‘So much pride when people ask where I’m from’: ‘Hacks’ creator, Lucia Aniello, reflects on western Mass upbringing

The shows “Broad City” and “Hacks” take place largely in New York City and Las Vegas, respectively, but they have a local connection: each show’s executive production team includes Lucia Aniello, a producer, writer, director, and showrunner who grew up in Hadley.

“I have so much pride when people ask where I’m from,” Aniello said.

Though Aniello wasn’t born in the Pioneer Valley, she moved here as a young toddler. Her father Mauro Aniello was a chef, and her mother Claire Aniello was both a restaurant manager and a pastry chef. Together, they owned and operated the Amherst restaurants Pinocchio’s, Monkey Bar, and La Piazza.

Aniello said that their partnership made her see them as role models: in the same way that they worked together in restaurant ownership (being “the bosses of a lot of people” and “having to be tough but fair”), she and her husband Paul W. Downs work together running “Hacks” with co-creator and co-showrunner Jen Statsky.

Aniello went to public schools in Hadley, including Hopkins Academy, through 10th grade, when she dropped out to pursue a GED so she could spend more time training with tennis coach Art Carrington. Rather than doing a typical junior and senior year of high school, she took classes at Holyoke Community College as well as Smith College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, thanks to the Five College Consortium. With those, she was able to transfer to Columbia University (where she played varsity tennis) with credits already in hand, which allowed her to graduate early.

While in New York, Aniello joined the celebrated Upright Citizens Brigade, where she met her husband. She also met Ilana Glazer, with whom she helped develop what would become “Broad City,” a sitcom about two best friends. Her work on that show included executive producing, writing and directing. A few years after that show first aired, she directed and co-wrote her debut feature film, “Rough Night,” starring Scarlett Johansson.

Coming from an area with a high concentration of women and queer people not only helped build her own confidence in pitching, creating, and directing her work – “Growing up in that kind of a community where you felt empowered only left me in a position where I felt empowered,” she said – but it also informed her biggest projects, most if not all of which have been female-fronted. With “Broad City,” for example, “I think we were just portraying young women just as they are. Some people, I think it was the first time that they felt that they [saw] stoner, messy girls on television. Maybe it was one of the first times they’d seen it, but for us, it really felt like we were just reflecting the world as we saw it.”

The Pioneer Valley, she said, has “such a funky, cool mindset that I think that people are really figuring out their own paths and are a little bit less, maybe, than other places, feeling like they have to be constrained to being anything specifically. I haven’t really found anywhere else in this world where people just really march to the beat of their own drum.”

Incidentally, another of Aniello’s projects has even more local ties: she was an executive producer and director for Netflix’s “Baby-Sitters Club” series, based on the books by written by Ann M. Martin, a Smith College alumna, and whose writing staff included Lisha Brooks and Dan Robert, both of whom are from Northampton. “Meeting them here in LA and working with them, I felt like I knew them my whole life because we all had the same background,” she said. “It was actually almost trippy, in a way, how much we felt kindred because of growing up in the same place.”

Her most recent major project is the award-winning series, “Hacks,” starring Jean Smart as stand-up comedian Deborah Vance and Hannah Einbinder as harried comedy writer Ava Daniels. (Last year, “Hacks” beat “The Bear” in the “Outstanding Comedy Series” Emmy category. “The Bear,” as it happens, also has a local connection: Amherst native Ebon Moss-Bachrach plays Richie Jerimovich, a family friend of Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, played by Jeremy Allen-White.)

The show, which streams on Max, has grown widely popular since its first episode aired in May 2021. The show is now into its fourth season, with the season finale scheduled for May 29.

“So many people from so many different walks of life, we’ve found, have really liked the show,” Aniello said. “There is no typical ‘Hacks’ watcher.”

The show has guest-starred a number of celebrities, including Jimmy Kimmel, Kristen Bell, Christina Hendricks, and Patton Oswalt. One of the most recent guests (as of this writing) was Carol Burnett, who Aniello said was “really, really amazing and so sharp and funny and had amazing stories.”

Still, there’s one particular guest star who hasn’t yet made an appearance but whom Aniello hopes to bring one day: Cher.

“I don’t know if Cher reads the Daily Hampshire Gazette,” Aniello said, “but if she does – Cher, please come on the show, babe. We need you.”

All told, Aniello considers “Hacks” her proudest accomplishment so far.

“It’s been a really amazing thing to have worked on, and I’m really proud of it,” she said, “and I’m really proud of the people and the friendships that I’ve made working on the show, because it really is a creative collaboration.”

With all of the experience that Aniello has accumulated throughout her career, what advice would she give to someone trying to enter the comedy world?

“The thing is, there’s a billion people who want to break into the industry,” she said, “and it’s an insane industry to break into – it’s really, really, really, really difficult. But I would say that if you really have a perspective that is unlike anybody else’s perspective, then that’s who should be going into comedy.”

As she’s noticed throughout her career in comedy, she said, the people who stand out the most have two things in common: “One, they have very unique perspectives. They have things to say that no one else has ever heard before. And two, they work really, really, really hard. They don’t just write one spec script or write one feature and then expect to have that thing break through. They write another, and they write another, and then they write another, and they’re just constantly trying.”

Though Aniello is now based in Los Angeles and her parents no longer live in the area, she still has ties to the Valley through childhood friends.

“I haven’t been back in a little bit,” she said. “It does bum me out, to be honest, because I think spring and summer and early fall in western Mass is truly the most beautiful place on earth, and I have so many amazing memories.”

“I really have such a deep love for western Mass,” Aniello added. “I think what’s so interesting is, even though I think that it’s easy to categorize it as this one place, it’s very many different places at once. Hadley is very different from Northampton and from Amherst, but has its own uniqueness … I really am grateful for growing up in that place where I could both spend a lot of time growing up with kids [whose] parents were farmers and have that perspective, and then go to my tennis camp in Amherst and experience a totally different kind of person, and then, on the weekend, go to Northampton and spend time with a totally different kind of person.”

Still, she said, “I know I didn’t appreciate it when I grew up there. I think that I didn’t realize what a cool and special place it is. I only really fully appreciated it once I left.”

Carolyn Brown can be reached at [email protected].