‘Industry’ creators on 5 choices that saved HBO show from oblivion

Bill Goldman has a well-worn line about Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.” He meant that nobody involved in the making of a movie knows whether it’s going to work, even if they claim to. As first-time creators of a TV show for HBO, we made good on Bill’s words in the most literal sense: We knew nothing.

When we first pitched the show to Casey Bloys and the creative team at HBO, we said it would be “glacially slow, with no big bang theory of dramatics.” Sit in the building that originated “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” and you feel a certain pressure to intellectualize your ideas, to overstress your originality. We should have just said, “Sexy graduate ‘Hunger Games’ on a trading floor.” But we were determined to tell them that the show was more than this, that it had a soul. This was naive. We knew nothing because at that point there was nothing. We could only understand the show by making it.

So many choices that seem hard-coded into the show’s DNA are accidents or evolutions of choices totally out of our control. We watch early cuts of episodes and worry. The show is baggy, dour and a little self-serious. We pace up the cut: we hack, nip, tuck. It becomes kinetic and engaging. We were given the latitude in postproduction to lean into the mistakes and make virtues of them — to cut the show at the breakneck pace that became its hallmark.

Luckily, we cast well — there was something undeniable about the young actors’ freshness and charisma. They made you lean in. Ken Leung made you lean in further. Eric (Leung) and Harper (Myha’la) share a scene and something happens — we don’t prepare for it, but we sense something: the touch-paper being lit. Next time we redraft, we lean into that feeling — a yearning — and it will sit underneath the words of everything we write for them going forward. Is that the show’s soul? We never could have communicated it in a pitch. We knew nothing. Now we know something.

Likewise, its soundscape. The scenes feel a little inert. How to solve that? We hire Nathan Micay. He overlays them with his unique sound. It’s a techno-forward, Michael Mann-coded balm for scenes that need juice. These scenes now seem to swell. Wait: There’s romance in this universe after all. Why don’t we write into that? What if the characters who people reductively call monsters actually love each other but are not incentivized to express it, so they can’t? Have we fallen into saying something about capitalism? Maybe we found another piece of the show’s soul.

We feel the show’s sound design could be more immersive. We realize the show is too dry. We solve both problems at once. We decide that background chatter could be an avenue for comedy. We write a secondary ADR [automated dialogue replacement] script and lay it carefully so it falls between the lines of featured dialogue. Here we find Rishi’s voice. We road test it in the background before pushing Sagar [Radia] and the character to center stage in Season 3. The arc on the writers’ room wall gives you an illusion of control and intention, but the real road is unknowable. Unmapped. Where you land is an act of faith.

We write a two-dimensional finance bro called Robert. He’s a cartoon who loves cocaine and thinks with his d—. We cast Harry Lawtey, who plays him with a boyish, broken quality, wide eyes looking for home. The Robert we initially wrote is dead. The actor — his sensitivity and skill — rewrites the story. Barely consciously, we find ourselves writing a story of escape. How quickly can Robert leave and at what cost to himself? People tell us they think this version of Robert, the one we didn’t envisage and the one we don’t fully control, is the show’s soul. Maybe we are getting somewhere finally.

The making of “Industry” over four seasons is a synthesis of many things. Our own development as creators: trying to be as impartial and brutal as we can, leaning into what we feel worked and doing away with what we think didn’t. The hive-mind of our writers’ room and cast: a back-and-forth that writes and overwrites the characters and their choices, enriching the psychological stock of the soup. The brilliant creative minds of our department heads, who use all their ingenuity to make a show that operates on a fraction of the budget of most streaming-era shows look like an HBO Sunday night event. Our producers at Bad Wolf and collaborators at HBO, who gave the series time and space to grow, to find an audience and find a soul. Bad Wolf’s CEO Jane Tranter, who has shepherded the show from a bag of often contradictory ideas into its fourth season, always called “Industry” “the little show that could.” Somehow, we continue to prove her right.

We are so buried in the moment, the flow of problem-solving, the laying of track to the next shoot day and the next character beat, that we know we can never fully grasp the totality of the work. We will never see it with fresh eyes. We know the contours of every turn and every compromise, and because we never experience it cold, there is a very real sense that ultimately its meaning and its soul has nothing to do with us. It is its own thing, experienced by you.

It’s a truism that working in TV is a collaboration, but the definition is usually limited to a collaboration between people, rather than between the people and the show itself — a living organism that will guide you as to how it wants to be written. It’s constantly speaking; our job is to be alive to transcribe its lessons, metabolize them through our process and put them onscreen as best we can. We still know nothing, but now we have our faith. Things will be revealed in the making.