Judging by this year’s comedy series Emmy nominees, Hollywood does have a sense of humor about itself.
This year, both the category’s incumbent, HBO Max’s “Hacks,” as well as buzzy new contender, Apple TV+’s “The Studio,” found humor in even the most soul-crushing parts of the industry. Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building” switched locales from New York to Los Angeles for part of its season as its three investigators saw their work get a screen adaptation as they tried to solve the murder of a veteran stunt performer. The final season of FX’s vampire mockumentary “What We Do in the Shadows” came with a wrap on production of the documentary-within-a-show. There were even touches of the city in other nominees. ABC’s “Abbott Elementary” had a crossover episode with FXX’s “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” and while Apple TV+’s “Shrinking” and Netflix’s “Nobody Wants This” are not Hollywood-specific in plot, they are set in distinct communities in the Los Angeles area.
But it’s a tricky balancing act to send up the industry that feeds you, deliver insider jokes that may fall flat with audiences that are not fluent with showbiz gossip sites like DeuxMoi and pay homage to Old Hollywood and classic movies.
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John Hoffman, the showrunner and co-creator of “Murders,” says. Although he’s a fan of Hollywood-lampooning classic programs like “The Larry Sanders Show,” he had to find a way to tell these stories from the perspective of three leads who know little to nothing about this world. How would the excessive and narcissistic theater director Oliver Putnam (actor in a comedy Emmy nominee Martin Short) handle Zach Galifianakis portraying him and also hating everything
about him?
Season 4’s murder victim was Jane Lynch’s Sazz Pataki, the former stunt double and dear friend of Steve Martin’s TV star Charles-Haden Savage.
“My wish here was to take a work friend and say, ‘What were they really doing?’” Hoffman says. “If they’re a victim, you get to explore what their life was really like, and [her] devotion to this man.”
He adds that it’s not the back-stabbing or competitiveness of industry that he finds relatable, but the times “where you’re all holding hands and you meet up with people in the 101 Coffee Shop, and you share your first act of a screenplay you’re working on nervously, and you get to have creative partners who are going to help and guide you through.”
Meanwhile, after setting much of its previous episodes in Las Vegas, “Hacks” returned to L.A. this season. It went so meta that it made use of the tourist staple that is the Universal Studios backlot tour, cast actual entertainment journalists for a press conference scene and let a character utter his own take on one of TV’s most famous lines — “Desperate Housewives’” “Oh Mary Alice, what did you do?” — on the very set where it was filmed.
“Hacks” creators Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky say their instincts always come from a place of love; in fact, the “Housewives” joke was pitched by executive story editor Ariel Karlin, whom the creators credit for her encyclopedic knowledge of TV. Statsky says all three of them were outsiders who had to find their ways into this line of work; Aniello adds that it’s important to root for a media landscape that’s always changing.
Downs grew up watching British comedies in his suburban New Jersey home and still loves the specificity in them. He says it shouldn’t be expected for all audiences to understand everything the characters say. “If only three people laugh at a reference to [industry restaurant] Mother Wolf, it’s worth it … to have that added layer of specificity,” he says.
In fact, the “Hacks” trio might have pulled off the most in-joke of the season. They appeared in “The Studio” as versions of themselves accepting a Golden Globe. There, they thanked Netflix boss Ted Sarandos, who in real life currently has absolutely no bearing on their careers.