dpThe song was written to get Deborah Vance a Grammy. It got its composers an Emmy nomination instead.
Carlos Rafael Rivera and David Stal got the assignment at the end of last summer, and it was ambitious even by Hacks standards. They had to write the number that would get Deborah (Jean Smart) her Grammy — and it couldn’t be a throwaway. It had to be a real song, in a real category, good enough that it could plausibly win.
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The showrunners walked them through it. In the story, Deborah has gone to the management consultants at McKinsey, who came back with a soft spot in the awards calendar.
“They said, ‘Hey, the category’s pretty weak this year — regional Mexican, including Tejano,'” Rivera says. “‘And it would be great if you guys could make a song that actually was that [genre]. But not only that, a song that could actually win a Grammy in that category.’ That was the gauntlet laid down by them.”
What came back was “Mis Figuritas”: 21 seconds, sung entirely in Spanish, and about salt and pepper shakers. The Emmy nomination is in Best Original Music and Lyrics, and if it wins, it will be the first entirely Spanish-language song to take that award. Spanish has surfaced in the category before — The Simpsons was nominated in 1996 for the partly bilingual “Señor Burns.”
“One thing David and I agreed to do is not to parody,” Rivera says. “Especially in something like that. You want to be respectful. So we wanted to make it right.”
That meant homework — listening to artists like Peso Pluma, and a decade of winners in the category. What they landed on isn’t strictly Tejano, Rivera clarifies: “It was more like a contemporary mariachi, but it fits in regional Mexican.”
Then he called in help. Sebastian Krys, a friend he grew up with who became a Grammy-winning producer of Latin and American records, pointed him to Áureo Baqueiro, who produced the track, played vihuela, and brought in the horns. Rob Schaer, a trumpet player who had recorded across the season’s score, played too.
“It was kind of like a familial thing,” Rivera says. “But that authenticity was good.”
“I am a Jewish kid from Texas and Carlos is the one that has Latin roots,” Stal says, “so I let him absolutely inform that process, especially with lyrics.”
The lyrics took a few tries. The first job, Rivera says, is just getting a yes — the showrunners only need to know whether it’s funny. One early version was about Deborah’s sister, a feud running since the beginning, built on the idea that Deborah had put on her sister’s shirt and never given it back.
“Something really pointless and dumb, but somehow related,” Rivera says. “Rejected.”
What replaced it was the salt and pepper shakers Deborah has been obsessing over since Season 1 — a gag, Rivera points out, that has always been doing double duty. “It serves as a way for the audience to see her vulnerability, to see a little bit of a side of Deborah that she really doesn’t show to the rest of the world.”
So the song became mis figuritas de porcelana — my porcelain figurines. “They’re the only ones I love, and they’re made of Lladró,” Rivera says, translating. “They’re my life.”
The Lladró came from Rivera’s own life. He grew up in Panama, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, where his mother kept a shelf of the Spanish porcelain, and where the figurines came with a standing warning.
“Every Hispanic house has some kind of Lladró figure, and they have these hands,” he says. “There’s something beautiful about them, these fingers. So she’s like, ‘Stay away from the hands. Stay away from the hands.’ I remember that.”
Rivera and Stal both insist that most of the credit belongs to Smart. “Without Jean’s hilarious performance, and without Ava’s (Hannah Einbinder) reactions, and just the funny setup that our showrunners created, it wouldn’t have had the impact that it had,” Stal says.
The songwriting duo has been trading music back and forth since the Netflix series Godless in 2017, when orchestrator Tim Davies connected them because Rivera needed help. They didn’t meet in person until after that first job was done. Rivera started Hacks alone in Season 1 and brought Stal on for Season 2.
“He says, ‘Hey, I’ve got a sketch for something,'” Stal says about how they collaborate. “And I’ll say, ‘OK, cool,’ I’ll change a couple little things, and send it back. And we go back and forth until we get this kind of homogenous — it’s neither me or him, it’s a Carlos and David piece of music.”
“Mis Figuritas” songwriters David Stal and Carlos Rafael Rivear (‘Hacks’)
The Emmy category they’ve landed in has a long history of rewarding comedy, from “Dick in a Box” to “I’m F—ing Matt Damon,” alongside straight-faced entries like Diane Warren and Lady Gaga’s “Til It Happens to You.” Stal, who is part of the TV Academy’s music peer group, has a theory about it.
“It’s what makes you feel the most. It’s not an intellectual exercise. It’s what hits you here,” he says, pointing to his heart. “And sometimes it’s ‘Dick in a Box.'”
This is Rivera’s seventh nomination and he’s won three times, for Godless, The Queen’s Gambit, and Lessons in Chemistry. Stal is a first-time nominee twice over this year, since he’s also up for sound mixing on the episode “The Garden.” Rivera says he’s more excited for Stal than himself.
“For me, the point of pride is seeing David get the opportunity to go through this ride right now,” he says. “It’s the best feeling in the world.”
Hacks was Rivera’s first comedy, and for a while he was fairly sure he’d been miscast.
“When they hired me, I didn’t know why they hired me,” he says. “I always felt like they got the wrong guy. How am I going to pull this Vegas, jazzy kind of music off?”
“I would’ve never believed I could have succeeded,” Rivera says as the interview comes to an end. “And you get to follow Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland? Come on, man. I’m good.”
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