The makers of banking drama Industry on their sexed-up take on the City

After Konrad Kay and Mickey Down created the banking drama Industry in their late twenties, they became two of the youngest showrunners that HBO has ever had. Their depiction of Gen Z graduates being ritually humiliated and betrayed was based on their own time failing in the City; the first series, which aired in 2020, won plaudits from critics and bankers alike. Down heard that the president of one large bank summoned his global head of HR to demand the show somehow be taken off air.

Yet Kay and Down had a “dissonant reaction” to success. They felt the show failed to put their characters through true tests of morality; it also lacked a central storyline. Harper, the mesmerising protagonist played by Myha’la Herrold, “was doing some interest rate trade over here, she was dealing with this client here, it wasn’t very joined up,” says Kay. Down is blunter: the series was “a mess”.

So the second series tries to give stock-trading the same thread as a sports or action movie. “We were slightly scared that we were not capable of writing it,” says Kay. There is less novelty in seeing finance accurately depicted on screen — although which other drama shows an alpha male clipping his toenails at his desk? — but there is more narrative (as well as, bizarrely, a brief cameo from your correspondent).

The plot revolves around maverick US investor Jesse Bloom, nicknamed “Mr Covid” for increasing his money 200-fold during the pandemic. We’re told that, as the pandemic hit, Bloom bet on stocks falling and went on CNBC proclaiming the apocalypse, thereby causing stocks to tank. He then took the profits and re-bought stocks on the cheap. That sounded so much like real-life hedge fund titan Bill Ackman that HBO’s lawyers intervened, insisting that Ackman was referenced as a separate figure who “followed” Bloom. Bloom, played by Jay Duplass, goes on to look for another big trade, which turns out to involve healthcare.

The show remains compulsive viewing, even though the characters, like those in fellow HBO drama Succession, can seem like awful people, even to each other. In the first series, Yasmin (Marisa Abela), one of the more likeable characters, rages at Harper for being “a bit of a cunt”. By series two, she has reached acceptance: “We’re all cunts, aren’t we? So let’s just lean into it, yeah?” Are these bad people who went into finance, or did finance make them bad? “That is a central question in the show and one we talk about constantly,” says Down, who quit banking after a year. “When we hear people say they’re terrible, we’re like, ‘They’re us! They’re composites of people we know!’”

Industry majors in two Fs, one of which is finance. As for the other, it is hard to keep track of who hasn’t slept with whom. Do the writing team debate how much sex to include? “There’s no debate, everyone agrees there should be loads,” laughs Down, although his own father-in-law has told him he’d like a button to skip through it. The quantity of sex and drugs is intended to illustrate the characters’ stunted development. “All the characters, to stop themselves having to ask tough questions about their identity and their personhood and their own insecurities, they’re chasing the next time they can get that rush,” says Kay. A private wealth manager is mistaken for a sex worker on account of her demeanour, which makes its own point.

Industry has been criticised for its characters’ lack of introspection. The trading floor of the fictional bank, Pierpoint, is arguably even more claustrophobic in the second series: the young bankers often seem to have no friends or family who can stabilise them, their colleagues are their only company. “The lie of the sellside is that your colleagues aren’t your competitors,” as the billionaire Bloom puts it.

When occasionally a character insists “it’s just business”, they protest too much — because their whole identity has come to revolve around the trading floor. Yasmin, wanting to prove herself as a private banker, ends up trying to enlist her wealthy father as a client. Harper exchanges one office father figure, her boss Eric, for another, Bloom. This series does delve into the graduates’ back stories. But part of the realism is that these characters don’t spend hours discussing their emotions or motivations; if they did, they wouldn’t have got their jobs in the first place.

What Down and Kay excel in is keeping the show contemporary: from the return-to-the-office weirdness to the rutting to establish status (“I was actually talking to your boss.”). Industry is not Succession — the budget presumably lacks a zero — but the dialogue exudes the same whip-smart cynicism: “I think about you less than I think about climate change”; “Nobody reads that email. It’s getting denser than Dostoevsky and less fun.”

Some finance people will love this sexed-up take on their reality, others will nitpick. The writers are alive to their own shortcuts. “Rishi is a really good example of a character who is totally unrealistic, in the sense that he’s a market-maker, he’s a prop trader, he basically trades every product under the sun, he seems the font of all liquidity in the market,” says Kay. “There’s no Chinese wall. Pierpoint doesn’t seem to have an equity division. Of course there are things that you have to compress.”

But he insists that the fundamental truths are there, for example in the way that the bankers approach their clients and, within the bank, how traders treat salespeople. There are “lines in the sand” in terms of accuracy. A dramatic trade by Harper early in series two is legally possible, even if it appears unethical. “That’s kind of the grey area that we always want the show to play in.”

It’s now a decade since Kay and Down worked in the City. Neither is financially minded today. Down managed to lose money on meme stock GameStop: “I bought the dip, and it dipped again. I realised that a) I don’t have a brain for this, and b) I should just not have any investments in anything that requires me checking on a phone, because I become obsessed with it.” But the pair had “a very, very good consultant” on series two, who does not want to be named, “but is still very much in the business, and is quite high up in it. He fed us a lot of information.”

One dynamic in Industry is New York seeking to impose control over London (“We could say London drinks too much and leaves too early. But none of us are saying that,” a US emissary tells the desk). HBO also sent over Jami O’Brien as an executive producer to “babysit” Down and Kay. Is this in fact a depiction of the TV industry — the tussle between the writers, the BBC and HBO? “There is an unconscious analogue,” laughs Down.

Ultimately, however, Industry remains the creation of two men who were chewed up by the City and didn’t lose their sense of humour or desire for competition in the process. “It’s amazing how much leeway [HBO] give us. Amazing,” says Kay. “They’re usually saying to us: ‘Make it more fucked up.’”

On BBC1 and iPlayer in the UK later this month and on HBO Max in the US now