'Hacks' Sets 'The Amazing Race' Crossover In Season 5, Producer Says It Could Have Been Season 6 Storyline
Hacks is crossing over with The Amazing Race in an upcoming episode of the HBO Max series!
In the fifth episode, Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her daughter DJ (Kaitlin Olson) team up to compete on the CBS competition series, and both shows worked together to make sure it was as authentic as possible.
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“I’ve been wanting Deborah to go on Amazing Race, and it was always an idea to have Deborah and Ava [Hannah Einbinder] go,” Hacks co-creator and exec producer Lucia Aniello tells Variety. “It’s something we mentioned in Season 2 when they’re watching Amazing Race, they like talk about how they would be a good team. And we actually wrote an early draft of this where it was Deborah and Ava. But as the season went on and we were formulating things, we were looking for a really rich Deborah/ DJ story.”
In order to keep the crossover authentic, The Amazing Race host Phil Keoghan will play himself in the episode, and The Amazing Race creator and executive producer Elise Doganieri will also make an appearance as herself.
They also had actual Amazing Race cameraman playing themselves on Hacks, “filming” Deborah and DJ as they go through the challenges, and there were also actual The Amazing Race clue boxes and more used in the episode.
Hacks co-creator Jen Statsky added, “We knew if we were really going to do this, it had to be ambitious. Use their people, use their clue boxes. For every episode, you prep like crazy, but this one took so much planning. We didn’t want it to look slapped together.”
“It was like an out-of-body experience, because I’m so hands on in the field on ‘Race,’ and I was hands-on here, but we’re dealing now with actors,” Elise said. “I dealt with the art department and set designers on the placement of the clue boxes and how the clues are ripped and read. They made sure that the way it was shot was in the reality style and how we would film it — where the camera crews would stand, and how they would race along the contestants.”
The Hacks team sent over scripts to Elise and Phil so they could go over it and make sure the challenges and clues were written as they would be on The Amazing Race.
Lucia Aniello even advocated to do a whole season of Hacks as The Amazing Race.
“That would have been the sixth season of ‘Hacks,’ by the way,” she said, to which Jen Statsky added, “When people are sad there’s not a sixth season, Lucia tried!”
Hacks‘ fifth and final season just premiered on HBO Max TODAY (April 9), and the Amazing Race episode will be the fifth episode, which will air on Thursday (April 30).