Jen Statsky wrote on Broad City and The Good Place before co-creating Hacks, where her voice is easiest to hear: two women who make each other better and worse at the same job, funniest when the argument stops being about work.
Fi1m perspective
In Hacks (2021) a note on a joke never stays a note on a joke. Deborah Vance, the veteran played by Jean Smart, tells Ava Daniels, the young writer played by Hannah Einbinder, that a line does not land, and within four exchanges they have stopped discussing the line and started discussing each other. That slide from the professional to the personal is the thing Statsky and her co-creators, Lucia Aniello and Paul W. Downs, are best at, and it is the reason the series is more than a comedy about show business.
She came up as a staff writer rather than on pilots of her own. There was Late Night with Jimmy Fallon from 2011, two episodes of Parks and Recreation, then Broad City (2014) and The Good Place (2016), the last under Michael Schur. On a staffed comedy nobody but the writers knows whose joke is whose, and we will not pretend to. What we can say is that the shows she chose share a habit. The people in them are trying to become better and cannot manage it alone: Chidi and his ethics chalkboard, Abbi and Ilana phoning each other every ten minutes from different boroughs. Both sets of writers, in our reviews, knew how long a half hour was and how many ideas fit in it.
Hacks is where the habit becomes hers, and where its weaknesses show too. Our review found the poorer exchanges leaning on the women's ages, so that their disagreements were predictable before either had finished speaking, and Ava sometimes written to illustrate a complaint about younger people. That is a real limit. The generational joke is the easy one, and the scripts reach for it when a sharper objection about the work would have served Einbinder better. Statsky has described the aim as "this kind of complex, dynamic, sometimes dark, sometimes fraught relationship between these two characters", and the series gets there most often when nobody mentions a birth year.
When it does get there, it got to us. We were moved, more than we expected from a comedy about writing jokes, by how quickly the ground shifts under these two: a quarrel about a punchline turns, in a single line, into an admission neither woman meant to make, and Smart and Einbinder play the silence after it without reaching for the laugh. That is writing that trusts its actors, and it is rarer than it should be.
Statsky has now co-created one series, and it has made her case. Whether the case is hers alone or belongs in equal parts to Aniello and Downs is a question the credits do not settle, since the three of them have written together across five titles. We would like to see what she writes without them. Until then, start with Hacks, and watch for the scenes where the age gap goes unremarked.
Biography
Jen Statsky is an American television writer and producer. She was born on 19 November 1985 in Milton, Massachusetts.
She has written for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Parks and Recreation (2009), Broad City (2014), The Good Place (2016) and Forever (2018). She is co-creator and co-showrunner of the series Hacks (2021), on which she has also written episodes and directed one.
Statsky has received three Primetime Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award and multiple Writers Guild of America Awards.
