The Creators of 'Industry' Know Banking Is a Rigged Game
Ambition is a curse in the arena of high finance. At the prestigious London investment bank Pierpoint, which doubles as the backdrop for the Gen Z banking drama Industry, a cohort of university graduates vie for money and power. Harper (Myha’la), Yasmin (Marisa Abela), and Rob (Harry Lawtey) are desperate to prove they belong, that they’ve got the mettle to survive the battleground of the trading floor, but Pierpoint is a special kind of hell: Ambition is only as useful as your will to lie, cheat, and outmaneuver your way to the top. As easily as it opens doors, it just as easily gets you stabbed in the back.
“When you go down the laundry list of what they’ve done and what they did to get there,” cocreator Mickey Down says of his beloved characters, “they can be considered pretty heinous individuals.” But their savory deceit is why we watch. It’s why Industry has become The Show of the Season, the internet’s new meme-machine, drawing expected-but-flawed comparisons to Succession, another HBO supernova. Industry is a beast all its own.
Now in its third season, its most audacious and anxiety-riddled, Industry occupies the esteemed Sunday night 9 pm slot that Games of Thrones and The Sopornos made famous. The show is still the show many of us fell in love with when it debuted in 2020: all ego and heart and reckless ambition. Only, Down and cocreator Konrad Kay have upped the stakes even more this time around, illustrating how sinister and deep relationships run across media, politics, and finance for London’s privileged class.
This week’s upcoming episode—deliciously-titled “White Mischief”; fans of Uncut Gems rejoice, this one’s just for you—marks the season’s halfway point. Over Zoom from their respective residences in London, Down and Kay spoke with me about where the show has been and where it’s possibly headed next.
JASON PARHAM: I read that the initial pitch for this season was “coke and boats.” What was HBO’s response?
MICKEY DOWN: We had a 30,000-foot view of what the season was going to be in terms of the business story. And then we thought, look, we shouldn’t be scared to have a slight genre element to the show. We were already talking about Yasmin’s father, which we thought was one of the most interesting parts of the second season. We had the idea that her dad’s gone missing, and she’s been bearing the brunt of that in the media. We had all of that. We just hadn’t decided how to show it yet. So we said, what if we have a secondary timeline that has a bit of a mystery element to it? And what if we start the show from there? So we sent an email to HBO with the header “coke and boats” and said this is where we want to start the show.
Incredible.
MD: We told them that we want to dip back into this timeline when we feel like it’s good punctuation. We wanted to have this slow drip feel of what actually happened on the boat. And their response was very positive.
The show is continually testing its limits. Erect penises. Cum scenes. Crazy yacht parties. All kinds of drugs. Did HBO ever ask you to reel it in?
KONRAD KAY: There was a conversation about [a scene in the season three finale] which they balked at a lot, actually. Normally with them it’s a question of—they want us to push ourselves into weirder psychosexual and weirder content territories. I think they know that they’re known for that sort of stuff. They know it drives engagement and conversation. Whether cynical or not, it is a fundamentally true thing about trying to make noise in a very busy marketplace.
Completely.
KK: With that scene, they felt it was out of place with what we had set up in the show. But for us, it felt like a natural continuation. It felt like something that could kick the show into something else if it gets renewed for a season four. It would surprise viewers in a way and kind of change the grammar of what we were trying to do. They pushed back on it quite a lot, but after some back and forth we got it in.
Was there a clear road map going into season three of where you wanted to take the show?
MD: Not exactly. But there was a mandate that we gave ourselves before we started writing. We wanted to expand everything. We wanted to raise the stakes in an organic way. We wanted to place Pierpoint within a larger ecosystem. We also wanted to tell bigger stories without it feeling like we jumped the shark. And we wanted to make it feel slightly more intelligible.
In what way?
MD: In the previous season, we kept the audience at arm’s length a little bit. The sheer illegibility of the dialog, the finance jargon. We wanted to tell a story that was slightly easier to understand or grasp.
KK: Very early on in the writing process, we were like, “We want to do the failure of an IPO. We want to do a government investigation into it. We want to have a Rishi episode.”
MD: We thought that the idea of an IPO, which even if you don’t have a huge knowledge of finance, is something that people have an understanding of. That, coupled with an energy company, which even if you don’t know the mechanisms of what an energy company actually does, you know that people’s houses have to be heated.
This more purposeful world-building must have also changed how you approached each of the characters.
MD: We wrote ourselves into a bit of a corner at the end of season two because Harper was fired. So we had discussions about how we were going to make good on that. Does Harper go to college? Does she get a degree? Does she get final credit points, then come back to Pierpoint? We thought that was a bit of a cop-out after a quite powerful ending. That then opened up a new avenue for the show, which is like, What does Harper look like if she has no power and has to claim it back again? And then what if there’s another character we haven’t spent as much time with that is now in that hot seat? That brought us to Yasmin as a wider character and a wider arc.
What difficulties arose as you expanded the universe beyond the trading floor?
KK: This isn’t a very satisfying answer. And may be a bit of an arrogant answer. But the truth is—Mick, I’ll speak for you, but I kind of think you’d agree with me—that we had a confidence going into this season about what we wanted the show to be and our ambition for it. Seasons one and two were a dress rehearsal for season three in terms of what we really wanted to achieve with the show.
Which was what?
KK: The stuff we always were interested in writing about, fundamentally, now we felt well positioned to write about. The way finance interacted with the broader world. The way that the class system and the hierarchy seems like it was hermetically sealed on the trading floor was something that actually in London can be extrapolated out into media or social members clubs or politics. All of these faces were different, but they were all linked by a similar kind of ecosystem, a similar kind of person having power and not having power, and all the negotiations that happened when people entered those systems.
That makes sense.
KK: The overriding feeling was that we have eight hours to do this now, we have no idea whether we’re going to get it again, but we have 16 hours behind us, so let’s not be scared about the ambition of it. Let’s look at it dead in the eye and let’s just swing as hard as we can. There was never a feeling of like, “Oh god, we might get this wrong or we might misstep here.” We didn’t pull any of our punches.
Had you pulled punches in previous seasons?
KK: No, not at all. Fundamentally, because of our lack of experience in the first season, I think we were really cleaved very strongly into the idea that the only way the show was going to be a success was if we somehow rendered the most authentic version of a banking experience on to screen. It was like, we’ve lived it, so as the creators of it, we can do a documentary rendering of it, and whether people find that interesting or not, there is a truth to what we’re doing.
MD: The evolution of the show from one to two lost a bit of the roughness, which actually made season one successful. In two, we cleaved to the idea of having a robust story for each of the characters. We centered the season on this idea of mentorship. Each character was basically connected to a mentor, which meant that they were on several separate tram lines, and very good A to B to C storylines, but they never really interacted. While we were in service of making those stories work, and having a rigorous plot structure, we kind of lost some of the weirdness of the show. When we got to season three, we were like, we can have the weirdness, we can have those idiosyncrasies.
Did being open to the weirdness and idiosyncrasies teach you anything?
MD: You know, the show is hard edge and it’s frenetic. It’s about a very cold industry. And the show works when it reflects all that stuff, but what we discovered in season three is that the show can have elements of romance. And I mean that in the classical sense as well. It can be about striving. It can be about ambition. It can be about a romantic hero’s journey as much as it can be about failure and self flagellation.
KK: The characters are so scared of revealing themselves to each other in our show, so those human moments between Harper and Yasmin, or the moment when Henry is really emotionally naked with Yasmin, and Yasmin is really emotionally naked with Rob, they pack a wallop because it is such a busy universe that the characters exist in.
You’ve got a stacked cast. Kitt Harrington and Sarah Goldberg bring an eccentric energy to the ensemble. Roger Barclay, who plays Otto, was a standout for me. He gives a sobering view into the corrupt backdoor politics of London society and the role the media plays in government. What was it about that thematic entanglement that enticed you?
MD: One of the things we didn’t do in the first two seasons, especially, is show how Pierpoint fits into the industrial complex, which makes up some of the way that the country is governed. Finance obviously has huge outside influence, and especially when it’s married to politics and media. People within those systems know each other from schooling and university. It was this very insidious network. They help one another out. This exists across most Western democracies—there’s obviously a version of it in the US—but in the UK, it’s polite, it’s genteel, and it happens behind closed doors. Roger’s character is an encapsulation of that. He has tentacles in every single part of society in order to enrich himself. We just found it really interesting.
One of the unintended consequences of the streaming age, I think, was the notion that TV shows could just kind of go on forever. I personally love a show that knows when to leave the party. It doesn’t overstay its welcome. Do you have an idea of how all of this eventually ends for Harper, Yasmin, and everyone—or is it like you said earlier, are you backing yourself into a wall at the end of every season only to later find a way out?
MD: The more you write, the more you start to think about how it’s going to end. But, you know, we write seasons with what we hope are satisfying conclusions, so that if the show is to end, it would be a satisfying end and also enough of the door being a jar so that we can continue if necessary. In the writers room, inevitably, you think, OK, well, what would be an amazing image to end the whole thing? You start to formulate that even subconsciously in your head because you know the characters so well. You start thinking about what would be the perfect end point or encapsulation of this character. But I wouldn’t say we have an end in mind yet.
KK: It’s obviously having more of a moment now that it’s a Sunday-night show and more people are watching it. Everyone’s catching up to it.
I was going to ask about that.
KK: It feels like the next season would actually be the second season of the version where it’s been the most in the shop window. Both of us, creatively, feel the show has legs for more than one more season. How many more, I don’t know. I think what we will eventually do, and maybe this is just famous last words—because you don’t turn down getting renewed by HBO—but I think if we get a fourth season, we will start to think about whether it’ll be five or six, and then start to think about a definitive ending. What’s worked really well for the show is that we’ve always thought it was going to be the last season. Every finale has kind of felt like a very big punctuation mark, which I think is just a good way to write TV.
MD: We don’t want to hold stuff back. If HBO was to say, “You’ve got until season five to finish this,” I still think we’d throw everything at the wall for season four and not even think about season five.
“Coke and boats” was the unofficial tagline for this season. For the sake of this thought experiment, if Industry does get renewed, and without knowing how far along you are in the process of plotting it out, if at all, but if there was a tagline for season four, what would it be?
KK: Michael Clayton—
MD: In London!
KK: We’re only joking. But we do want to do something that’s slightly more corporate thriller than the show in its previous incarnation.
