Growing up, my parents owned restaurants in Amherst, Massachusetts, the college town known for its excellent bus system and that one time UMass went to the Final Four, in the 90s.
My dad was the chef and my mom made the desserts, hostessed, and did ungodly amounts of paperwork. It was a grueling business: they corralled undergrads who showed up to work hungover, helped people get citizenship, and paid for all three of their kids to go to college.
After I graduated, I needed to figure out a way to pay my bills in New York, so, staying in the family trade, I started waitressing (because Blue Man Group wasn’t hiring). My longest-running gig was at Koi, at the Bryant Park Hotel, where I worked for just over two years. I had friends who had gone on to graduate film school, but I hadn’t gotten into the only one I applied to. (N.Y.U., I will haunt you!)
I felt that my time as a server was just a way to make ends meet, but, looking back, it was better than any film school I could have possibly attended.
Waiting tables afforded me the flexibility to do comedy every hour I wasn’t making tips. I did stand-up and started taking improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater, where I met Paul W. Downs, my comedy partner and future husband.
And because I didn’t have a nine-to-five, Paul and I started writing together and making shorts in our spare time. Like my parents, we did it all together. We learned everything as we went along: we wrote and re-wrote. When one of us was acting, the other directed. We even learned to edit from YouTube tutorials. And making a name for ourselves online with digital shorts led to our first job together in television, working on Broad City for Comedy Central.
In 2021, Paul and I co-created Hacks for HBO Max, with our best friend, Jen Statsky. (Season Three dropped on Max on May 2!) Hacks is about a dark mentorship between two women—a fabulous stand-up comic nearing the end of her career (Jean Smart) and the Gen Z bisexual writer (Hannah Einbinder) who has been tapped to resuscitate it. When forced to work together, the two develop a deep—and deeply complicated—relationship. Think The Devil Wears Prada but with more plastic surgery and less shame.
Hacks is my first time show-running, and it’s almost exactly like waiting tables. I have to deal with the front of house, but instead of customers, I’m managing network executives and actors and attending events—the public-facing activities required to get a show green-lighted and, ultimately, promoted.
But I also deal even more closely with the people who actually make the product behind the scenes—the camera department, the riggers and the grips, the production designer and art director, the set decorators, the costume designer, the sound and locations teams, just to name a few. I’m constantly moving between the two worlds and servicing both at the same time.
As a show-runner and director, I’m in a race against time, scrambling to put out 10,000 fires all at once. To get the opening shot for Season Three, I found myself at Caesars Palace at five a.m., directing 300 extras and a bunch of drag queens. I only had 20 minutes left on the clock, and I just didn’t have the shot yet.
That overwhelming wave of anxiety was almost the exact same feeling I had as a waiter when the courses weren’t coming out in the right order, one table hadn’t gotten their drinks, and there were three tables I hadn’t even visited. In both lines of work, the only option was to take a deep breath and focus on one fire at a time.
At the restaurant, I would immediately assess my customers’ needs. One table liked to chat about their day; another required their food as quickly as possible. It’s not all that different from working with actors. Some may love to discuss motivation and character arcs, while others just want to be told exactly how you want them to say the line, and then go home.
Both businesses are also built around a creative endeavor and require exhausting prep. (A beautiful scene can be as nourishing as a balanced dish!) The inventory, the shot listing, the scheduling, the budget, the re-writes, the canceled reservations—there’s a never-ending to-do list. Restaurants and television shows both begin with a creative, exciting, and delicious idea, but they contend with the logistics of managing a small army of people and making sure they don’t hate you.
As much as I admire my parents’ work ethic, I used to think they were crazy for getting into the restaurant business. It’s so volatile, so hard to stay afloat. It requires long hours, sleepless nights, and tireless dedication. But I get why they did it—to give people a place to come together and make memories with their families, and enjoy a meal they might never forget. And I guess you really do become your parents, because it’s the same for me. I make comedy with my husband (and our best friend) to make people laugh.
In the end, both outputs are brought to the masses and criticized. (We pretend we don’t read the criticism.) I love show-running in part because the restaurant world has wired me to embrace every beautiful, painful part of the process. Either that or I’m just addicted to the adrenaline.
Maybe the next show I make should be about the inner workings of a restaurant. That hasn’t been done, right?
Lucia Aniello is co-show-runner, co-writer, and co-director of Hacks