Industry creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay were once ex-finance people trying to make their way in the TV game and throwing ideas around.
At that point, they revealed today they were developing a Tarantino-esque series titled Highway for HBO-owned Cinemax about a Black female highway woman in Regency England, a “gothic idea” that had shades of the Pulp Fiction auteur’s work, for which they had written the first episode.
“We had lots of ideas and a lot of the plates fell and cracked and broke and we basically ended up with this one idea called Highway,” said Down.
Speaking at SXSW London, the pair said Industry producer Jane Tranter, who runs Bad Wolf, pitched both Highway and Industry to HBO and came back with a demand.
“She came back and said we had to make a decision about which one we wanted because we can’t do both,” added Down.
The rest is history. Fast forward several years and the pair are deep in Season 4 of HBO-BBC finance drama Industry, the BAFTA-winning Marisa Abela-starrer that Kay said has had a “reset” for its latest season.
The showrunners are creatively rejuvenated for Season 4 and Kay said he would “love to do a couple more seasons afterwards,” having recently struck a deal with HBO.
“We’re so lucky because Industry is our thing, it’s not someone else’s IP, it doesn’t really come from anything but our brains,” he added.
Taking a “pessimistic” view, Kay said it would be “very very hard” for the pair to get a different show off the ground in today’s scripted climate. “I can’t really imagine it happening unless we had a big name actor or director attached,” he added.
“Being given the keys to an F1 car”
Konrad Kay and Mickey Down
Matt Doyle for Deadline
The creators have spoken in the past about how naïve they were when they first wrote Industry.
Down described the first season greenlight from HBO as like “having no drivers licence and being given the keys to an F1 car.” They wrote the first episode 60 times and had three completely different iterations. “We were told to bottle up that energy we had when going into the workplace for the first time,” added Kay, who previously worked with Down in the finance industry.
Down added of getting the first season greenlight: “We just don’t have the Hollywood method in the UK so suddenly you’re a showrunner of an HBO TV show. I had no experience whatsoever.”
The duo were speaking at SXSW London after Working Title exec Surian Fletcher-Jones, who revealed a new BBC adaptation of A Passage to India.
