"Hacks" creators on collaboration, S5, and the state of comedy

Marketplace

American Public Media

Business, News

4.6 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

HBO Max’s “Hacks” often tackles the push and pull between art and profit in the entertainment industry. It’s a topic the show’s creators are deeply familiar with. In this episode, “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal discusses that tension — as it appears in the show and in real life — with “Hacks” showrunners Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky. Plus: Job-finding sites struggle as hiring slows, and response rates to government surveys fall.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Tell you what, we're going to do some news, and then we're just going to sit back and have a chat.
0:09.4	From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.
0:18.6	In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdahl.
0:25.1	It is Wednesday, today the 13th of August.
0:27.9	Good as always to have you along, everybody.
0:30.0	We are going to talk television in a little bit,
0:32.6	specifically the business of comedy right now
0:35.5	with the creators of the HBO show Hacks. But we are going to
0:39.9	begin because it's our job with the business of this economy right now. If you're a regular
0:45.8	listener and probably even if you're not, you know that a whole slew of the data we use to
0:50.3	understand this economy comes from the government. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the Department of Energy, I could go on,
0:58.6	but I won't.
0:59.5	The challenge, and this is entirely separate from the looming and very real political
1:04.3	threat to government data, but the challenge is that the way the feds get that data
1:09.3	doesn't seem to be working anymore. And that,
1:12.5	as Marketplace's Breed-Benishaw reports, is becoming a real problem. So to come up with a total of how
1:18.2	many jobs are out there, how many were avid, what's the unemployment rate, the Bureau of Labor
1:22.4	Statistics and the Census Bureau, they just ask. 120, 130,000 different businesses and government agencies, about 60,000 households.
1:31.8	John Schwabish is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. About two-thirds of households get back to them.
1:37.0	And 93% of businesses and governments answer. Eventually.
1:41.8	It can turn out that companies just can't answer that on time.
1:47.0	Erica Groshen is a former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
	...

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