuss it. But that wasn’t enough for Aniello: “I’ve always thought it would be so fun to watch Deborah Vance go on ‘Amazing Race.’ And so I’ve kind of been beating the drum for a long time.”
After finishing Season 4, Aniello found herself at an industry luncheon. One of the fellow guests was Elise Doganieri, co-creator and executive producer of the hit CBS reality competition show. Aniello saw her opportunity, and asked to be introduced: “I [said], ‘I love the show and I would love to do a crossover episode.”
Doganier agreed, offering to help in any way she could. It was an offer that ended up leading to the “Amazing Race” EP going above and beyond, becoming the engine that made Aniello’s crossover dream possible.
“She really helped tremendously with scripts, thoughts and specifics, giving us all of their actual crew in the show, and all of the props are all real,” said Aniello. “And she also helped us deal with legal clearance stuff with CBS. She’s really the MVP of that episode, and she also makes a quick cameo.”
The episode became the perfect vehicle to give Deborah and her daughter DJ’s (Kaitlin Olson) comedically fraught relationship a sense of resolution.
“There’s so many episodes this season that wouldn’t have worked as well if they were done earlier, and that’s one of them,” said Aniello. “I think especially because the Deborah-DJ relationship is so loaded, that then to put it on a hot plate of being on reality television competition show together, [and we were] able to use that as a catalyst to repair their relationship.”
While on “The Amazing Race,” Deborah realizes that DJ is tougher than she gave her credit for, leading her to the realiziation she should’ve let her try more things and she was too protective. This leads to Deborah giving DJ access to her QVC empire.
“It felt like how are we going to get these two finally to see each other differently? And so reality TV got to be the way,” said Aniello. “And finally introducing her to QVC, probably [paved] the path for [DJ] to be able to finally go on.”
That happy ending is predicated by the humiliating conclusion of the mother-daughter’s failed reality competition TV bid, and DJ’s refusal to accept failure in learning the clown routine, resulting in one of the most painful and hysterical moments in recent TV memory.
“Kaitlin Olson, I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, I really think is one of the funniest people to ever exist in the history of the world. We wrote DJ for her, we didn’t really do that for anybody else because we just knew how brilliantly funny, liquid funny at every moment, but I don’t think we really knew how soul-bearing she could be,” said Aniello. “She’s so good at showing you the pain of DJ, and it makes it not a joke. It makes it a real person. I really believe Kaitlin Olson is somebody who should be the lead of every single movie. There should be no other movies, only Kaitlin Olson movies.”
To hear Aniello‘s full interview, make sure you subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
