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Interview with Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, HBO's Industry showrunners, on how the series, now in its fourth season, gets more popular each passing season.
"Hi, I'm Javier from Gamereactor.
Why do you think the series seems to get more popular after each season?
Like, it gets better reviews, more people watch it. What do you think is that?
HBO is spending more money on it."
"No, no, the visibility of it is just changing season on season.
I think it's just a case of, like, we've been in a really lucky position where we've been allowed, you know, I think a lesser network would have not given the industry so much room to grow season on season, I think.
You know, we've been on the biggest streaming service. We probably would have got cancelled after season one or two."
"It's testament to HBO's faith in us that, and that we've allowed the people on camera and behind the camera to grow.
And I think, I think the show has just become, become clearer proposition.
It's become more sure of itself. It's become more confident.
I think in a way it's become a little bit less esoteric, and has, like, widened its view about what it's trying to say."
"I mean, the first season was very much a sort of young person show about young people starting in a bank.
But it was so specific and it was so sealed into that environment that I think it didn't really cater to a really large audience.
Where season on season, show's still about capitalism. It's still about the core characters.
It's still got the same core performers."
"But I think it's just slightly more universal in the stuff that it's talking about and looking at.
And frankly, it's just a little bit more commercially plotted in the way that we construct it.
So, following that line, how would you recommend the series to someone who may be a bit intimidated by the financial world and all the vocabulary that it's a bit complicated to follow sometimes?
Yeah, I think, look, I'd say first and foremost, the series is a piece of entertainment."
"I think the thing, to return to your earlier question, I think the reason this show has worked in the last couple of seasons in particular is because we've been really concerned with wanting to get an audience back for another episode.
We want it to have a week-to-week watchability. We want the audience to be following the plot.
I think, hopefully, even though the show is very, very dense, we've made it a little bit more intelligible and a little bit more easy to get underneath in the last couple of seasons."
"And in season one, I mean, the financial jargon in season one was kind of window dressing to the plot.
And the plot was kind of minimal in itself.
And now, I feel like, now in season four, there is a sort of genre thriller element to it, which is just going to pull the audience through those eight episodes."
"For the first time ever, you can't watch an episode of it.
And even though the episodes have the sort of hour-long units of storytelling, there's no way you can watch episode two or three and not want to know what happens in four, five, six, and seven and eight.
So I feel like, for the first time, it's really, really propulsive and telling a really interesting, twisty-turny story."
"Great. Have you been inspired by real-life events when making the show?
And maybe, did you expect that when you first started creating the series, maybe five years ago, I don't know, did you expect that this character would be where they are now?
Or have things changed along the way due to real-life events, maybe?
Well, I mean, the show is a contemporary world show."
"So every season, we come back and me and Mickey talk about the things that we're interested in.
And we always sort of use the show as a sort of vessel to discuss all of those things.
The best thing about returning TV is, like, you can be pretty dynamic in terms of the way you...
You can imagine that the characters are going to go on a certain journey, and then either through performance or what you learn about the character through writing it, or even sometimes taking diagnoses from the way people watch certain things, you can change the journeys in a pretty malleable way, you know?
It would be ridiculous to say that 10 years ago, we knew we had a bullseye for where Harper and Yasmin were going to necessarily end up."
"What we loved about doing the show is, year on year, coming back, being diagnostic about what we thought worked, what we thought didn't work, and then, more importantly, getting together with our writers, me and Mickey, and thinking, oh, these are the things that we want to write about this year.
You know, we're going to do fintech, we're going to do a little bit of financial fraud, we're going to do a little bit of the rising specter of authoritarianism around the world."
"And, like, we have all these moving little jigsaw pieces, and our job is, how can we make a telecoherent and cohesive story over eight hours that speak and cater to all of those things?
Like, it's... The way we look at it is, it's like the real world, but a more operatic, more artistic, more dialed-up version of all of the things that are, kind of, the time we're living in right now."
"It's not a documentary, but we draw on that stuff as inspiration, obviously.
Okay, and for people who have followed from the very beginning, what can they expect from season four compared to the other seasons?
I hope they can expect more of an excavation of these characters, and seeing them now with a degree of power that they didn't have in season one, what they decided to do with it, I think it's going to be really interesting for the audience."
"As Conrad said, the show started off as this, kind of, slice-of-life show about young people in London, and, yes, they wanted power, and, yes, they were ambitious, but now we're seeing that ambition turn up to 11, and we're seeing, actually, what they do now that they've harnessed that ambition."
"And the reason the show, I think, works is because, yes, it's a thrilling proposition, hopefully, and, yes, there's loads of, sort of, like, quite bad behaviour, but I really think, given we've seen these characters behave for three seasons now, we've seen where they started, some of their behaviours are a little bit more understandable than they would be if we were coming to the season cold."
"OK, thank you very much. I think that's a little...
That's beautiful. Thank you.
Thanks.
That was great. Thank you so much."
