At the end of “Hacks” Season 3, co-creator, co-showrunner, executive producer and writer Jen Statsky said Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and Ava Daniels’ (Hannah Einbinder) relationship has hit a point it’s never seen before – and the writers have had to find a way to mind the comedy and emotional stakes following it.
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“You always want to be funny first and think of the comedy and think of the jokes, but their relationship is very real, very fraught, very difficult,” Statsky said. “And that also gives us a lot to play with.”
Statsky, writer and producers Jake Bender and Zach Dunn of “What We Do in the Shadows,” director and executive producer of “Abbott Elementary” Randall Einhorn and writer, director and executive producer of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” Jeff Schaffer joined the Variety TV FYC Fest: The Nominees to discuss their respective shows.
Einhorn, who previously worked on shows like “The Office,” “Parks and Rec,” but also “Survivor,” said his experience in reality TV helped him strengthen his directing on “Abbott Elementary.”
“I certainly use a lot of techniques from reality and from documentaries,” Einhorn explained. “For instance, whenever we see Janine and Gregory together, we just back up and get longer on the lens. And I think what that does is it makes the scene ring truer. It kind of veneers it with this authenticity of, I believe that they’re not aware of the cameras. We put a little foreground in there and we make it seem like they’re not aware of us for these voyeuristic moments that I think feel very rich.”
Bender and Dunn similarly use a mockumentary format in “What We Do in the Shadows,” which Bender says feels like is “the whole joke of the show.”
“We get into it a little bit in the final season, the idea about who this documentary is for and what it is,” Dunn said. “But I think that, in general, there’s very strict rules. In the “What We Do in the Shadows” movie, they were really strict about it feeling like a real documentary and not doing cheats that couldn’t happen in a documentary; that’s continued; the rules are good. Rules can be really annoying, but they also can help with comedy, I think.”
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Schaeffer, who works on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” revealed that he and the crew didn’t go into the last season thinking that it would be the final one.
“The only reason we ended the series is because the funniest version of this season’s finale was if it was the series finale,” Schaeffer said. “That’s it.”
The comedy writers and producers explored the changes within the TV industry, specifically the shortening of comedy TV seasons. Schaeffer said its hard to think of the television heyday, where seasons would run 22 or 24 episodes of a comedy season.
He explained that it feels hard enough to do 10 episodes, let alone double that. Statsky said she and her team have been able to fit the number of episodes to the story they have set. But, she said of her previous work on other shows: “When we did 22 [episodes] on Parks and Rec, I’m like, ‘How the fuck?'”
Schaeffer said his biggest gripe is that people don’t know how to say goodbye, especially after “Curb.”
“They can’t seem to say goodbye without attaching, ‘And we’ll have lunch or do something,'” Schaeffer said. “No one’s going off to war. Goodbyes can just be goodbyes. That’s one of the things that Larry’s the best in the world at. When we’re on the phone and we’re done talking, he just hangs up and it’s great. We don’t need to, ‘Okay, we’ll do this.’ or ‘Okay, I’ll see this. Okay, we’ll have lunch.’ You don’t. People are so worried about how to initiate contact. But I think the real problem with humanity is we don’t know how to terminate contact, and that’s really the best part of contact, is the end. So just snip it.”
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