Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm 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 Conrad 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 Conrad K., welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour.
I have to say I'm a huge fan of this show. Conrad, tell me how this show came about. You both worked in finance. You knew each other from university.
Yeah, I mean, 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. What were you selling? U.S.
Chapter 2: What is the premise of HBO's 'Industry' and its creators' background?
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 four a year. So the metrics didn't really stack up. So 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.
Mickey, did you get into finance, too, for the obvious reason you wanted to make some money and please your parents?
That's exactly right. Well, my mom thought that finance was too much of a spiffy 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. Doctor doesn't count? No, doctor. That was never going to happen for me, David. So it was lawyer or nothing.
And 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 like partying and having a lot of fun. And it was around us that suddenly, you know, 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?
So I applied to all those jobs, didn't get any of them. I ended up working for the Home Office, the civil service. And then I went to work for Rothschild, which is a kind of, you know, old blue-blooded institution. I mean, I have like kind of 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 like 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?
So from there, what's the origin story of industry?
I had sold this thing to NBC Universal, which was a kind of comedy short about a young guy who didn't want to be a banker and wanted to be a DJ with some sort of autobiographical elements. It really felt like a sort of hobbyist vocation. It didn't really feel like something that I could sell my parents on, quite frankly.
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Chapter 3: Why did Mickey Down and Konrad Kay leave the finance industry?
You're welcome. Look, you know, you could say the same with Dostoevsky, so it's high praise. That seems to me even harder, the conception of the main characters.
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.
Everybody really loves, especially in the first two seasons, writing about the characters and pathologizing their behavior and saying they're all like kind of dead-eyed sociopaths. And 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.
And he said, well, 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.
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, so she's a real outsider, and she fakes her resume. This doesn't seem like 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?
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Chapter 4: How did the idea for 'Industry' originate?
Before we could formulate our own identities, we allowed the institution to make them for us. And that's... You know, I look back on that person, I kind of cringe because I was just such a sort of weird and it's kind of 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 sort of attitude, which is like, I'm never content with my career. The reason our show feels like it's constantly, you know, changing and vibrating with electricity is because me and Conrad are in terms of our careers. And, you know, we want to be successful. We were finance bros in the first instance.
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?
Oh, I want to work with Conrad forever. I mean, it's very difficult to find someone you don't want to tear apart having spent every day with them. I mean, obviously there are moments, there are very few moments of tension between us. What's the biggest fight you've ever had?
No, I think maybe when we were writing season one and I went to a stag do and came back really hung over and didn't want to work. Yeah.
That's what we, we had a proper set. We didn't enjoy fighting so much that we never did it again.
Yeah. There was, it was horrible. There was no green light then. So we actually, I think it was a, it was a frustration that we were in development hell. Uh, I don't know. It works for us. We feel, honestly, we have amazing collaborators. We love working with the people we work with. But there's a moment that at the end of a long day when you've been shooting, you get in the car.
It's me and Conor. We live together as well during the shoot, which is crazy. That's crazy.
You live together?
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Chapter 5: What themes are explored through the characters in 'Industry'?
I have to say, by way of thanks, this is, in such a grim world that we're living in lately, this is the most uplifting relationship I've encountered in quite a while. On Red K, Mickey Down, thanks so much. Thank you so much, David. It's a privilege. It's an honor. Industry is on HBO Max, finishing its fourth season. You can find our TV critic Ingo Kang's review of the show at newyorker.com.
And of course, you can subscribe to The New Yorker there as well, newyorker.com. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of TuneArts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul.
This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer, with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett. And we had assistance this week from Richie O2 in London. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund.
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