They say write what you know, but Mickey Down and Konrad Kay can admit that the first draft of their buzzy HBO finance drama, Industry, may have hit a little too close to home. “The first version of the show we wrote was even colder. It was almost documentarian in how realistic it was,” Down says over Zoom. “Me and Konrad had been chewed up and spat out by this industry; we had our own feelings about it. The show was a little bit of revenge and a cathartic exercise for us.”
The catharsis continues on Monday, when Industry returns for its sophomore season. Down and Kay were in the thick of editing the show’s first in 2020 when COVID hit, and even considered attempting to add a last-minute reference to the pandemic. “We actually joked about putting in additional recording of someone saying in the background, ‘There is a virus coming out of Wuhan, China,’” Down recalls. “Is that really shit? We ended up not doing that.”
While COVID didn’t make it into season one, it figures prominently in season two which finds Robert (Harry Lawtey), Yasmin (Marisa Abela), and Harper (Myha’la Herrold) back in the London office at Pierpoint & Co. having survived RIF (reduction in force) as well as a global pandemic. “We thought, are people really bored of that? Do people really want eight hours of that?” Down says. “We wanted to honor the fact that this is the biggest thing that’s happened to workplaces in hundreds of years. The best way is not through masks and hand sanitizer. It’s through seeing how lockdowns have affected these characters and pushed them into different places.”
Ahead of the season two premiere, Down and Kay sat down to chat about the lessons they learned from season one, the democratization of finance, and hypersensitive billionaires.
Vanity Fair: How did you feel at the end of season one of Industry? Did you have a plan looking ahead to season two?
Mickey Down: We were blown away by the reaction to season one, because we had absolutely no idea how it would land. An esoteric banking show set in London by two former bankers—who gives a fuck? It came out and everyone found different things to love about it. Some people like the business stuff, some people like the soapy stuff, some people like the romance, some people like the sex, some people like the drugs. What you gave into it, you got back.
Konrad Kay: The privilege of doing a second season is you get to go and diagnose the stuff that worked well and didn’t work so well. Me and Mickey were very conscious of the fact that we didn’t want the show to be as objective and surface level about some of the characters [in season two]. How can we deepen them and make them more complex while also honoring all of the stuff that we’d set up in season one? Why is Yasmin the way she is with men at work? Okay, well, let’s meet her father, because her relationship with her father is going to tell us a lot about her relationship with Kenny. Why is Harper so incapable of showing love for people? Let’s meet a member of her family and see what that explains.
One of the things we really wanted to do is tell a more compelling work story line. A lot of the characters were on their own separate tram lines in season one. We wanted to make them all feel like they were speaking to each other a little bit more and have a more of a strong week-to-week story engine rather than be like, “Oh, the vibe on Industry this week was sick. Let’s come back for the soundtrack and the drugs.” We felt a very conscious need to level everything up in season two purely because of the privilege of getting to do it again. We were very rigorous with ourselves about stuff that we thought was good and stuff that we thought was bad in season one.
I really loved season one, but season two does feel like it delves further into the interior lives of the central characters. What did you take away from watching season one?
Kay: A lot of people’s reaction to the world was, “Oh, it’s quite cold. These people…some of them are borderline sociopathic. Everything is transactional. Who are Mick and Konrad and what do they think of the human race that they made a TV show like this?” [Laughs.] The truth was all of that stuff informed the way we wrote season two.
Read More
Photo Credit: