Why Has ‘Industry’ Season 3 Been So Good? Its Creators Needed Two Seasons to Learn Their Craft
Tomorrow night is the Season 3 finale of HBO’s “Industry,” capping off what critics and fans are calling the best season yet. “[A] titanic move forward,” wrote critic Megan O’Keefe. “Showrunners Mickey Down and Konrad Kay have boldly raised the stakes for each character in monumental ways.” But it’s not just the critics who think the writing on the show got significantly better this season.
“We had an executive at HBO, who, when she was reading our scripts for the first time in Season 1, said ‘You guys are incredible interior decorators, but you have no idea how to build a house,’” said Mickey Down who, along with fellow co-creator Konrad Kay, was a guest on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “Which I thought was a really good way of saying, ‘You guys can do character and dialogue, but you have no idea how to tell a story.’”
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The HBO executives note process during Seasons 1 and 2, became part of a crash course on serialized TV structure for Kay and Down — who not all that long ago were, like their young “Industry” characters, recruited out of Oxford to work on the cutthroat trading floor of a top financial firm. A world they despised and gleefully satirized as they transitioned into their new career of writing television. The principles behind HBO’s bedrock storytelling are common sense — for example, the plot proposition of each episode is clear, and within the first five to 10 minutes the viewer understands the narrative momentum — but instinctively putting these concepts into action while writing didn’t come over night.
“I know it sounds ridiculous, but we had to kind of make 16 hours of TV to just like metabolize that into our bodies and not have to overthink it too much,” said Kay. “And then suddenly it’s sort of like [snaps into place.] […] I think it’s a ridiculous thing to say because we’re making an HBO TV show, but we sort of learn on the job.”
The studio clearly saw the potential in both the young showrunners. Their ability to recreate the detailed authenticity of a frenetic trading room floor, and write the foul-mouthed, smart-as-a-whip dialogue of its ambitious protagonists navigating constantly fluctuating power dynamics that made Seasons 1 and 2 so watchable. Not only did HBO re-up “Industry” for a third season (an increasingly harder bar to clear), but moved it from Mondays to its vaunted Sunday night lineup. Down and Kay also proved to not be precious about their work, their own analysis of the first two seasons was clear-eyed as if they were studying the value of a stock, and harsher than any critic.
“Season 1 was eight hours of vibe. It was basically a YA show and within a quite interesting world, the world that we had experienced, and we could feel that we could render authentically, but it had no story really,” said Down. “I rewatched it recently and the story actually starts going at about Episode 5.”
“The Boys,” as the cast and crew lovingly refer to Down and Kay, refer to Season 1 as being punk rock, rather than a proper album. The first four episodes were written waiting for the show to be picked up, and the episodes feel like they were written in vacuum, with little correlation between them, as each focused on introducing a single character, before they started “getting the serialized engine cranking” with Harper (Myha’la) and Eric’s (Ken Leung) scheming.
“But then in Season 2 we thought, ‘OK we have to show that we can write eight hours of TV with a story,” said Down. “So all the characters were in their different tramlines, they all had their different mentors, they all had their different stories, but there was no connectivity between them. And I think, actually, we overcorrected a little bit.”
Down and Kay’s analysis of Season 2 is in many ways just as harsh as Season 1. The isolation of the young leads and a mentor were good enough storylines, but it kept the young protagonists isolated from each other, working against the show’s heart and strength.
“I think Season 2 feels quite cold because, this is us being diagnostic on Season 2, but it’s cold because they’re never — that core [group of] characters are really never in a room together,” said Down, to which Kay quickly added, “That was a failure of writing, they spend a lot of time with their older mentors, and not enough time with each other.”
For Season 3, Kay and Down cut the show’s umbilical cord to the Pierpoint trading floor, and the creator’s safety zone of the world they were comfortable in their ability to render authentically, as the new season has explored both the implications of the fictional bank Pierpoint’s day-to-day business in the larger economy and politics of the U.K., but also more of the characters’ lives outside the office.
“When we first started writing the show because we were very green, we didn’t have very much experience. We were a little bit intimidated by the thought of breaking the kind of hermetically sealed [world of the Pierpoint trading floor] because a lot of it, especially in the first season, were kind of quite authored from mine and Mickey’s experience in that world,” said Konrad. “So to do something that felt a little bit more ambitious, I don’t think we felt like we had the capacity to do it yet. And as the show has evolved, we’ve kind of evolved as its creators, we’ve got a little bit more confident about the stuff that we feel comfortable writing about.”
The creators were also pushed to expand by having painted themselves in a corner with the Season 2 finale. The “over-correction” in designing the Season 2 mentor-mentee plot led them to wanting to find resolution in Harper’s initial backstory of secretly never having graduated university — the creators were paranoid there wouldn’t be a Season 3 and the storyline would be left hanging. Entering Season 3, the show’s lead (if there truly is one), having been fired by Eric, was cut off from Pierpoint. Kay and Down admit they contemplated concocting some between-season scenarios that reversed course and brought Harper back at the bank.
“[Bringing Harper back to Pierpoint] felt like we would be just treading old territory, and Marisa [Abela] who plays Yasmin is a fantastic actor who we just didn’t give enough to, quite honestly,” said Down. “The shift or focus change more into Yasmin was born out of the end of Season 2 and the fact we had written ourselves into a bit of a corner by firing Harper.”
Down and Kay joke about how ridiculous they found Yasmin’s Season 2 storyline in which, according to them, boiled down to having sex with her old boss (Katrine De Candole) and yelling at Kenny (Conor MacNeill). But in the Season 2 finale there was scene with her father Charles (Adam Levy) that resonated with the creators.
“They had that conversation in the bar where he’s like, ‘Look at yourself, look at everything I’ve given you. You think you’ve created this life for yourself, but like everything you have is because of me.’ That dynamic felt really rich, so we wanted to do more of that,” said Down.
The creators already knew the scandal surrounding Charles, and entanglement of his book publishing empire, would bring the voyeuristic eye of the tabloid press down on Yasmin — who would be painted (incorrectly) as the spoiled rich girl partying on her father’s yacht after he went into hiding and left his debts unpaid.
“We’ve had this press thing, and [wondered] would people really feel the weight of her father and his influence on her and what happened on that boat if we don’t see it,” said Down.
Kay and Down liked the idea of starting the season on the boat, dropping the audience in the deep end of the story and in such unfamiliar surroundings. They also liked the idea of what happenned on the boat casting a shadow over the season and sparking a deeper exploration of Yasmin’s backstory and the scars her father had left on her childhood. While writing the first episode they sent an email to HBO entitled “Coke and Boats,” laying out their idea of how throughout the first six episodes, Season 3 would keep flashing back to what happened on the boat six weeks prior.
“We wanted to level up,” said Kay. “We’ve never done anything with timeline in Season 1 and 2, and we were like, how can we disseminate the information for maximum impact. We felt emotionally that those scenes were going to have way more impact the way we doled them out, and I think episode 6 [with its shocking twist] is one of the more successful episodes of the season in terms of how it clicks everything into focus.”
Another key aspect of pushing the show away from the trading room floor was leaving more room for the young leads to spend time together. And no relationship was more ripe for further development than the long simmering dynamics between Yasmin and Rob (Harry Lawtey) — a relationship that has developed into one of the most rewarding ‘Will They, or Won’t They’ storylines in recent TV memory.
“That sort of trope is the sort of thing that in Season 1 we would have been very afraid of,” said Kay. “We wanted to be kind of quite iconoclastic and be like, ‘Oh these TV conventions, they don’t really apply to us, like we can do something slightly different, which was very naive, and is why Season 1 ended up being a bit more like — me and Mickey talk about it as a bit more of a punk rock record than a proper record. But ‘Will They, Won’t They,’ of course it’s a trope because it’s magnificent. It plays magnificently well. Or like a mystery element in the show, like around Yasmin’s Dad, that was stuff that we were so afraid of being cliché and we didn’t want to lean on what you think of the more conventional storytelling, but when that conventional story is the bedrock of what we’re doing, then all of the stuff that me and Mickey love — character, dialogue, all that sort of stuff — you can build a much more safe house.”
“Industry” Season 3, Episode 8 — the finale — airs Sunday, September 29 at 10 p.m. ET on HBO and Max.
Look for IndieWire’s Toolkit episode with Mickey Down and Konrad Kay on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other major podcast platforms on September 30, following the Season 3 finale.
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