Lucia Aniello finds good comedy in people who make working together unnecessarily difficult. We rate her feeling for performers, though Hacks also shows how readily a lively disagreement can become a predictable complaint about another generation.
Fi1m perspective
In Hacks (2021), two women make a difficult job harder for each other. Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder are excellent together, particularly when a discussion about work becomes personal. We laughed at those exchanges because the irritation is recognisable, even when the women are being unreasonable. Aniello is good at this: letting a professional disagreement expose the feelings of the people having it, while keeping it funny enough that we want to spend more time with them.
Aniello began with digital shorts and improv sketches alongside Paul W. Downs in 2007. She went on to direct and write for Broad City (2014), then co-created, directed and wrote the miniseries Time Traveling Bong (2016). Rough Night (2017), which she directed and co-wrote, was her first feature. Her work has been concentrated in television, and we see no reason to wish she had hurried away from it.
She co-created Hacks with Downs and Jen Statsky, taking on writing, directing and showrunning duties. Aniello has explained that being in the writing room lets her understand why a scene is needed and the characters’ points of view. We can see the value of that approach in a programme so dependent on conversations going wrong. The shared credit matters, too: Smart and Einbinder contribute much of what makes the difficult partnership worth our attention.
The caveat is in the scripts. When they lean too hard on the women’s ages, the exchanges grow predictable, and Ava is sometimes reduced to an example of what is wrong with younger people. Einbinder gives her more life than that, but having an excellent performer is no excuse for handing her an obvious objection. We would like Aniello and her fellow writers to trust these particular women more and the generational shorthand less. Start with Hacks for the pleasure of watching Smart and Einbinder make a difficult partnership funny.
Biography
Lucia Aniello is an Italian-born American director, writer and producer. She graduated from Columbia University in 2004 with a degree in film and media studies.
She is best known for co-creating, writing and directing episodes of the series Hacks (2021–2026), for which she has won multiple Primetime Emmy Awards. She has also directed and written for Broad City (2014–2019) and directed the feature film Rough Night (2017), which she co-wrote with Paul W. Downs. Other credits include directing episodes of The Baby-Sitters Club (2020) and Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens (2020).
Aniello is married to comedian and collaborator Paul W. Downs.
