The Gen Z banking drama Industry returns for its third season Sunday night. Early reviews have been uniformly glowing. The social media hype is real. (Stocks are even plummeting worldwide—global market crash, or Industry guerilla marketing?) Dan Riley, GQ’s global content development director, recently spent some time in London for an excellent feature on Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, the guys behind HBO’s hottest show. GQ senior staff writer Gabriella Paiella chatted with him about it.
Dan, you were an Industry early adopter. An industrialist, if you will. I remember you telling me back then that it was the most obsessed you’ve been with a TV show in years. What about it hooked you?
Where to start? The young unknown actors in the ensemble. The pace. The score. The A-grade insults on the floor. It was just the best thing I’d seen about what it was like to be a 22-year-old, working in an office, trying to get ahead, to impress your boss or the person sitting two desks over. The way there were no edges to your life inside and outside the office. I guess it was the first real raw vision I’d seen of that experience—and it was incredibly refreshing. The first season came out during that first COVID winter and my wife and I were at home with our first baby. This is probably not most people’s reaction to the show, but I couldn’t believe how much it made me miss being in the office. Maybe I’m just getting old and the young company is addicting.
It clearly worked—HBO is placing it in the hallowed Sunday night 9 p.m. slot, where The Sopranos and Game of Thrones and Succession once lived. How, exactly, did a sleeper hit about young London bankers end up there?
Mickey and Konrad, who I write about in this piece, are incredibly thoughtful and humble about the fact that they got this chance from HBO to make anything at all. At the same time, they’ve thought a lot about what this show could be if you pushed these characters beyond finance and watched them intersect with these other powerful elements of contemporary UK society, exploring the way finance, tech, media, and conservative politics sit next to one another. It feels appropriate that a show taking on these bigger concerns is being brought to a potentially bigger audience.
Mickey and Konrad both put in some time on the trading floor out of school, and a narrative has coalesced around that. But you come to an interesting realization in your piece: “Industry isn’t really the incredible story of two bankers who somehow become makers of television. It’s really more the incredible story of how two budding television makers were somehow allowed to become bankers.” At what point in your reporting did that become clear?
They had this incredible hook to talk about (and no doubt pitch and sell) their show: They’d worked in banking and then wrote this show that articulated what it was really like to work and play in that world. All true. But Konrad was an English literature grad at Oxford; Mickey a theology grad. They’d been writing and thinking about movies since they met in college. They couldn’t really admit it to themselves, but they did have major artistic ambitions. It just can feel crazy to put aside all other opportunities to try to go make TV or movies in your 20s. But I think they can say now that it was always there and it was banking that was the detour.
