Drama you can bank on
Industry is making as big an impact on today’s up-andcoming bankers as Sex and the City had on young women at the turn of the century, writes Craig Mathieson.
Recently, English screenwriter Konrad Kay was messaged by a former colleague from his days as a junior banker, who was dining at an outdoor restaurant in New York City. According to the friend in finance, at the next table a quartet of 30-somethings were earnestly discussing Industry, the new HBO series about the junior staff at a London merchant bank, which was created by Kay and his writing partner Mickey Down.
Each guest was trying to decide which character from the drama they matched.
Two decades ago another HBO series, Sex and the City, was inspiring a similar game. But instead of Carrie, Samantha or Miranda, Industry’s choices included Harper, Rob and Yasmin.
Ambivalent about ambition and fascinated by the struggle to form genuine bonds, the show has struck a chord, mostly impressing critics and winning audiences following its debut late last year on HBO and the United Kingdom’s BBC Two.
Down and Kay, who are currently writing season two, have released their fictional creations.
‘‘The characters no longer exist solely in our heads. They’re part of the world and people have reacted to them,’’ says Down, who was speaking from London along with Kay via a video call.
‘‘We’re a lot more confident because we no longer have to sell the show to the network or an audience, but there’s also more pressure to be good.’’
At first glance, Industry – set at the fictional London investment bank, Pierpoint & Co – has a fairly obvious lineage that stretches from Australian streaming service Stan’s 1 per cent drama Billions, back through films such as global financial crisis thriller Margin Call, all the way to Oliver Stone’s Wall Street.
But the show often defines itself by how different it is to its predecessors, beginning with the outlook of its 20-something characters: graduates starting their first job, uncertain if they’ll survive a six-month trial meant to find overachievers on the trading floor.
‘‘Doing something set in this world and harking back would have felt derivative. We think the show has a unique vantage point: not from the top down, but the bottom up,’’ Down says. ‘‘There was an earlier version from the perspective of people you might have seen before – older, rich and white. When we turned it into a show about young people entering the workplace, that’s when it revealed itself to us.’’
It was not that long ago that Down and Kay were in a similar position. With a friendship forged at Oxford University, they both spent several years working as analysts and traders for major banks. It wasn’t for them, but it gave them a granular sense of Industry characters such as Harper (Myha’la Herrold), an African-American woman determined to get her foot in the prestigious door, or the laddish hedonist Rob (Harry Lawtey) and his university pal, Gus (David Jonsson), who is black, gay, and an Old Etonian.
‘‘Everything comes from character. In some way the show might lack drama – that’s a fair criticism – but these are first-year graduates,’’ Kay says.
‘‘There are no big insider trading deals or something that ends up involving the FBI. A lot of it is just, ‘How do I get my feet under the desk? Who is my line manager? How will they treat me?’ We thought those were small moments, but they could be dramatic if you rendered them with specificity.’’
Down and Kay had few accumulated screen credits before Industry. They were working on a different project for leading production company, Bad Wolf (The Night Of, His Dark Materials), when chief executive Jane Tranter learnt of their background. She asked them for their take on capitalism’s epicentre, but what they handed in was also a striking study of contemporary mores.
The drug use is matter-of-fact, while the diversely orientated sex scenes offer frank insight into the characters – the privileged but uncertain Yasmin (Marisa Abela), for example, finds expression through how she dominates her partners.
‘‘One of the superficial criticisms of the show is that the sex is gratuitous. We were very careful to make sure that every single sex scene in this show says something about power or was revealing character through release,’’ Down says.
‘‘When we were writing, the sex scenes would be half a page long and forensically detailed in
‘‘A lot of it is just, ‘How do I get my feet under the desk? Who is my line manager? How will they treat me?’ We thought those were small moments, but they could be dramatic if you rendered them with specificity.’’
Industry co-creator Konrad Kay
terms of what we were trying to express. Then we’d talk them through with the actors, we’d talk it through with the intimacy co-ordinators, the directors would talk it though with the actors and intimacy co-ordinators,’’ Kay adds. ‘‘The youth and the verisimilitude meant that me and Mickey were militant about the sex scenes feeling as close to reality as possible.’’
The result is a show that moves to its own rhythms. The early episodes, in particular, don’t build to a peak, such as a far-reaching decision or moral lesson, but flow from one exhausting day to the next. With Nathan Micay’s buoyant electronic score holding the scenes aloft, the prevailing mood is what Kay has come to define as ‘‘euphoric sadness’’.
Industry isn’t a condemnation of its overleveraged setting because the characters don’t yet have an understanding of what they’re a part of.
‘‘We don’t want it to have a message, really, and it’s not a glamourisaton of that world,’’ Down says. ‘‘People who are vehemently opposed to that world might think we’re on their side, but in fact we’re not on anyone’s side.’’
Stream Industry on Neon now.