“Hacks” fans are about to see the most unlikely TV crossover event of the year. An upcoming episode will be set in the world of iconic reality competition series “The Amazing Race,” fulfilling a longtime dream of the “Hacks” producers — and just in time.

On Episode 5 of this final season of “Hacks,” “D’Amazing Race,” Deborah (Jean Smart) and her daughter DJ (Kaitlin Olson) wind up on the CBS show as contestants — running through airports, ripping open clues, taking on challenges, facing detours and battling other contestants, just like they really do on “The Amazing Race.”

“I’ve been wanting Deborah to go on ‘Amazing Race, and it was always an idea to have Deborah and Ava [Hannah Einbinder] go,” said “Hacks” co-creator and exec producer Lucia Aniello. “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.”

It’s about as true to “Amazing Race” as you can get. Aniello and her fellow “Hacks” creators Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky, as well as director Jeff Rosenberg (also an “Amazing Race” superfan), brought the producers behind the iconic CBS reality staple into the process to make sure this felt like the ultimate scripted episode of a real-life reality show.

Keeping it authentic, “The Amazing Race” host/exec producer Phil Keoghan played himself on the “Hacks” episode, and creator/exec producer Elise Doganieri was also on set throughout production.

“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,” Doganieri told Variety. “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.”

Said Statsky: “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.”

That meant even real “Amazing Race” camera operators traveled to the “Hacks” set to play themselves. As “Hacks” cameras rolled, the “Race” camerapeople ran around sets (including the Ontario Airport, the L.A. Memorial Coliseum and other locales) pretending to shoot Smart, Olson and the other “contestants” as normal. Of course, this time, their cameras weren’t really working, and instead they were being paid as performers on “Hacks.”

“The way they move and maneuver and are quietly in a dance with each other, we couldn’t really hire background artists to do that in the same way,” Aniello said. “It’s really cool to watch people at the top their game do what they do best.”

Doganieri also made a cameo, playing herself, showcasing what she normally does behind the scenes on a challenge: Keeping tabs on contestants and calling them out when they don’t follow the rules.

“It was very much like what I would do if there was a rule question, or if somebody was doing something wrong,” she said. “And then, of course, Phil did all the things that he does on our show. In the script, he was saying what he truly says on ‘The Amazing Race.’ I know that Lucia and Jen and Paul got a real kick out of that.”

The “Hacks” producers sent the episode scripts to Doganieri and Keoghan so they could make sure the challenges and clues in the episode were written in “Amazing Race” language.

“At one point we really wanted Deborah, for example, to be yelling at DJ, and Elise said, ‘that’s not allowed, so either you take that out, or we have a producer come and say that that’s not allowed,’” Aniello recalled. “And we’re like, ‘guess what Elise, you just accidentally wrote yourself into the show. We’ll have you come and do that.’ We really respect Elise so much. And it was so nice to have her there and feel like she was blessing our work as well. And if you are a big fan of ‘The Amazing Race,’ then hopefully you feel seen.”

This, of course, is a culmination of a love for “The Amazing Race” that Aniello first cultivated from a surprising source: Comedian Kevin Hart. A few years before “Hacks,” Aniello and Downs wrote a movie for Hart, and for a flashback scene, Hart had an idea: That his character and his wife were contestants on “The Amazing Race” and had such a massive flameout on the show that after that, they split up.

Aniello and Downs liked the idea, but had never watched “The Amazing Race.” So they binged a few seasons for research. Then the pandemic happened, and as the married couple quarantined at home with major wanderlust, they went down a deep “Amazing Race” rabbit hole.

“We just pounded season after season of ‘Amazing Race,’ and very quickly it had nothing to do with the scripts and the Kevin project anymore,” Aniello said. “It became about loving the show, getting so invested in the storytelling, and the evolution of the show.”

As Aniello and Downs became superfans as they were in the midst of creating “Hacks” with Jen Statsky — whom they also turned on to “Race.”

That’s why Aniello always knew she wanted to incorporate “The Amazing Race” into “Hacks” somehow. She has said in the past that elements of “Hacks” Season 2, when Deborah and Ava hit the road in a tour bus, were inspired by both “Race” and “Road Rules.” But she yearned to do more.

“Lucia’s passion for this has never died, and it’s really inspiring,” Statsky said. “At one point, Lucia was advocating we do an entire ‘Amazing Race’ season.” (“That would have been the sixth season of ‘Hacks,’ by the way,” Aniello quipped. Added Statsky: “When people are sad there’s not a sixth season, Lucia tried!”)

Now here comes our involvement in all this. Several years ago at one of Variety’s annual showrunner’s dinners (usually held the week before the Emmys), Aniello came up to me with a request: Could I introduce her to “The Amazing Race” producers?

I’ve known “Race” creators Bertram van Munster and Elise Doganieri since the start of “Race” back in 2001, and even had Keoghan attend my “Race”-themed 30th birthday party in 2003. At the same time, “Hacks” had become one of my signature favorite shows (see my cameo in Season 4), so I was happy to oblige bringing the creative forces between two seminal shows together.

They met, and the idea was hatched for a crossover. Van Munster and Doganieri were game. But then a few more years passed, and the idea seemed to have fizzled. Until Last summer, when Aniello emailed me with a request: Could I put her back in touch with Doganieri? Now that “Hacks” was ending with Season 5, it was now or never to do that “Race” crossover.

Keoghan and Doganieri at the “Hacks” Season 5 premiere party on Wednesday

“Next thing you know, we are receiving scripts,” Doganieri said. “She really wanted to make sure it was authentic to our show, and that they were getting the terminology correct, how the clues were written, how everything would go with the race, detours, roadblocks, what happens within one episode. We supplied them with real race envelopes and things like that. Our department on our side pulled together a bunch of goodies for them, and we just took it from there.”

Aniello credited Doganieri for doing the leg work in clearing the licensing and the rights to “The Amazing Race” brand and logo, in addition to all those props and guidance on the scripts.

Said Statsky: “She put in so much work to do that. It would have been so easy for her to be like, ‘sorry, we’re not gonna be able to license it,’ or ‘CBS is saying no.’ We’ve tried to do other things like that, across networks or across studios, and someone usually says, ‘they’re never gonna agree.’ But she really made it happen. So we are so in her debt.”

Doganieri returned the compliment, and said she was united with the “Hacks” team in her determination to pull this off.

“Sometimes collaborations don’t work because there’s different conflict of interest, but any roadblock — excuse the pun — I was determined to keep pushing forward,” she said. “I was like, we have to make this happen. It’s the perfect collaboration, right? And just the nice thing is that over the 25-plus years and 39 seasons of Amazing Race, there is a relationship of trust with CBS. I kept them in the loop on what we were doing, and basically they said, as long as I was feeling comfortable, they were good with it.”

As the two sides learned about each other’s show, that mutual level of respect grew.

“The Amazing Race” on location

“Somebody asked me, ‘when you’re on the road filming “Amazing Race,” where do you how do you set up your video villages?’” Doganieri said. “And I laughed because we don’t have a video village. It really is run and gun. There are no second takes. It’s go, go, go.

“Honestly, for me, it was a joy to watch how they shoot in scripted, I have a lot of respect for what they do, the long hours that they also put in to shoot one episode,” she added. “Having that moment where you’re really understanding the hard work that goes into scripted and the hard work that goes into reality — and the mutual respect for each other.”

For Aniello, bringing “The Amazing Race” to “Hacks” also gave her a chance to geek out on everything she always wanted to know about the show. For example, the interpersonal navigation between teams and camera operators, which are constantly switched up, so players don’t get emotionally attached to the crew and vice versa. Also, how do the teams eat? What if they want a coffee?

“It’s just fascinating,” she said. “I really do think it’s such a cool way for so many people to see what life is like all over the world. I think for so many people probably got inspired to travel from watching ‘Amazing Race.’ It makes it so accessible that anybody could go and experience these things. Its cultural impact is actually incredibly significant and a little bit undervalued. I think it’s high art.”