June is bustin’ out all over — which means the buzzer has rung on Emmy season. Anything that wants to be eligible for this year’s race has to have aired already, so I guess we gave the last word to last night’s epic-length series finale of Euphoria, which concluded by killing off multiple characters, including — spoiler alert — Zendaya‘s Rue.
More to come on Euphoria and all the Emmy contenders in the weeks ahead — and check out our Prestige Junkie Pundits page to see who thinks the polarizing HBO drama might lead Zendaya to a third Emmy. But to celebrate the new month, I’m handing today’s newsletter over to my colleague Christopher Rosen for a conversation with Industry creators Konrad Kay and Mickey Down about how they pulled the show back from what they thought would be a three-season arc — creating not just a hugely acclaimed fourth season but a set-up for a fifth and final coming next year. The bad behavior and shocking twists of Industry have helped grow its audience each season, even as Kay and Down crafted a “huge swing” for that surprise fourth season. So how do you top that? If anyone can, it’s these guys.
Starting Over
When Industry’s creators sat down to write the HBO drama’s fourth season, they had just one small challenge to overcome: the way they ended season three.
“We did write very elegant endings for all the fucking characters,” Kay says.
Back in 2024, Industry concluded with an episode that not only could have been the series finale, but was originally conceived as one. “We didn’t know we were coming back,” Down says.
Titled “Infinite Largesse,” the episode blew Industry up: Pierpoint, the multinational investment bank at the center of the show, was sold to a sovereign wealth fund in the Middle East, and its London office, where the characters worked, was shuttered. Key figures were given definitive conclusions — like Harry Lawtey’s Robert, who decamped for Silicon Valley. Even the show’s leads found a modicum of closure, with Harper (Myha’la) planning to head back to America, and Yasmin (Marisa Abela) shifting to a life of aristocracy with her future husband, Henry (Kit Harington). “Join us on the ground floor of what is going to be a spectacular journey,” Robert says during the episode’s final seconds.
But the response to season three was so strong — both critically and in viewership, which was up 40 percent from season two — that HBO renewed Industry for season four just before the finale.
“When we came back, we took both horns,” Down says about writing themselves out of those creative corners, which included keeping Harper in London and bringing her mentor, Eric Tao (Ken Leung), out of semi-retirement.
Former investment bankers who met at Oxford, Down and Kay have never been shy about their influences, which range from the movies of Michael Mann and Benny and Josh Safdie to classic prestige television about “difficult men” like Mad Men and The Sopranos. So when starting on what would become season four, they tried to answer a simple question: “What would we be writing if it wasn’t Industry?”
“We thought, ‘Okay, we love the conspiracy thriller; we love the political thriller. Let’s just try and inject that into the ecosystem of Industry and have those things come to the fore,” Down says. “That allowed us to write, hopefully, a pretty dynamic eight hours of television. You’ll be pulled through this genre story, but with the characterization that you’ve come to expect and love from the show.”
The risk, of course, was turning off the show’s loyal fans. “It was a very, very different season,” Down acknowledges. But, wouldn’t you know it? Industry continued its ascent: Viewership for season four grew another 30 percent.
“We’re very grateful that people took to it so well, because it was a huge swing for a show to give in this fourth season,” Down says. “We were kind of on tenterhooks to how it was going to be received.”
Uncomfortable Spaces
Free from the trading floor where the show began in relative obscurity in 2020 (with, fun fact, a pilot episode directed by Lena Dunham!), Down and Kay had plenty on their minds in season four, including the rise of far-right fascism across the globe and the ease with which society’s elite can control the media and financial fraud at mass scale. The duo wrote six of the season’s eight episodes and served as co-directors on four (including the shocking season finale), and it often felt like their goal was to create standalone movies rather than episodic television — particularly in the way Industry steadfastly refused to impose a moral judgment on its characters.
“Ambivalence is way more allowed in cinema than it is on TV,” Kay says. “The whole point of TV is comfort and stability. You know what you’re going to get, and when you tune in, you get the same thing.”
There was little comfort with Industry. Season four took light inspiration from the real-life collapse of a fraudulent German fintech company, Wirecard — as well as Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking crimes — and put its characters in morally challenging positions without easy answers in almost every scene.
“Mickey and I are really interested in all of the questions the script provokes,” Kay says. “Then, we don’t really give a fuck about the answer. I don’t mean it as glibly as that — but there are multiple different ways of looking at things. Which is why we try to take character motivations and just let people make their own decisions.”
Take the season four descent of Eric Tao, a fan-favorite character thanks to Leung’s portrayal. Eric has always been Industry’s Don Draper: brusque, compromised and often downright cruel, but a character you oddly wanted to see succeed.
The twist for Eric in season four was that, after showing some personal growth and reconnecting with Harper following their falling out in season two, he’s brought down by his own hubris. Long split from his wife, Eric was often seen seeking comfort with younger women. In season four, a young sex worker not only recorded her dalliance with Eric, but she is also revealed as having been possibly underage. (An ambiguity even the show’s stars Myha’la and Abela don’t have a definitive answer for.)
“There was something harrowing about him being undone that way,” Kay says. “His power is directly linked to his sexuality in some ways. We set that up in season three, the way that he sort of beats his own ego, his feelings of inadequacy and aging with the younger people that he vampires off — in both a work sense and a sexual sense.”
Like other characters, Eric had a definitive ending in season three — the sale of Pierpoint made him very rich, but left him without a purpose. In season four, his reunion with Harper — long awaited by fans — was a red herring of hope. Kay says he and Down did wonder what viewers would think about how they treated Eric. “But when we were talking about it, Mickey’s impulse, which was correct, was that we just always wrote to try and serve our own creative impulse and not really worry about audience litigation of what ends up happening for characters,” Kay says. “If we feel it in our stomach, it feels right.”
Eric’s ultimate fate — he literally walked off into the vast unknown at the end of season four’s sixth episode — and more will likely be resolved next year. HBO renewed Industry for its fifth and final season in February, meaning Down and Kay will now actually get to definitively end their financial drama.
“To be honest, we’ve really enjoyed writing it, which is a really good sign,” Kay says of the final season. “A sense of finality is very freeing.”
A sense of finality, sure, but Kay isn’t guaranteeing any straightforward lessons.
“We don’t write about sort of conclusive takeaways of the world,” Kay says. “But it is nice to know that this will be the definitive statement about all the world we created. HBO really empowered us to go from novices to seasoned people over five seasons, which is amazing. It’s like, once in a lifetime — maybe unrepeatable.”
