Industry Finale: A (Spoiler-Packed) Season 3 Exit Interview With Creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay

Rob grows out his hair for that coda, for that pitch.

Mickey Down: The fuckboi Gen Z haircut.

Exactly. Was that the Gen Z Don Draper meme?

Mickey Down: [laughs] He does look like that.

Speaking of Mad Men and The Sopranos again—were there scenes or moments or specific references from those two shows that you baked into this season, or is it a general sense that you guys are just very familiar with those shows, know how they work, know how lines sound that kind of pervades the writing of it? I’m thinking in particular of Rob’s trip, for example, which reminded me of a dream sequence from The Sopranos.

Mickey Down: Those episodes are my favorite episodes of The Sopranos. They’re obviously very contentious and polarizing because people absolutely fucking hate them. But I love them. “Join the Club” [The Sopranos Season 6] is my favorite episode of The Sopranos. I think that The Sopranos and Mad Men, I just jump back and forth which one I prefer and The Sopranos is probably the best, one of the best pieces of art ever, and and takes the biscuit, I think, because it just, firstly, precedes Mad Men, so Mad Men stands on the shoulders of it. And also Mad Men does this as well, but The Sopranos takes so much care over its secondary characters to make them three dimensional and to build inner lives for them. And that’s something I think we try and do in Industry. But every single character has to feel like there’s a whole hinterland beyond.

Konrad Kay: You can follow them.

Mickey Down: Yeah, you can follow them. We can do a Rishi episode of anyone in the show and they have to feel interesting. They can’t just be there for plot, they can’t be caricatures, they can’t just jump in and deliver deus ex machina stuff and walk off. They need to be fully fresh characters and I think that’s the thing that Mad Men and Sopranos did the best. Also, they’re dramas that are just relentlessly funny all the time, especially The Sopranos. The Sopranos is funnier than any comedy, even though it’s the most dramatic show that’s ever been on TV.

Konrad Kay: There’s a feeling you want to conjure, which those shows conjure, which is like when they really, what that expression you like touching the third rail or whatever. There’s a bit where those things just take fucking flight, right? And “Join the Club” is a great example. “Join the Club,” the last three minutes of that, the last three minutes of “Signal 30” [Mad Men Season 5], you’re just like, it’s the best show of all time operating at its absolute peak. And so I think going back to Mickey’s point about cuts to black, I do think the feeling you are left with on the cut to black is the feeling that you remember about the episode. So Yasmin’s confession to Rob, or Rishi outside the pavilion, the needle drop in that, I think you walk away from that and it puts something into your body that the rest of the episode just doesn’t do. And it’s something that lingers. The end of “Join the Club” is something I think about all the fucking time. Always the music, the drop, every single shot choice in it. Yeah, I think it’s perfect. So it’s a long-winded way of saying we think long and hard about that, that feeling that we want the viewer to leave the episode with, which is a musical thing as much as anything really, I guess.