Two former bankers turned their experience into HBO's most underrated show. Now, it's finally getting the attention it deserves.

• Mickey Down and Konrad Kay created HBO's "Industry" after having short-lived stints as bankers.
• Now in its third season, the show is poised for a breakthrough, earning rave reviews and a new time slot.

When Mickey Down started working in finance in London in his early 20s, he realized he could literally see his professional future laid out in front of him.

With his office set up so that junior employees "graduated" to a new desk each time they were promoted, the answer to where he could be in 10 or even 20 years at the company was simple: right across the room.

"I felt like, 'God, I can see my entire life opening up, and I don't like it,'" Down, now in his 30s, tells Business Insider.

What's the point of 100-hour workweeks and sacrificing your personal life, he thought, if all it gets you is a bigger paycheck and a different desk?

He left his firm after roughly a year. "I decided I didn't want to spend my entire life pursuing this thing," Down recalls. "First, I'm not good at it. Second, it's going to be the detriment of my soul."

"Industry" is poised for its breakout season

The heart of "Industry," the HBO show Down cocreated with his friend and fellow ex-banker Konrad Kay, thrums with a similar tenor of existential danger. The show, whose third season premieres Sunday on HBO, follows a group of twenty-somethings working at the London branch of the fictional Pierpoint & Co. investment bank, where access to money, power, and influence fluctuates with the whims of tyrannical bosses, Pierpoint's privileged clients, and the market itself.

The drama series delivers both Emmy-worthy performances and juicy scenes of bankers behaving badly — though it was the latter that garnered the most attention when its first two seasons premiered in 2020 and 2022. Why call "Industry" a well-made drama that depicts bankers as three-dimensional characters when you can call it "sexy," "drug-fueled," and "the missing link between 'Euphoria' and 'Succession'"?

Now, after two seasons of flying under the radar and developing a cult following, "Industry" is poised for its breakout moment. HBO is betting on it as the network's next buzzy prestige drama, awarding it the coveted Sunday night time slot once occupied by "House of the Dragon" and "Succession." Reviews so far have been glowing, with season three boasting a 100% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing. With "The Summer of the Finance Bro" already in full swing, could this be the season "Industry" finally cuts through the noise?

Finance didn't prepare the cocreators for running a TV set

The show's success rests on the shoulders of Down and Kay, two guys who admit they couldn't hack it in finance but used their experiences to create one of the most vivid and entertaining portraits of the industry they left behind.

The writing part came naturally; the show-running part less so. Over three seasons, Down and Kay have overcome the strange sensation of going from the most junior person at the bank to the most senior one on a TV set that looks a lot like their former workplace.

"Season one, we basically had no idea what we were doing," Down says. The duo had written and pitched plenty of scripts before, but that never prepared them for what the job would entail once they actually went into production.

"Suddenly, you have to wear eight different hats," Down continues. "You're an HR department, and you're a parent to the actors. You're in charge of putting out fires. You're in charge of scheduling, all this stuff. "

By season two, Down says, "we professionalized ourselves a bit more." They brought in a co-showrunner, Jami O'Brien, and a writers room. Making season three, they felt confident as the captains of their ship.

"I'm sure people have different opinions about what sort of bosses we are," Kay says. They're not perfect, Down adds: they have rigorously high standards. But they were delighted to hear from some cast and crew members who told them how much they enjoyed their experience working on season three.

"It might sound a bit trite and might sound a bit saccharine, but it's very important to us at the end of the six months that people are like, 'Fuck me, I would definitely do that again," Kay says.

'Industry' is the bleakest portrait of the finance workplace

That means a lot coming from two people who created a drama with one of the bleakest views of the modern workplace in recent memory — not to mention one with a very specific storyline about toxic bosses and bullying.

"I mean, trauma begets trauma, right?" Down says, referencing the chain reaction of workplace abuse that Yasmin (Marisa Abela) inflicts on her new report Venetia (Indy Lewis) after enduring extreme bullying from her boss Kenny (Conor MacNeill) in season one.

In real life, HR violations happen, and "Industry" is nothing if not committed to showcasing the dark, cocaine-fueled underbelly not just of the industry on the whole but of each individual character's psyche.

Down and Kay populate their show with colorful characters, from a posh green energy startup CEO with a golden shower kink to a philandering trader with a foul mouth and a secret gambling addiction. Many of them are amalgamations of people they know from running in these circles — because the truth, Kay says, is often stranger than fiction.

Rich people "have these quite unbelievable character peccadilloes," Kay says, adding, "You meet these people, you spend an hour with them, there are seven things that you could pull from that chat that if you dramatize, you'd be like, 'It feels too heightened.'"

So how do you make someone larger than life — say, that CEO who's into golden showers — not seem like a caricature?

"Usually, it's a gateway into a character," Down says of the show's treatment of sex and sexuality. Understanding a character's eccentricities — sexual or otherwise — can shed light on why they are the way they are."

"So we're like, 'Well, he likes…to be peed on. What does that mean? Does that mean that he can control the situation? Does that mean that he likes to show vulnerability without having to actually show it emotionally?'"

Four years into "Industry," Down and Kay are much happier discussing the nuances of creating a believable startup founder than they would be actually working alongside him.

Down says the grueling hours of that early finance job, which prevented him from pursuing writing as a hobby, prompted him to quit wholesale and begin building a career as a screenwriter.

"I really credit finance with pushing me towards it because it's the polar opposite of finance in some respects," Down says.

"I love it," he adds. "I can't imagine doing something else."

Correction: August 9, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of a co-showrunner. She is Jami O'Brien, not Jamie O'Brien.