Failed “Finance Bros” Find Success with HBO’s “Industry”

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.

From 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.

Victory 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 K, 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 uncertain honestly by the financial industry.

My boss, when he fired me, said I was the worst ever salesman that would grace the doors

of Morgan Stanley.

What were you selling?

U.S. equities, but selling is a very strong version of what I was doing.

I think he's supposed to make about 40 out of 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, he'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.

But my mum thought that finance was too much of a spivy career, even that she's an architect

which I think blows my mind because she's one of those immigrant mothers who just says

that if you're not a lawyer, you don't have a job.

Even though you don't have a job.

But no doctor, that was never going to happen for me, David, so it was a lawyer or nothing.

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 parting and having a lot of

fun.

It was around us that suddenly, in the second year, everyone started getting these jobs or

internships.

I looked around and said, 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, ended up working for the home office,

the civil service, and then I went to work for Ross Child, which is a kind of old, blue-blooded

institution.

I have kind of quite fond memories of it because I like the people I worked with, but

the job itself was just not for me at all.

I was like, incredibly elsuited 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 and 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.

They felt, 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.

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 that we should try and actually make a career

out of this.

So we started writing a script that we called Not an Exit, which is essentially, it was

a kind of cathartic exercise because it was about two guys who in banking absolutely

hated it.

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

I 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.

What seems to me key to the show is not just the milieu, that you've created these characters

who are all so deeply, deeply damaged.

Thank you.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Look, you know, you could say the same with Justayevsky, so it's a high praise.

What 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 it

in Not an Exit because it was, you know, it was, 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 Tranta, who produces the show with us, who her company, Bad Wolf, 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 lace, the

amount of power, because all the things you've discussed, well, you know, 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 it 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, it 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 were all 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, and especially with Deadwood

and he said, well, what you see in categorized 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, you know, 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?

Well, I mean, we actually had a few different permutations of the main character, and

all the characters around Harper are kind of analogs of people we know, they're people

who went to university with school, the people we worked with.

But Harper felt like, yeah, confidence, but like, firstly, we realized we were writing

for an American audience even though the show is sort of UK based, so we wanted to kind

of lend America lens into it.

And then we thought, if we're doing a show about people with least amount of power trying

to accrue it, let's just like actually kind of figure out the person who has the least

amount of power and is the most marginalized.

And that's not necessarily to say that we're going to write her towards that, and she's

going to be, no, she's going to make excuses because she's marginalized, but we're going

to create a character who would feel like the whole world against her in this world.

We, me and Mickey were really interested.

I mean, like when I was in Morgan Stanley, the word that kept propping up in all the literature

and all of us were in meritocracy.

And so the first season for us in terms of how we built the characters, what was interesting

to us, it became a sort of dramatic social experiment of like, nominally all of these

characters are coming into the institution and the institution is telling them you are

all equal.

And you're going to start on the same start position and then it's going to be a race

to the finish line.

And some of you will get jobs and some of you won't, but effectively will be a level

playing field, which is why one of the great lies that any institution ever sells anybody

because everybody, of course, in their interactions with their bosses and the hierarchy they find

themselves with, they hit their own glass ceilings, which are functions of where they come

from.

And honestly, in the first season, me and Mickey were just really interested in the idea

of luck.

I'm speaking with Conrad Kay and Mickey Down, who created HBO show industry more in a moment.

I want to play a clip from season three and this is Harper arguing with the other really

main character, Yasmin.

Let's listen.

You revel in my disgrace, you revel in other people's pain, it fucking nourishes you.

Okay.

Yas.

I did everything in my power to try and stop Petra.

I did.

But this is the business.

Sorry.

The world is showing you what it is without any of the protections that you are so clearly

used to.

And I am genuinely sorry that you think I am so sick that I could somehow get off on

your unhappiness now.

Oh, so you don't?

You didn't today.

I needed my friend today.

Harper, I needed my friend and you used me.

Now, it's a great scene.

And to some extent, it violates what they teach you in writing school, which is to always

go never tell.

And you have it.

You have it.

It's almost like an operatic scene where two people step to the front of the stage and they

spell out in very distinct terms, their anger with each other underneath it.

Maybe they're love for each other, their resentments and who they are.

And the show does that more than many other shows.

The language of the show is front and center.

That's the aspirational cruelty.

That's the sort of thing that if you end away for five minutes and could write down your feelings

that you might say to someone you want to hurt, that's not something you probably say in the

moment.

We're also just writing towards our references as well.

For us, the stuff we grew up loving and watching, the language and what was coming out

of people's mouths could be as dramatic as what was actually happening in the scenes.

I mean, you know, there's that great truism or like cliché even about like sorkins and

social networks stuff where those scenes of two people talking can have as much drama as

a car chase.

I mean, that's kind of industry's M.O.

People talking is violence, language is violence, language is action.

We have to do that as well because you know, we have a lot of...

We don't have a car chase.

Exactly.

We write a lot of dense two handers.

We have to make the feel of their electric.

And we're pretty bold and obvious about what we wear on our sleeves.

I think you can really see a lot of these sort of disparate influences all over the show.

And we like to lead the fingerprints on it, like we draw from madmen, we draw from the

sopranos.

A lot of the needle drops this season.

The direct lifts from madmen.

We almost feel like those two shows are kind of in conversation with each other.

Madmen has always been influential to the show, but like peep show, girls obviously in the

first season.

We wanted to write a show about ambitious people who are really, you know, quite hard to

like sometimes.

I always said that my favourite genre is Michael Douglas.

Michael Douglas.

Michael Douglas with his ass out.

And his hair up.

His hair up.

His suit.

And doing something shady that he's sexy.

That's why I love it.

You guys don't seem averse to the rewards of capitalism.

And yet you're making a show that in some ways, not to be, you know, over self-series, but

it's a critique of capitalism to some extent.

How do you circle that square?

It's interesting.

I mean, it's a kind of critique of unchecked capitalism.

It's a critique of the sort of the dark heart of capitalism.

I'm also saying, I don't think capitalism buys very nature is a bad thing.

But I think honestly, when you write a show about finance, in the same way you write a

show or a film about war, you have to kind of make the thing feel kind of seductive in the

first act.

And that's always kind of what we've done.

I mean, you see any single piece of literature or art about finance.

And the first act is always look how great this is.

And the third act is always like this kind of bad this is.

And that's, you know, sometimes people just ignore the second and third acts.

And that's why you have a load of, you know, sort of finance, memebrows, loving American

psycho and Wall Street and not really seeing the sort of the cost of that kind of living.

And look, we left university.

There's only run real reason you go into finance at the age of 21.

And, you know, you can, in an interview, you would talk to that up and you would say,

like, you know, I want to see my deals on the front page of the financial times.

And I really care about, you know, macroeconomics and all that stuff.

The real reason you go into finance because you want to make way more money than your peers

when you're 21.

You want to go to a job that gives you a prestigious sounding title.

And that's kind of what we were like before we could formulate our own identity.

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, 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 in my career.

The reason I'll show feels like it's constantly, you know, changing and, and, uh,

vibrating electricity is because me and Conrad are in terms of our careers.

And, you know, we want to be successful.

We, we, we, we, we, we were finance grows 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, it's very difficult to find someone you want to, you don't want to, you know, tear apart,

having spent every day with him.

And obviously there is, 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 sense of that time.

That was it. That was it.

We didn't enjoy fighting so much that we never did it again.

Yeah, there was, it was horrible. There was no green light thing.

So we actually, I think it was a, it was a frustration that we were in development hell.

I don't know, it's, you know, it works for us.

We, 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 the long day when you've been shooting, you get in the car,

there's me and Conrad, we lived together as well during the shoot.

It's crazy.

That's crazy.

You lived together?

We lived together.

Yeah, we lived together during the shoot.

When we were in production, I spent more time with Conrad than I spent with my wife and my children.

And it's just like, it's very difficult or hard or rare, I think, to like have a partnership

with someone that you can stand to that level.

David, it's a commitment.

I mean, you said marriage.

It's like, it is, it is a marriage.

And like anything in life that's worth doing and is good is a commitment.

I think we know, look, we've been best friends.

It predates our work relationship.

I think if you're thrust together and the work relationship is the basis,

then the idea of a kind of creative divorce is a sort of, is more easy to see.

But like, we're in mesh in each other's lives.

We love each other.

It's a, it's a very fraternal relationship.

It's not to say it's always perfect.

I mean, I'm a very complicated person.

He's a very complicated person.

But we, it's kind of like understanding, understanding each other's weaknesses, strengths,

pushing each other to be the best version of ourselves, giving each other space within the relationship to flourish.

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.

I'm glad.

Okay, Mickey down.

Thanks so much.

Thanks for having us.

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 Merrill Garbis of Tune Arts,

with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul.

This episode was produced by Max Foulton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters,

Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul and Ursula Summer.

With guidance from Emily Boateen and assistance from Michael May, David Gabel,

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 Cherina Endowment Fund.