Mickey Down

And then when I made this thing and it was bought and I got an agent, suddenly it felt like a job.

And I could then take that to Conrad and say, look, we should try and actually make a career out of this.

So we started writing a script that we called Not an Exit, which was essentially, it was a kind of cathartic exercise.

It was about two guys who were in banking who absolutely hated it.

And it was a bag of ideas, it was a mess.

It was like 10-page scenes of characters called Mickey and Conrad.

The whole first episode, it was a guy basically like working off a hangover, which was kind of what, I mean, the same DNA as industry.

Well, I think the thing that really unlocked the show for us, and there was a bit of this in Northern Exit because it was, you know, 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 sort of Mickey and Conrads of the industry.

But it was Jane Tranter who produces the show with us through her company, Bad Wolf Studios.

who, when she found out she had two bankers working with her on another project, said, have you thought about writing this world?

And we said, we had written it.

It's this thing, Not an Exit, and 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 discuss, 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.

And that kind of unlocked it for us.

And also, it allows the characters...

to be damaged, to behave sort of like free of easy explanation and to like be sort of heinous because they are young and those behaviors are somewhat more excusable when you're young.

And that kind of opened up for us.

And 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 is sort of moved in the direction it has because it's just dramatically inert.

And it feels like, you know, it's actually quite hard to move story on when no one knows, has an ability to do it.