Industry has become popular with both city boys and finance bros, but the duo behind the show say those fans are fundamentally misunderstanding their show.
BBC/HBO hit Industry started out a tale of young graduates fighting to survive at a cutthroat investment bank in London.
But the size and scope of the show has grown with each successive chapter, meaning Season 4 just kicked off with a politically charged episode that (kind-of) featured Donald Trump. While Episode 2 was a gothic horror that played like a twisted Christmas Carol.
But just as movies like Wall Street and The Wolf of Wall Street were celebrated by those they satirized, the creators of Industry believe that the message of their show is being misread and misinterpreted.
Industry creators believe there’s “dishonesty” in how people engage with the show
Mickey Down and Konrad Kay were bankers who took their experiences in the world of finance, and turned them into Industry. But they’ve been surprised by how the show has been received in some quarters.
“Anything of this ilk, anything set in this world has to feel very seductive in this first act because you have to, basically, convince the audience to think that these people are having a great time, and you have to lean in,” Down told Deadline. “And then the third act is usually when it all goes to hell and you reveal the person’s pursuit of this thing is not gonna be edifying – it’s actually gonna destroy them.
“A lot of finance bros just watch the first act and just think, ‘OK, that looks fun, I can do drugs and have loads of sex and that looks like rock ‘n’ roll.’ And they don’t really watch the third act where it all implodes.”
Down continued: “It’s weird because I still get LinkedIn messages and there’s usually a slew of messages from people being like ‘Bro, I love your show. Got me into finance.'”
Kay added: “There’s a level of dishonesty as well with the way people engage with this thing, I think, where they watch Wall Street or they watch Industry and they say, ‘These people are sociopathic, they’re dead-eyed,’ when in fact what they’re really saying is: ‘I recognize parts in myself that I haven’t necessarily nurtured or I’m too scared to think about.’
“But those traits – avarice, blind ambition – they exist in everybody.”
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