Ambition is one curse of high finance. At London’s prestigious investment bank Pierpoint, which serves as the setting for Generation Z’s banking drama IndustryA group of college graduates fight for money and power. Harper (Myha’la), Yasmin (Marisa Abela) and Rob (Harry Lawtey) are desperate to prove that they belong, that they have what it takes to survive on the trading floor, but Pierpoint is a special kind of hell: Ambition only helps when you want to lie, cheat and trick your way to the top. It opens doors easily, but it also gets you stabbed in the back just as easily.
“When you look at the long list of things they’ve done and what they’ve done to get there,” co-creator Mickey Down says of his beloved characters, “they can be seen as pretty evil individuals.” But their delicious deception is why we watch. That’s why Industry has become The Show of the Season, the internet’s new meme-generating machine, draws expected but flawed comparisons to SuccessionAnother HBO supernova. Industry is a real monster.
Now in its third season, its boldest and most angsty yet, Industry takes the honorable spot on Sunday nights at 9pm Game of Thrones And Soporno Family became popular. The show is still the same one many of us loved when it debuted in 2020: all ego, heart, and reckless ambition. Only Down and co-creator Konrad Kay have raised the stakes even higher this time around, illustrating the deep, dark relationships that play out across media, politics, and finance for London’s privileged elite.
This week’s upcoming episode—captivatingly titled “White Mischief”; fans Uncut gemstones Rejoice, this one’s just for you—marking the midpoint of the season. Over Zoom from their London home, Down and Kay talked to me about how the show came to be and where it might be headed next.
JASON PARHAM: I read that the original pitch for this season was “cocaine and boats.” How did HBO respond?
MICKEY DOWN: We had a 30,000-foot vision of what the season would look like in terms of the business story. And then we thought, hey, we shouldn’t be afraid to bring a little bit of genre into the show. We talked about Yasmin’s father, which we thought was one of the most interesting parts of season two. We had this idea that her father had gone missing, and she was burdened by that in the media. We had all of that. We just hadn’t decided how to express it. So we said, what if we had a secondary timeline that had a little bit of a mystery element? And what if we started the show from there? So we sent an email to HBO with the subject line “coke and boats” and said that’s where we wanted to start the show.
Amazing.
Doctor: We told them we wanted to go back to this timeline when we felt like it was a good punctuation. We wanted to get a slow drip feel of what actually happened on the boat. And their response was very positive.
The show constantly tested its limits. Erections. Ejaculation. Crazy yacht parties. All kinds of drugs. Did HBO ever ask you to come back?
