‘Industry’ Is Back With Boats, Cocaine and Bigger Ambitions

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‘Industry’ Is Back With Boats, ******** and ******* Ambitions

The creators of “Industry” pitched the Season 3 opener to HBO with three words: “Coke and boats.”

“We were like, ‘Don’t ***** us, but this is where we want to start Season 3,’” Mickey Down, one of the creators, said in a video call.

The HBO executives did not want to ***** them. They were thrilled that the show, which follows a chaotic group of young employees at an investment bank in London and often deals with the more specialized details of finance, was going in a broader direction.

While ******** substances are nothing new for the show, most of the action had been centered on the trading floor. The new season, beginning on Aug. 11, opens with a hedonistic party on a luxury yacht, filmed in Majorca. It is a flashback with devastating implications for one of the principal characters, a rich woman named Yasmin, played by Marisa Abela.

“Coke and boats” was just one of the ways in which Down and the other creator, Konrad Kay, sought to expand the show, in the new season, Down said.

HBO hopes that the wider vision will draw a ******* audience. The series previously debuted new episodes on Mondays and now gets a marquee Sunday-night slot, taking the place of “House of the Dragon,” which just finished its second season.

“We have high hopes for the show,” said Francesca Orsi, head of drama for HBO, adding that if “the world embraces Season 3 in the way that we have, both in its critical praise but also its viewership, there’s no question that we want to continue moving forward with it.”

The most obvious example of the ways in which “Industry” is broadening is the setting: The show is no longer tied exclusively to Pierpoint & Co., the fictional firm where it began. The upstart Harper (Myha’la), fired at the end of Season 2, teams with an ambitious portfolio manager (Sarah Goldberg of “Barry”) and plans to mess with her old employer.

The show is also experimenting with a wider array of tones and cinematic tricks. The new season includes a *****-induced hallucination sequence, an episode that plays like a riff on Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” multiple deaths and a mystery, which ties back to that ********-fueled boat trip.

When “Industry” started, in 2020, Down and Kay, who have backgrounds in finance, were green showrunners who wanted to keep their plots as authentic as possible, focusing on young strivers, office hierarchy and high-pressure deals full of financial jargon. (With a healthy dollop of **** and drugs.) Now that the characters have moved up in professional status, the creators thought they could sustain more complex and heightened story lines.

“They’re dealing with covering up murders and all this sort of stuff,” Kay said. “You’re way more inclined to go with it because you feel that, oh, I think of this person as a human being because I’ve seen them get salads.”

The show’s ******* ambitions also include a significant new addition to the cast, who is no stranger to Sunday nights on HBO. Kit Harington, the “Game of Thrones” star, is now playing an aristocrat named Henry Muck, who runs a green-tech energy company; Pierpoint is handling its initial public offering.

“Henry Muck is the first time, really, we’ve had a character in ‘Industry’ who has had a public face,” said Jane Tranter, an executive producer. “So we cast an actor who had a public face.”

At the time the role came along, Harington was looking to return to television. He had been a fan of the show, which evoked his own past on HBO despite the fact that there is nary a sword or direwolf to be found.

“It reminded me a bit of ‘Game of Thrones’ and the nature of my joining that when we were all young actors,” he said in a video interview. “I kind of had a weird sort of affinity to it.”

The presence of Muck allows the writers to ***** deeper into the world of Britain’s elite while teasing out questions about ethical investment, with Pierpoint trying to boost its image by backing a professed do-gooder company. And while Muck considers himself a good guy, constantly using therapy-speak, he is far from Jon Snow, the noble hero Harington played on “Thrones.”

“There’s a sort of bluster that a lot of very posh people, very successful people in the U.K. have,” Down said.

Harington said he had encountered people like Muck in his own life — privileged types who occupy a “gilded environment,” which makes them believe they are immune to the normal rules of society.

“It was exciting coming in and playing, in more than one respect, a disrupter,” Harington said. “A disrupter to their world, a disrupter to this world, someone who sees himself as a disrupter into an industry.”

The arrival of a well-known actor like Harington could also help a series that, through two seasons, has “felt like a bit of a well-kept secret, I suppose, bit of a hidden gem,” said Harry Lawtey, who plays the underachieving Pierpoint banker Robert.

Tranter, the producer, said “Industry” is the kind of series “that you think is just for you, that only you have found.” The hope now is to level up. “There comes a point when you want everyone to find it,” she said.

”Industry” ratings have been minuscule. In Season 2, which debuted in 2022, episodes

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on the Monday nights on which they premiered. (HBO declined to say how much delayed on-demand and streaming viewing added to the overall audience.) The move to Sunday gives the show more prominence in the HBO schedule, and Orsi said the network’s streaming platform, rebranded as Max last year, is positioned to give the show more visibility than it had in earlier seasons.

In the new season, “Industry” continues to rely as much as possible on the trading-floor set it built in Wales back in Season 1, partly for budget reasons. But core characters like Myha’la’s Harper are now off on their own, and even those within the Pierpoint orbit found themselves branching out.

Ken Leung, who plays Eric Tao, a newly anointed Pierpoint partner and one of the adults in the room, said he kept getting surprised by the scripts he was reading. They included scenes in which he dressed up as Henry VIII, and others in which characters go completely off the rails.

“You got the feeling that anything could happen in a show that seemingly is in a very fixed environment,” he said. “Suddenly that’s blown wide open.”

Myha’la said, “When the world starts to open up, the possibilities are endless.”

Kay, Down and their collaborators attribute their boldness to the confidence that comes with experience, which also led the creators to direct for the first time this season. They seem to enjoy keeping their audience (and their actors) guessing, and Down said that in some ways they are even blessed by their “bad title.” While its vagueness isn’t great for online search results, it gives the creators a narrative freedom that they are now fully embracing.

As long as “Industry” stays at least loosely based in the world of business or finance, Down said, “it can really be about anything.”

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#Industry #Boats #******** #******* #Ambitions

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