David Remnick: For my money, forgive the pun, one of the best things on television is a show about making money, making as much of it as possible. Industry on HBO is a financial drama centered on a group of junior employees at a fictional investment bank in London. Industry is currently finishing its fourth season, and the show was created by Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, two old Oxford friends, both of whom did stints in the financial world. In fact, they say if they'd been any good at finance, they probably wouldn't have created a TV show about it in the first place. Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I have to say, I'm a huge fan of this show. Konrad, tell me how this show came about. You both worked in finance. You knew each other from university.
Konrad Kay: We were spat out pretty unceremoniously by the financial industry. My boss, when he fired me, said I was the worst ever salesman that graced the doors of Morgan Stanley.
David Remnick: What were you selling?
Konrad Kay: US equities, but selling is a very strong version of what I was doing. I think you're supposed to make about 40 outgoing calls a day. I made about 4 a year. The metrics didn't really stack up. They picked me up on my collar and threw me out onto the street. I'm very happy bullshitting in all areas of my life, apart from the area where when I have to pick up the phone to a Dutch pension fund manager who's looked at Apple stock for 20 years, and I have to pretend to tell him something about the stock that he doesn't know. That was really tough for me, to be honest.
David Remnick: Mickey, did you get into finance, too, for the obvious reason you wanted to make some money and please your parents?
Mickey Down: That's exactly right. My mom thought that finance was too much of a spivvy career, even though she's an architect, which I think blows my mind because she's one of those immigrant mothers who just says, "If you're not a lawyer, basically you don't have a job," even though--
David Remnick: Doctor doesn't count?
Mickey Down: No doctors, but that was never going to happen for me, David. It was a lawyer or nothing. I had no interest in being in finance at all when I got to Oxford, I really had no interest in anything other than just partying and having a lot of fun. It was around us that suddenly in the second year, everyone started getting these jobs or internships. I looked around and said, "God, what am I going to do with the rest of my life?"
I applied to all those jobs, didn't get any of them, ended up working for the home office, the civil service, and then I went to work for Rothschild, which is an old blue-blooded institution. I have quite fond memories of it because I liked the people I worked with, but the job itself was just not for me at all. I was incredibly ill-suited to it. At that level, it's literally just staring in front of a computer screen and doing PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets, and literally it's just an exercise in do you have the ability to stay up 100 hours a week?
David Remnick: From there, what's the origin story of Industry?
Mickey Down: I'd sold this thing to NBCUniversal, which was a comedy short about a young guy who didn't want to be a banker and wanted to be a DJ with some autobiographical elements. It really felt like a hobbyist vocation. It didn't really feel like something that I could sell my parents on, quite frankly. Then, when I made this thing, and it was bought, and I got an agent, suddenly it felt like a job. I could then take that to Konrad and say, "Look, we should try and actually make a career out of this." We started writing a script that we called 'Not an Exit,' which was essentially--
It was a cathartic exercise. It was about two guys who, in banking, absolutely hated it. It was a bag of ideas. It was a mess that was 10-page scenes of characters called Mickey and Konrad. The whole first episode, it was a guy basically working off a hangover, [chuckles] which was the same DNA as Industry.
David Remnick: What seems to me key to the show is not just the milieu that you've created these characters who are all so deeply, deeply damaged.
Mickey Down: Thank you.
David Remnick: You're welcome. Look, you know, you could say the same with Dostoevsky. It's high praise. That seems to me even harder, the conception of the main characters.
Mickey Down: I think the thing that really unlocked the show for us, and there was a bit of this in Not An Exit because that was a little bit more Upstairs, Downstairs in terms of its lens, because we were dealing with people at the very top of the industry as well as the Mickey and Konrad's of the industry.
It was Jane Tranter, who produces the show with us through her company Bad Wolf, who, when she found out she had two bankers working with her on another project, said, "Have you thought about writing this world?" We said, "We had written it. It's this thing, Not An Exit." She read it, and then she said, "You should really focus on the prism of people with the least amount of power because all the things you discussed, Wall Street succession, all the literature in this world, it's all through the top-down lens. It's all about people who have power rather than the people who are trying to accrue it.
That unlocked it for us. Also, it allows the characters to be damaged, to behave free of easy explanation, and to be heinous because they are young, and those behaviors are somewhat more excusable when you're young. That opened up for us. Also, it was a dramatic challenge because it's quite difficult to make characters who have no power active, which is the reason the show moved in a direction it has because it's just dramatically inert, and it feels like it's actually quite hard to move story on when no one has an ability to do it.
Konrad Kay: Everybody really loves, especially in the first two seasons, writing about the characters and pathologizing their behavior and saying they were all dead-eyed sociopaths. There was this quote that me and Mickey kept thinking about when people put that exact thing to David Milch when he was writing his shows for HBO, especially with Deadwood. He said, "What you see and categorize as pathology and pathologized behavior and sociopathic behavior, I'm saying it's people vibrating against the coercions of their present environment and their past.
David Remnick: Let's be specific about that. You have a character named Harper who, in some sense, couldn't be more marginalized in this world. She's a woman, she's Black, she's American. She's a real outsider, and she fakes her resume. This doesn't seem necessarily a typical person in the finance world, at least as I know it from way outside. Why did you make her your main character?
Mickey Down: We actually had a few different permutations of the main character. All the characters that surround Harper are analogs of people we know. They're people who went to university with school. They're people we worked with. But Harper--
David Remnick: Felt like composites.
Mickey Down: Yes, composites, but firstly, we realized we were writing for an American audience, even though the show is UK-based. We wanted to lend an American lens into it. Then we thought if we're doing a show about people with the least amount of power trying to accrue it. Let's just actually figure out the person who has the least amount of power and is the most marginalized. That's not necessarily to say that we're going to write her towards that, and she's going to make excuses because she's marginalized, but we're going to create a character who would feel like the whole world's against her in this world.
Konrad Kay: Me and Mickey were really interested-- I mean, when I was at Morgan Stanley, the word that kept propping up in all the literature and all was this word meritocracy. The first season for us, in terms of how we built the characters, what was interesting to us, it became a dramatic social experiment of nominally, all of these characters are coming into the institution, and the institution is telling them you are all equal and you're going to start on the same start position, and then it's going to be a race to the finish line.
Some of you will get jobs and some of you won't, but effectively, it'll be a level playing field, which is one of the great lies that any institution ever sells anybody. Because everybody, of course, in their interactions with their bosses, in the hierarchy they find themselves with, they hit their own glass ceilings, which are functions of where they come from. Honestly, in the first season, me and Mickey were just really interested in the idea of luck.
David Remnick: I want to play a clip from season three. This is Harper arguing with the other really main character, Yasmin. Let's listen.
Harper: You revel in my disgrace. You revel in other people's pain. It fucking nourishes you.
Yasmin: Okay, yes, I did everything in my power to try and stop Petra. I did.
Harper: But this is the business. Sorry. The world is showing you what it is without any of the protections that you are so clearly used to, and I am genuinely sorry that you think I am so sick that I could somehow get off on your unhappiness now.
Yasmin: Oh, so you don't. You didn't today. I needed my friend, Harper. I needed my friend, and you used me.
David Remnick: Now, it's a great scene, and to some extent, it violates what they teach you in writing school, which is to always show, never tell. It's almost like an operatic scene where two people step to the front of the stage, and they spell out in very distinct terms their anger with each other. Underneath it may be their love for each other, their resentments, and who they are. The show does that more than many other shows. The language of the show is front and center.
Mickey Down: That's the aspirational cruelty. That's the thing that if you went away for five minutes and could write down your feelings that you might say to someone that you want to hurt, that's not something you'd probably say in the moment.
Konrad Kay: We're also just writing towards our references as well. For us, the stuff we grew up loving and watching, the language and what was coming out of people's mouths, could be as dramatic as what was actually happening in the scenes. There's that great truism, or cliche even, about Sorkin and Fincher, like Social Network stuff, where those scenes of two people talking can have as much drama as a car chase. That's industry's MO. People talking is violence, language is violence, language is action.
Mickey Down: We had to do that as well because we wear a lot of--
Konrad Kay: We'd have a budget for car chases.
Mickey Down: Exactly. We write a lot of dense two-handers. We have to make them feel that they're electric.
Konrad Kay: We're pretty bold and obvious about what we wear on our sleeves. I think you can really see a lot of these disparate influences all over the show. We like to leave the fingerprints on it. We draw from Mad Men. We draw from The Sopranos. A lot of the needle drops this season are direct lifts from Mad Men. We almost feel like those two shows are in conversation with each other.
Mickey Down: Mad Men has always been influential to the show, but like Peep Show, Girls, obviously, in the first season, we wanted to write a show about ambitious people who are really quite hard to like sometimes. I always said that my favorite genre is Michael Douglas.
[chuckling]
Mickey Down: Michael Douglas with his ass out-
Konrad Kay: And his hair up.
Mickey Down: -and his hair upwith a suit and doing something shadily sexy. That's what I love.
David Remnick: You guys don't seem averse to the rewards of capitalism, and yet you're making a show that in some ways, not to be over self-serious, but is a critique of capitalism to some extent. How do you circle that square?
Mickey Down: It's interesting. I mean, it's a critique of unchecked capitalism. It's a critique of the dark heart of capitalism. I'm not saying I don't think capitalism by its very nature is a bad thing, but I think, honestly, when you write a show about finance, in the same way you write a show or a film about war, you have to make the thing feel seductive in the first act. That's always what we've done. You see any single piece of literature or art about finance, and the first act is always, look how great this is. The third act is always like, look how bad this is.
Sometimes people just ignore the second and third acts. That's why you have a lot of finance mean bros loving American Psycho and Wall Street and not really seeing the cost of that kind of living. Look, we left university. There's only one real reason you go into finance at the age of 21. In an interview, you would tart it up, and you would say, "I want to see my deals on the front page of the Financial Times, and I really care about macroeconomics," all that stuff. The real reason you go into finance because you want to make way more money than your peers when you're 21. You want to go to a job that gives you a prestigious-sounding title.
That's what we were like. Before we could formulate our own identities, we allowed the institution to make them for us. I look back on that person, I cringe because I was just such weird in this juvenile approach to identity and life and money and my job. But I still have some of that in me. I still feel like I want to make money. I still feel like I want to be successful. I do have this attitude, which is I'm never content in my career. The reason our show feels like it's constantly changing and vibrating of electricity is because me and Konrad are, in terms of our careers. We want to be successful. We were finance bros in the first instance.
David Remnick: Partnerships are not easy to sustain, no matter what they are. Marriages, creative partnerships. What are your ambitions going forward after this, either together or separately?
Mickey Down: Oh, I want to work with Konrad forever. I mean, it's very difficult to find someone you don't want to tear apart, having spent every day with him. Obviously, there are moments. There are very few moments of tension between us.
David Remnick: What's the biggest fight you've ever had?
Mickey Down: No, I think maybe when we were writing season one, and I went to a stag do and came back really hungover and didn't want to work.
Konrad Kay: Yes, that's what we had. We had a proper set to that. We didn't enjoy fighting so much that we never did it again.
Mickey Down: It was horrible. There was no green light then. I think it was a frustration that we were in development hell. I don't know. It works for us. Honestly, we have amazing collaborators. We love working with the people we work with. But there's a moment that, at the end of the long day, when you've been shooting, you get in the car, and it's me and Konrad. We live together as well during the shoot, which is crazy.
David Remnick: You live together,
Konrad Kay: We live together.
Mickey Down: We live together during the shoot. When we're in production, I spend more time with Konrad than I spend with my wife and my children. It's very difficult or hard or rare, I think, to have a partnership with someone that you can stand to that level.
Konrad Kay: But, David, it's a commitment. I mean, you said marriage. It's like, it is a marriage. Anything in life that's worth doing and is good is a commitment. I think we know we've been best friends. It predates our work relationship. I think if you're thrust together and the work relationship is the basis, then the idea of a creative divorce is more easy to see. But we're enmeshed in each other's lives.
We love each other. It's a very fraternal relationship. It's not to say it's always perfect. I mean, I'm a very complicated person. He's a very complicated person. It's understanding each other's weaknesses, strengths, pushing each other to be the best version of ourselves, giving each other space within the relationship to flourish.
David Remnick: I have to say, by way of thanks, in such a grim world that we're living in lately, this is the most uplifting relationship I've encountered in quite a while. Konrad Kay, Mickey Down, thanks so much.
Mickey Down: Thank you so much.
Konrad Kay: Thanks for having us, David.
Mickey Down: Privilege.
Konrad Kay: It's an honor.
[outro music]
David Remnick: Industry is on HBO Max, finishing its fourth season. You can find our TV critic Inkoo Kang's review of the show at newyorker.com, and of course, you can subscribe to The New Yorker there as well, newyorker.com.
 
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