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‘It’s a world that’s sometimes nasty and ugly’:​ Industry’s creators on the new series of the banking drama

In the first lockdown, the nation was seemingly united in its obsession with the BBC’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People. But in the second, things were a bit more fuzzy, culturally speaking, unless, that is, you were one of those who watched Industry, in which case the dark November of 2020 was punctuated by some pretty indelible television. OK, so its characters were all monsters, cruel and lewd and venal; its acronym-strewn dialogue was frequently impenetrable, its sex scenes invariably on the wrong side of #MeToo and its plot enigmatic (set on the trading floor of a City investment bank, much of the so-called action involved people staring dully for minutes at a time at the blue light of their screens). And yet, those of us who loved it could hardly wait for each episode to begin. Unaccountably thrilling and utterly addictive, it was, I thought at the time, the bastard child of This Life and early Neil LaBute – and what’s not to like about that?

Konrad Kay, who co-wrote Industry with his old friend, Mickey Down, laughs (we’re in a studio in deepest north London, where both men are visibly relieved the agony of posing for a photographer is now over). “Yeah,” he says. “Someone else called it Tory Skins, which is good, too.” But in the end, comparisons, however flattering or neat, may be redundant. Not only does Industry stand at an unlikely angle to almost everything else on TV right now, which may be one reason why it remains, in his words, “a bit cultish”, but the long-awaited second series, which will be screened in the UK next month, comes with a lot more… texture than the first.

“I think we’re only just beginning to hit our stride,” he says. “It’s a bit like we needed to watch the first season to understand what the show’s really about.” If the first series had an almost documentary feel at moments – its laser focus was entirely on what it might take to succeed at a place such as Pierpoint & Co, a rotten outlier of an institution that seemingly comes with no HR department – the second is more interested in its characters’ backstories; in exactly what it is (Mummy? Daddy? boarding school?) that might have made its characters so horribly ruthless, if not downright repellent.

Industry revolves, for anyone who hasn’t seen it, around a group of recent graduates, all of them trainees at Pierpoint: there is Harper (Myha’la Herrold), a sharp-eyed American with a fake CV; Gus (David Jonsson), a snobbish ex-public-school boy who by the end of the first series has departed the bank to write a novel; Yasmin (Marisa Abela), the daughter of a non-dom Syrian who lives in a big stuccoed house in Notting Hill; and Robert (Harry Lawtey), who knew Gus at Oxford and is the flat-voweled, state-educated son of a publican. Above this sex-obsessed, drug-obsessed, bonus-obsessed quartet in the bank’s hierarchy, running them like spies or indentured servants (or both), are various delightful sociopaths, most notably Eric Tao (Ken Leung), a gnomic Asian-American who likes to wander the trading floor with a baseball bat in his hand. Adjacent to them, and to him, are the clients on whose bank balances they all rely for their pay cheques: the hedge fund managers and sometime billionaires who, once the trade is done or the market has fallen, tend to spit them out as if they were so much spearmint chewing gum.

As you might have gathered, Down and Kay, who are in their early 30s, aren’t much interested in ticking boxes; the usual pieties don’t really apply. If Gus is both black and gay, he’s also the old Etonian son of the Ghanaian ambassador to Angola, a background that has contrived to make him just as corruptible as the rest of them, if not more so. Similarly, it’s one of the series’ female characters who makes a habit of sexually harassing those junior to her every time she gets in a (chauffeur-driven) car with them. In this world, no one is good, or not for long. The series is, as they put it, “about playing the game and getting what you want” – and in this sense, as well as in the fact that it is full of bullshitting old Etonians, it speaks perfectly to the times. There’s a reason why, in the second series, Gus starts working for a Tory MP and Harper begins buying stocks in a company that’s betting on the privatisation of the NHS.

“The best thing about it is that it presents a world that is sometimes nasty and really kind of ugly,” says Down, who does not seem nasty at all. “When it was first commissioned, HBO [the series is a co-production with the BBC] said that we had an opportunity, as new writers, to do something that was pretty against the grain – and they told us to lean into that.” Kay agrees, though he also thinks it’s too easy, and too reductive, to see their characters only as dislikable. “Hopefully, we’ll get to write this show for a while,” he says. “Which will mean we can show how and why these people have suppressed so much of what is good in them. Selfishness and self-destruction are human qualities and everybody has the capacity for both, even if they don’t like to see that reflected back at them.” As well as their ambition, their characters, it’s increasingly apparent, have something else in common: they are all, in various different ways, parentless and, as the show progresses, this is something for which they will pay a price.

Is banking really like this, though? Even now, after all the scandals and promises to clean up? What do people in the City make of it? “Some have really taken to it and some have turned their noses up at it, because they think there’s too much sex and drugs,” says Kay. “I think a few believe they could do better themselves, but you get that with anything. The second season is sensationalised for the purposes of drama and Harper does get herself in these scenarios that probably any other 25-year-old woman in an investment bank wouldn’t. But the jargon and the dialogue and a lot of the relationships between certain factions on the trading floor are drawn from life. We had an incredible consultant for series two, who must remain nameless, and he thinks it’s very authentic. On a sonic level, the jargon in particular, which is very technical, just kind of works.”

If he sounds confident, perhaps this is also because this is a world the pair once knew themselves. (How else would it ever have been commissioned? It’s all but impossible to imagine a non-banker pitching such a show successfully.) Down and Kay, who went to Charterhouse school in Godalming and King’s College school in Wimbledon respectively, and who, in conversation, try hard to sound faintly embarrassed by their privilege, met at Oxford University and went into banking afterwards, mostly because they couldn’t think what else to do. Down, having started out as an intern in private wealth management at a big American institution, lasted only a year before leaving to try to make it as a TV writer (to pay his bills, he worked for the former theatrical agent Michael Foster and for Sacha Baron Cohen). But Kay lasted a bit longer: “I did about three years before I was fired – I mean, made redundant – in 2013.”

His job was akin to Harper’s. “I worked in European equity sales, then I moved into US equity sales.” He mutters something about Dutch pension funds and Brussels. “At the time, I wasn’t interested in stocks or even in economics; I’m much more interested now I’m writing about it. But I was so young and inexperienced. It required a level of bullshit I just wasn’t capable of, even by my standards. I hated the idea of being on a call with someone and always being one question away from disaster. I’d be talking about stock and then the guy would be, like, so what’s the discount? What’s the price? And I didn’t know even basic things.”

The money was good. He and Down both have immigrant mothers (from Poland and Ghana); it wasn’t in either of their natures to walk away from well-paid jobs. But the sense of being about to be found out was queasy-making, to put it mildly. When the end came – Kay was called upstairs and handed an ominous file – his main feeling was one of surprise that he’d lasted so long.

After this, they began writing together – or trying to – and when they found that they could, they were off. “We did loads and loads of things,” says Down. “We started in half-hour comedy, but we found that it was a totally closed shop. So we fell into drama. We got a couple of early commissions, we worked on a constructed reality thing with David Hasselhoff and we just took loads and loads of meetings.” They sold lots of ideas, but the majority never went into production. They were often broke. “It was dispiriting,” says Kay. “But you know what the weird thing is? We had this incredible sense of delusion about our success. I think it’s to do with being a partnership, but I was just, like: we’re going to be good at this; we don’t have an option not to be. What I love about working with Mickey is that there will always be days when I feel: this is just a fucking fool’s errand and he’ll be the one saying, ‘Come on, come on, we’ve got an 11am’. But it was a kind of compulsion then. We felt we could create something that was good and true.”

At this point, Industry was far off; they were deep into writing a show about a black, female highwayman. Down takes up the story: “But we were also working on another film at Jane Tranter’s Bad Wolf [Tranter is a former BBC executive and a renowned drama producer] and when she discovered that she had two finance guys on her staff, she was, like: oh, I’ve always wanted to do a show in that world.” The pair had written a script about bankers some time before, but they’d put it in a drawer, thinking that it was both derivative and that the stink of the 2008 banking crisis remained off-putting to viewers. Now it was time to dig it out. “Jane Tranter had a meeting at HBO, she pitched on our behalf and we got a two-script commission and a bible commission: in other words, for two episodes and a detailed roadmap for the rest of the series.” How detailed? Put it this way: for every one of their graduate trainees, they wrote both a full CV and a personal statement. Two-and-a-half years later, Industry was commissioned: “We wrote about 70 drafts of the first episode.”

Their newness as writers brought some advantages. They had a big say in things such as casting (all their trainees are played – with aplomb – by newcomers) and the show’s soundtrack (Industry’s electronic 1980s-inspired score, which does so much to help build tension, is by DJ/producer Nathan Micay). But so did their relationship with HBO. The first episode was directed by Lena Dunham. “We were big fans of Girls,” says Down. “But it was really that she has a deal with HBO and she went in for one of her regular meetings, a catch-up, and they said: there’s this show filming in Wales, here are the scripts, what do you think? She read them overnight and she really liked it. At the time, I think that having run her own show, and having been at the centre of the culture for 10 years, she just wanted to work as a regular, jobbing director for a bit.” Her involvement, however brief, was a huge blessing, a crucial headline when it came to early publicity for the show.

The second series, most of which I’ve already seen, is just as smoothly brilliant as the first, for all that Down and Kay have taken huge risks with their storyline, pretty much setting a bomb under it (let us just say that, in addition to the arrival of a vaguely Elon Musk-like figure played by Jay Duplass, Eric’s power may at last be on the wane). And the dialogue is, I think, easier to grasp now, the financial talk simplified just a little. It comes with some great set pieces away from the bank: scenes that might have come from HBO’s hit Succession, the popularity of which will surely help to build Industry’s audience in the future. Has a third been commissioned? Not yet, but they’re hopeful. “We’ve done a lot of thinking about where they could all be in three or four years’ time.” In the meantime, they’ve got dozens of other projects on the go: a murder mystery, a heist thriller, a period drama.

Let’s assume it runs and runs. Will their ever-restless characters be allowed to get what they want? To be – whisper it – happy? Could Industry have a redemptive arc or is such a notion a blasphemy? They look at each other. “OK, let’s think,” says Kay. “Let’s think about the Rosetta stones of TV: The Sopranos or Mad Men. Is Tony Soprano ever happy? Is Don Draper? I don’t think so, not really.” Down says: “All the great shows are about the pursuit of success and how that makes you lonely, which is basically what our show is about, too. We’d love to see if they have some kind of redemption, but… ” Kay interrupts, finishing his sentence: “That’s not good television,” he says and they both laugh. Oh dear. Poor Harper, poor Eric, poor Robert. I worry for them. How high can they fly? How low can they fall?

• Series two of Industry begins on BBC One in September