On Sunday night, the Gen Z banking drama Industry returns for its third season. Early reviews have been across-the-board glowing. The social media hype is real. (Stocks are even plummeting worldwide—global market crash, or Industry season 3 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 how this cult series became unmissable Sunday-night appointment TV.
Gabriella Paiella: 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?
Dan Riley: Where to start? The young unknown actors in the ensemble. The kinetic pace. The new-wavy 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 or make your colleagues laugh or catch the eye of 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?
The creators, Mickey and Konrad, who I write about in this piece, are incredibly thoughtful and humble about the fact that they had never made a show before, got this chance from HBO, and were really allowed to make anything at all. At the same time, they’ve thought a lot about what this show could be if you painted on a wider canvas and pushed these characters beyond finance and watched them intersect with these other powerful elements of contemporary UK society. That is, the show got steadily bigger, and interested in these uncomfortable ideas about the places where finance, tech, media, and conservative politics sit next to one another. The young characters on the show have started to grow up, and as happens in real life, they’ve naturally moved out of their first job and into these other worlds. It feels appropriate that a show taking on these bigger concerns is being brought to a potentially bigger audience.
More broadly, what does the scope of this season and this new slot signal about HBO’s ambitions?
This new season is dropping at this odd moment in TV when networks and viewers are still feeling the effects of the duel WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023. Because it’s a UK production, Industry got waivers to go ahead last year, which is why it—and a show like House of the Dragon—have new seasons ready. I can’t speak for the wider HBO slate, but at the premiere on Monday night a lot of people were talking about how this show demonstrates why it’s so important to take chances on young writers, directors, and TV makers. Mickey and Konrad are the first to admit they were totally unprepared for the opportunity they were given to make the first season of their show. But the organic audience was there, the show grew in incredibly interesting ways, and now you’re here with something that’s as good and rich and complex as anything on the network. People at the event were beating the drum: This is why you take chances on new voices.
Who’s your favorite Industry kid and why?
I have always been partial to Gus Sackey, who, as I write about in my piece on Mickey and Konrad, delivered a line in the first few minutes of the pilot that hooked me like none other. The show has done this interesting thing where the “main characters” of season one have shifted and the point of greatest focus has kind of swung around. For example, Gus is entirely absent from season three—but we’ve seen characters re-emerge in different contexts. He left Pierpoint, then worked in British politics, then moved to California at the end of season two. I have a strong suspicion (or at least a hope) that we’ll see him again in season four.
Both Mickey and Konrad put in some time on the trading floor out of school, and a sort of narrative had 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 I hadn’t seen nearly as much about their artistic ambitions before and after those brief years in finance. 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.
I’m also intrigued by this idea of watching television to “catch an immaculate vibe,” which is what you say makes Industry one of the best shows on TV. Describe that vibe in 3 words or less.
Sex, drugs, and Pet Shop Boys.
Anything else that didn’t make it in the final article that you can share with GQ readers?
These guys are very much having their Industry moment. But I also know the as-yet-unannounced thing that’s coming, and it has me extremely excited. If you’re fans of this show, keep your eyes peeled for the announcement.
