‘Industry’ Season 4 Finale With Creators Konrad Kay and Mickey Down

9:55Andy Greenwald:It's the turnstile needle drop. One way, by the way, I'm not trying to spoil your enjoyment of the upcoming last season of Industry, but if you do want a sense of what needle drops we'll be getting, just follow Conrad on Instagram and see what concerts he's been to because we got turnstile and geese in the months leading up to this episode. So the last scene is he comes home from that. He says, I love you. I can change. And then he hears that the police are there. Right. But importantly, he is not arrested. The last thing he does is he offers his arrest.

10:24Mickey Down:And they're like, that's not necessary. You're not even that dangerous. The thing I noted, and we haven't really spoken much about the editing and the pacing of the season in terms of the technical stuff, is there's essentially a smash cut to the sculpted, beautiful face of the actor Edward Holcroft. And he plays the character Sebastian Stefanowicz, who's been kind of in the background for a bit.

10:43Andy Greenwald:He's a reform party.

10:43Mickey Down:And is a reform MP who is very much cut from the J.D. Vance Peter Thiel technologist post-liberal democracy, I believe, both in working people and artificial intelligence and fascism.

11:01Andy Greenwald:He tells Harper he'd like her help in designing a new OS, presumably for society.

11:05Mickey Down:yes uh there is a smash cut to his sculpted beautiful face and it's almost as if another character has been reborn henry died and now this chrysalis could live opens and stefanowitz takes it's like there's always going to be another one that's the thing in this in this world yeah there's always going to be another bank and another politician and another and they They just continue to produce these people to take these roles and to pull the world in the direction that they want them to.

11:37Andy Greenwald:Shout out Edward Holcroft, great actor. We enjoyed him recently in The Agency, the first season on the Paramount Plus Network. This, we could talk about what the character is, what he does, and what he pretends for the future of the show. But I think that the scene you're describing is really important and really artful in underscoring something we've been kind of talking about and teasing a little bit in our conversations about the show. will bring it up with the guys, that I think the comp, the HBO comp, certainly not in terms of quality or longevity or anything, but I just mean in terms of construction and intent.

12:09Andy Greenwald:The comp for the show is not succession, as I think some people have made in the past because it's UK and there's some witty barbs on PJs. It actually is aspirational towards being the wire. And the rise of Stefanowicz in this episode reminded me of the incredible Bunny Colvin appearance in the season finale of season two of The Wire, where we're introduced to, I mean, Robert Wisdom, the actor, is a semi-familiar face even then. And then we're like, well, why are we following this guy? And it's that swagger of like, he's going to matter because all the pieces matter. There's a world in which Holcroft is,

12:44Mickey Down:you know, Stefanowicz is one of the main characters. I assume that he is.

12:47Andy Greenwald:And I'm increasingly excited about the fact that what the guys seem compelled by, sure, is Russian spycraft and Michael Clayton, who among us, But also the way that modern capitalist society is built on these corroded systems that are desperately intertwined and metastasized onto each other. And you cannot tell the story about one great stock hit without also talking about the larger repercussions for society.

13:13Mickey Down:Yeah. And Stefanowicz is meeting with Yasmin and Alexander. Alexander has a kind of neocon suspicion of him. I guess he's a little bit skeptical of.

13:26Andy Greenwald:You won the Orwell scholarship, then you became everything he warned us about.

13:30Mickey Down:Yes. But when he leaves, you see a glimmer in Yasmin's eye that recognizes the future and recognizes that Alexander maybe is fading, and this is the guy who's going to step into the breach.

13:41Andy Greenwald:Rome falls, Byzantium rises. What does Alexander say? He refers to Sebastian's voters as young, murderous, undersexed men. Yes. And Yasmin looks absolutely turned on.

13:54Mickey Down:And I think Stefanowicz calls them working class people across racial.

14:00Andy Greenwald:There is something that is so potent and so fissile here in what they're doing with Yasmin because she is actively turned on by narrative. Like she was trying to sell a television show in Hollywood in 2018. Yes. Like everything is zipless. Everything is meaningless. Nothing actually has stakes. It's just words. And we saw that this path was paved earlier in the season when she greased the wheels for the Nazi banker to write his think pieces.

14:30Mickey Down:Much to Henry's shock. Yeah. Where he was like, how could you have him writing a, you know, he's just an old racist. And Yasmin's like, who cares? It'll be yesterday. Tomorrow's chip wrapper is like this guy's column.

14:41Andy Greenwald:It's fun to see the show interact with, and obviously it's interacting with history and European history. but more specifically for the purview of this podcast with the types of entertainment that we grew up seeing and that your dad gave four stars to in The Inquirer because this made me think of Remains of the Day which is an incredible movie. Have we done that yet for Rewatchables?

15:00Mickey Down:CR Month is a long one. Maybe we get like an agey long weekend. I would love to have Bill do Howard's end.

15:07Andy Greenwald:I'm just saying I'm a veil for that version of the show. Hopkins top seven butler. We got But I think in that episode, sorry, in that film, there's like a muck-like estate, like a rich, posh, old money family. And the way that the essentially bored steward of the family flirts with Nazism. And it both shocks people, but then it also just kind of happens. Yeah, look at the world today. Exactly. And so the way that it's playing with that same awareness.

15:42Mickey Down:Yasmin is a character. In this show, in terms of being a creative, like as a fictional creation for Mickey and Conrad, I've often found very interesting because Marissa Bell is obviously an amazing performer. She's an interesting character, but she's been the odd one out of all. You know, Harper has found her calling in life, which is to be a world killer. She's had people around her. She's studied under Eric. Henry obviously felt like he had some sort of destiny probably to become prime minister or do something really significant with his life and to have the world tell him, you did something significant with your life.

16:24Mickey Down:Even Whitney, you know, whoever, like had these kind of directions that they were going with. Yasmin's flirted with finance. She's flirted with client relations. She flirted with aristocracy. She flirted with comms. And Reeder, she found a role. so we move on to a political fundraiser essentially in Paris

16:47Andy Greenwald:a law skirting fundraiser because the UK, it's weird, they have these things with like laws related to their elections

16:53Mickey Down:you're not supposed to take donations from outside of the country, you can't

16:57Andy Greenwald:although there are shell companies that allow it to be hmm

17:01Mickey Down:well I say him for a reason Yasmin has brought together a group of right-wing luminaries from across Europe to hang out with Stefanowicz in Paris. She has also brought a group of young women, including Haley, including Dolly, who was Eric's partner in the video.

17:21Andy Greenwald:Who we learn, I believe, although narrative is fluid, is not underage?

17:28Mickey Down:I think it depends on how you read what Yasmin said.

17:32Andy Greenwald:Right, we can get into that.

17:33Mickey Down:Men want her to be underage because it is illicit. Girls lie about their age, but girls also discover their womanhood when they want.

17:40Andy Greenwald:I think it's all fluid. I think my takeaway was that it's possible that she was not, but that they fake documentation to scare Eric. Yes. And that the story that Haley and Vladimir Putin told Yasmin is an inversion of that. Yes. That she was always over age or of age and that Eric asked her to pretend to be otherwise.

18:02Mickey Down:Also, I believe present at the Paris party is the barmaid from Henry's town, the estate's town.

18:10Andy Greenwald:I think from who we met earlier in the season. Yes. That seemed familiar. She's the one who thanked her and didn't speak French. Right. I also just wanted to note, one of the cool things about the episode was this off to Paris, where Haley's like, when they say, remember, babe, it's Paris, anything can happen. This is the halfway point in the episode.

18:27Mickey Down:Yeah.

18:27Andy Greenwald:This is, these guys have always been elite at playing with our expectations in terms of runtime. Isn't this supposed to be the end? Yeah.

18:35Mickey Down:So, Yasmin, after this dinner is concluded, it's time to retire for drinks and smokes and young women who sit on these guys' laps and it becomes apparent that Yasmin is essentially running these women and it becomes apparent to Harper who is sitting there with her and is just like, what the fuck is going on? Like, why are all these girls here?

18:56Andy Greenwald:In Yasmin's defense. she's right when she says cock heavy parties are always dead true anyone else want to comment on that?

19:04Mickey Down:I think is your camera right on you?

19:09Andy Greenwald:where's my light?

19:11Mickey Down:and it becomes apparent that Yasmin is assuming the role of a Helene Maxwell and that Harper is appalled and if you think she's appalled at one moment Yasmin shows her the video of Eric receiving favors from Dolly. And it's a great scene just because Harper is, and Mahala is just kind of like working through like what the fuck is happening. And she's like, why are you showing me this? But then the more important question is like, why do you have this?

19:44Andy Greenwald:What are these voices coming out of your mouth? Who are you? What have you become? This isn't you. Take my hand. And then...

19:50Mickey Down:And she says, if you've ever cared about me right now, take my hand and let's go. And Yasmin takes her hand because she has cared about her and does care about her.

19:57Andy Greenwald:And does a godfather kiss.

19:59Mickey Down:But gives her a kiss and is just like...

20:00Andy Greenwald:The Fredo kiss.

20:01Mickey Down:Yeah.

20:02Andy Greenwald:You can bounce. So, it's horrifying.

20:07Mickey Down:It's horrifying also considering her family history, which I think fictionally represents or follows loosely some of Helene Maxwell's background. I think this is Jelaine.

20:19Andy Greenwald:Isn't it the G, I think you say?

20:21Mickey Down:I don't think so, man. I think it goes Helene, isn't it? Kaya, what do you think? as our Epstein expert.

20:26Chris Ryan:Great, thank you. I always thought it was Jelaine. Jelaine Maxwell.

20:30Mickey Down:That's just, I don't trust that.

20:32Andy Greenwald:Jelaine.

20:33Mickey Down:All right. That's okay. Maybe in France they say Jelaine. You don't know her as well as I do.

20:37Andy Greenwald:Clearly.

20:39Mickey Down:My point being, I think this is going to come as a shock to some people. Even though if you look at the breadcrumbs, they may be leaving.

20:45Andy Greenwald:I mean, there's no sentimentality here. And that is something to be, that I respect in the way Mickey and Conrad work. And I think it might be a bridge too far for some viewers of television. I think that's okay. We knew from the beginning, even when we and they didn't know this would be a five-season epic spanning genres and eras, that this was an origin story show because it's about kids starting on the ground floor of a business. That's a really good point. We didn't know it was the origin story of a supervillain, and they probably didn't either, but it's fascinating that they've chosen to lean into it.

21:18Andy Greenwald:And I would push back on one thing when you were saying that we know what some characters want, but not necessarily Yasmin. I would argue it's the opposite. I think that of all the characters the show has introduced, Yasmin has had the cleanest, not the straightest path, but the cleanest relationship to what she wants and needs. It's constantly said. She wants to feel necessary. She wants to be wanted and she wants to be necessary and she wants to have people do what she wants. I mean, she says it this season as well about when she was younger, that's what she wanted.

21:46Mickey Down:It's outside of romance. I think that that's the thing. It's because like, the Rob relationship gave her that in some ways. Yeah, it was. It was, let's just jump in this car and go on a road trip and get out of this place.

21:59Andy Greenwald:She could never actually. And it wasn't enough. The actual love isn't enough. And that's echoed in the very haunting scene where she plays the last voicemail from her father where written into that, every word of that monologue is basically, it's commodity trading. Bring a friend, be you, you're desirable, I've named a rich boat after you, don't bring boys, be sexy, be, have that, there's your value.

22:25Mickey Down:I couldn't help but wonder, Carrie Bradshaw voice, what our dad voicemails would be. Andy? Do it. Recently saw Hamnet.

22:35Andy Greenwald:No, the voicemail, I recently received eight voicemails from my father and I called him back and he said, an article in the New York Times about Tokyo style pizza. Have you, have you heard of this?

22:49Mickey Down:Call me to discuss.

22:50Andy Greenwald:Yeah. So, you know, I definitely played it five times lying on the floor in a bathrobe. And we could talk about it. But so, the interesting thing to me is the Harper of all of this scene. Kwabana says something, and I think we don't need to delve too deeply into this because it's something I want to talk about with the guys directly when we have them on the line. But he says, are you an NPC? And she's kind of been an NPC this season. Harper. Harper. There was a, you and I were joking offline the other day, and I was saying like, the real twist is that Harper's been a ghost all along, like Henry's father.

23:33Andy Greenwald:There's a version of the season where that's true. She profits from everything. She sets some things in motion.

23:40Mickey Down:She doesn't go to Africa. She floats above.

23:43Andy Greenwald:Right. And her own journey is really opaque and off screen, literally and figuratively. She tells squab and oh my mother died the other you know it's it's all internal for her i actually don't know what she wants and i think the potential excitement for season five is this character stepping into what she wants she's not finished she's not done but more specifically fueled by what happens at the end of the episode because i think one of the defining things of the character is that she is post-class post-racial post-american post anything she is just pure id and capitalism. Like, this is the system.

24:18Andy Greenwald:I will win this game. And it is all a game on some level. When she sits down at that dinner, it's Paris, babe. Wear a beautiful dress. And there are Nazis there. And they're like, you're not like the other ones. And then her friend is sex trafficking potentially underage girls. Right. And the actual reality of the people who she does business with, who she associates with, who she becomes close friends with, hits her in a way. I don't think it's any coincidence that the next scene is kind of her, one of her few real emotionally vulnerable moments of the season with Quabana where she says, is it just because you're the only other black person I interact with?

24:56Andy Greenwald:Like the show steers away from things in a ways that can be interesting, counterintuitive. and it ran towards who she is at her core as a woman in the world, as a black woman in this world, in ways that I found really compelling and interesting in what it might mean for a more moral line going forward.

25:15Mickey Down:I think that this isn't really a criticism. I would like to see Harper do something other than short a company next season. Right, yeah. Another note just on the Yasmin stuff, which I think is going to be discussed ad nauseum over the next couple of weeks because it's a major turn for a major character and a really significant show, albeit somewhat of a cult one, but still a very significant show. And it's done quite well this season. I think it's worth noting the scene with her and Hayley when she asks Hayley if she has footage of her and Henry, which I was reminded takes place in a room, I believe, with Hitler paintings.

25:57Mickey Down:So there's a couple of different elements of embarrassment there. But the idea that this is like...

26:02Andy Greenwald:But not the good paintings. Not the good ones. Not those great landscapes. The watercolors.

26:07Mickey Down:The idea that there is compromise on everybody and that rather than anyone being in control, we're all part of this sort of ever-changing, ever-corrupting organism that is the world.

26:21Andy Greenwald:Yeah.

26:22Mickey Down:And that even someone who is positioning herself as the architect of a blackmail ring for, you know, rich and powerful men that she will then shove the way of the world that she wants. Technically, it looks like towards Stefano Fitz's way of thinking. She herself is still under Haley's thumb. I mean, Haley does not say like, oh yeah, you're totally in the clear and I destroyed the tapes and you're all good.

26:49Andy Greenwald:I believe she says, and I wish you took the opportunity to quote the show directly more just for the purposes of Compromat that Kaya and Kai now have. But I believe she says that she masturbates to the game tape.

26:59Mickey Down:That's right. And it reminded me of...

27:02Andy Greenwald:I tried to say that with gravitas.

27:03Mickey Down:A different kind of way of the way Whitney responded to Henry's question about the same thing, where he was like, do you think I'm capable of that? And he said, yes. And he was like, there's your answer. That was essentially, Haley is being provocative about, I find it stimulating, but it's like, it still exists.

27:19Andy Greenwald:The show is achieving rare air and incredibly successful air for this season, which I've struggled with at times, when it steers towards this jaw-droppingly chilling realization on the part of many people, including maybe even the show itself, that we are all trapped in this morally bankrupt panopticon of contemporary existence. And I really liked the construction of the episode that gave space for Bevan's speech at the beginning, which assails the world the way it is from an institutionalist, left-leaning, I don't know, aspirational perspective where she says, it's become my job to be seduced and lobbied and falsely loved so that neoliberalism can continue its decades-long project of gutting the moral architecture of how we govern, said as Bill and Hillary Clinton appear before House Committee.

28:15Andy Greenwald:And then in this same episode, Stefanowicz and the Nazis are like, yeah, this is over. This doesn't work. So we're going to build a new OS based on racial purity and incels. Right. That is the world that we live in. And those are...

28:33Mickey Down:Maybe if Sauron brought those guys to Helm's Deep, we'd have a different outcome. You know what I mean? That's the most... Actually, I think Sauron was looking for that. I was going to say,

28:41Andy Greenwald:that's the most ringer-pilled way to explain our contemporary political moments. I think shows are generally, television shows, even the most forward-thinking ones are generally conservative small c in ways of like institutions will win out. The goodness of people will win out. You know, on Thursday, we were talking about the pit and we're talking about how like the show is essentially about human dignity and how that matters. Like I think that it is not a small thing that this younger generation, the ones who, as someone says in the opening political thing, are the ones left having to foot the bill for everything, are making a television show that's calling bullshit on everyone and not feeling the need to suggest a quick fix, but seeing how people sort of squirm and seek solace and profit in the aftermath.

29:31Mickey Down:It's interesting, I think, this idea of whether or not Yasmin continues as a character, which I suppose we can ask Mickey and Conrad about in a second.

29:37Andy Greenwald:She's continuing as a character. I find this an interesting take by you.

29:40Mickey Down:There's not that much of a significant difference between what happens to Yasmin at the end of the show and what happens to Eric a couple of weeks ago. It is a place you can't really come back from morally, I think. Sure, but they can come back.

29:53Andy Greenwald:Sure, yeah. And I think everyone can and will. I think that's what they've proven by having people just be on call to show up. And you don't actually, it keeps you on your toes. Like, I didn't know Jenny Bevan was going to be a crucial character. Me neither. I didn't know Stefanowicz was going to potentially emerge as the biggest person in season five. I didn't know that there was more Mostyn to play. Sure. including that absolutely stunning scene that we didn't even mention oh the shopping mall scene where he basically relays what Russians do and you get the sense that these these tricky cold fingers of death have touched everyone

30:28Mickey Down:I loved the PM the chief of staff for the PM and Mostyn just being like stop talking about this

30:36Andy Greenwald:and the return of the echo of suicide which is how Henry began the season and then you end in a place where it's like it's very plausible sure for people to commit suicide

30:45Mickey Down:Yes, I thought it was a funny end for Henry's character to be on a boat much like Asmund's father.

30:51Andy Greenwald:Great call. But we can talk about it with them, but I'm curious how you feel, because the setup for the next season, as you said, could be almost anything. Is the show now going to be about, is it going to...

31:02Mickey Down:I have Patrick Raddenke right over here. We can just ask him.

31:05Andy Greenwald:I would love to talk to him about the state of play vis-a-vis the Russians in London. Yeah. Is it about...

31:10Mickey Down:He shows up at the end of this episode, yes. To talk to Harper.

31:14Andy Greenwald:Um, the, I mean, who would you think was the bigger get Patrick Radden Keefe or the chicken shop date girl?

31:24Mickey Down:I think it was probably Amelia.

31:26Andy Greenwald:Do you think, I think Amelia was probably harder to book. I totally.

31:28Mickey Down:With all due respect to the writer of Say Nothing. No, I'm just saying.

31:31Andy Greenwald:Um, is, is the last season going to follow a more traditional narrative where Harper is now a hero who's going to burn down. I don't think so. I don't think that's the worldview of this show. I think that's the conventional version.

31:43Mickey Down:How could you make a show about Harper taking down Yasmin when we're watching it play out in real time?

31:48Andy Greenwald:Exactly.

31:48Mickey Down:The show doesn't lie. It may be fabulous in places. It may embellish. It may emphasize. But it's fairly straightforward. And it, yeah.

31:59Andy Greenwald:We'll talk to the guys about it. But I think the triumph of the season, which, you know, I'm not backtracking my criticisms of the week to week and some of the episodes in the mushier middle of the season. but the triumph of the season to me is the successful argument that it made that it is a show about a worldview. It is a show about a moment and a context that I think we will be poorer for when it goes off the air. They did it. They walked it from one thing to another thing and maybe when we do a post-postmortem we can talk about how we feel about those twists and turns. We're doing this on Sunday night.

32:34Mickey Down:I think one thing we could do is return to our mailbag and have people send in questions. Yeah. So it's the watch at Spotify.com. But without any further ado, let's get into our interview with Mickey Down and Conrad Kay. This episode is brought to you by Hotels.com. Save Your Way is a new feature on Hotels.com and it's as simple as it sounds. When you book a trip as a Hotels.com member, you decide how to use your savings. Take the instant savings now or bank the savings as rewards for later. It's your call, only at Hotels.com. Save Your Way is available to loyalty members in the US and UK and hotels with member prices.

33:06Mickey Down:Other terms apply. See site for details. This episode is brought to you by TaxAct. Like an expert coach, TaxAct offers step-by-step guidance and guaranteed accuracy when filing taxes. Get tips along the way, add expert assist to talk to tax experts and let our experts do your taxes for you with expert full service. TaxAct helps you find the deductions and credits you deserve so you can get them over with. Visit TaxAct.com to learn more. Conditions apply. See TaxAct.com for details. I'm not an astronaut.

33:39Chris Ryan:I don't need an astronaut.

33:40Mickey Down:Audiences have spoken.

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33:46Mickey Down:So, I met an alien.

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34:07Mickey Down:When you want your spring break to feel like... And your kid's pool day to feel like... And your hotel bed to feel like... Ooh, and room service to feel like... Because at Hilton, hospitality feels like...

34:26Konrad Kay:Your cabana's ready. Would you like fresh towels?

34:28Mickey Down:It matters where you stay. Book now at Hilton.com. Hilton. For this day. We are honored to be joined by Conrad K. and Mickey Down again on this pod. I think this has got to be five or six times that they've joined us, including their legendary GameStop episode on The Watch. They've just concluded season four of Industry. The show will return season five, and it's the final season. Guys, congratulations on this incredible season of television. Andy, why don't you take it away?

35:00Andy Greenwald:Yeah, congratulations, guys. I think the GameStop episode was legendary. I wasn't a part of it. So for me, the legendary episode, Mickey, is the episode you did from the delivery room as your first child was coming into the world. I feel like that showed a really, really healthy balance of work life. And I respect it and appreciate it. Thanks, guys.

35:16Chris Ryan:And dedication to the watch, obviously. Yes.

35:18Andy Greenwald:Above all else. And it is noted. Season four was at once the most ambitious season of the show. I think everyone watching and everyone making it would agree there was a change in setting and tone, sometimes in genre. and it was also the most compressed in terms of getting your order for the series, writing it, producing it, and delivering it. So both and. Can you talk us through, Conrad, you want to get us started about how you approached each of those challenges and how one affected the other?

35:43Konrad Kay:Part of the thrill for me and Mickey, and the way to his credit, what they've allowed us to do with the show is to continuously get in there and come with a very fresh mindset of like, almost how much load can these eight hours bear in terms of our ambition for it, without moving the price point of the show that much. The ambition has just grown because as writers and as filmmakers, just year on year, we've become more ambitious about what we think the story can be. The thing we would say to each other is, if we weren't doing industry now, if there wasn't a fourth season of industry, what would we be interested to write it about?

36:14Konrad Kay:So when we got into the room, we were talking about all our favorite conspiracy thrillers. We were talking about Pakula. We were talking about Michael Man's the Insider. Talking about conspiracy thrillers generally. We were like, well, why can't we Trojan Hort that sort of idea into the, what we've already done with the characters. What we thought was kind of interesting to us was the level of reality and verisimilitude we brought to the first couple of seasons meant you had incredible buy-in with these characters already. You were connected to them. They were three-dimensional, hopefully. They were played beautifully by the actors.

36:44Konrad Kay:There was almost... The stakes of the story were kind of exciting for us then because they felt so human and so real. But bolting them into something that felt more propulsive, where genuine threat actually existed at the edge of the world and then in the center of the world, I just kind of thought like that was thrilling. I mean, the compression is, you know, the compression is just the nature of TV. Like, we knew we were up against it, but in a way that kind of, that focused the mind and made us more determined to succeed and sort of like, you know, pull it off. But I'm sure that we'll go through, you know, very imperfections in the season.

37:16Konrad Kay:But in terms of like what we set out to do, and, you know, we've cited many times quite boldly before the season started that we were influenced by Michael Clayton, and obviously Gilroy is a big influence on our writing. I think in terms of what we set out to do, I think we sort of landed in the ballpark of it.

37:32Mickey Down:Mickey, Conrad's alluding to what kind of load-bearing show this is and how it can support all these different ideas and all these different genres, but what's the line of what has to remain core industry DNA? And obviously, there are central characters who we are stuck with, not stuck with, but we are traveling along with throughout this season. And well, I mean, the thing is, is that it's not a sentimental show.

37:57Andy Greenwald:Sure. Drop your anti-Yaz takes now. It's not a safe space. I wasn't.

38:01Mickey Down:It's not anti-Yaz. It's just like putting characters in a position where it's hard to see paths forward for them. Morally. I don't know what you mean.

38:08Andy Greenwald:I saw the finale and I'm rooting for her more than ever. But please, Mickey, you take the floor.

38:11Mickey Down:What is the DNA of industry that has to stay steady so that you guys can then freestyle with other things like genre?

38:19Chris Ryan:First, I will say I think it is a sentimental show in some ways. I think the sentimentality of it is at the edges of it, as Conrad said. There is a romance at the edges of this world. And when it does revere itself, I think it's all the more powerful, given how cynical the rest of the exploration of the world is. And the core DNA of industry, there's a few different things. The kind of intellectual DNA of mining Conrad's voice and the way that we look at the world and the way that we are quite cynical in our take on this world. And then there's a kind of like, we always talked about this thing being operatic and being this huge backdrop that we've painted in this season.

38:55Chris Ryan:And in a sort of Shakespearean way, without being too grandiose, it still needs to have, you know, the sort of the core sort of intimate relationships that, as Conrad said, we've built for three seasons prior. Coming to the show sort of cold in season four and getting this kind of like sort of corporate conspiracy thriller would have felt received version of something else. I think it's because we had the heartbreak, the Yasmin relationship, or we had the Harper-Eric relationship with the core of it, I was interested to see how those relationships would work in this sort of new landscape. And another sort of very practical thing is the show has to be about finance in some way.

39:32Chris Ryan:We've talked about the fact that we wanted to widen the aperture between seasons. We went for a trading floor. We then went to a trading floor dealing with a telehealth company, and then we were suddenly in an actual company in the ESG season. And now we were writing about the intersection between politics and media and finance, but it has to really be about finance. It has to have something to say about finance and how finance sits within that ecosystem. So we're always talking about what's the trade, what is the trade that Harvest put on? And in some ways, this season was pretty simple in that regard, because the first three seasons, I mean, the first season in particular was the finance speak in that season was kind of techno babble.

40:14Chris Ryan:And as we've continued to produce the show, we've tried to make the finance speaker actually story speak as well. And in season four, we kind of tried to present the easiest version of a trading success story, which is Harper is on one side of it, and with Eric, and the Asmund's on the other side with Henry and Whitney. And she wants the thing to go down, and they want the thing to go up. And we thought people would finally have an intelligible finance story to follow. And obviously that didn't happen because as always of industry, we think you've written something really intelligible and it's ended up being incredibly unintelligible.

40:48Chris Ryan:But that's really important to us. Like going forward, you know, I love writing about politics. I love writing about, you know, other classes. I love writing about this sort of entrenched class system, but the show is a finance show. And even though we've like removed peer point, removed the trading floor, removed what, you know, sort of, in some ways, the sort of like anecdotal authenticity of the first season, we're still interested in how finance is driving the story.

41:10Mickey Down:I still have time for any financial technobabble. When Harper's like peel that off into the puke or whatever, when she's like selling, I was like, that's really good.

41:19Chris Ryan:One of my favorite ones, the team.

41:20Andy Greenwald:Did you have a moment though when you thought, when Kenny picked up and he said, who is this? And I thought all of a sudden that's what the season was doing. When he like literally was going to say just ghost, like he didn't know who they were. And I was like, but I guess it's a testament to you guys that I was like, well, they'll probably find a way out of this. We do want to talk specifically about some of the decisions in the finale, but I did want to bring it all the way back to the premiere of the season. There was a lot of labor necessary. No, not labor party, labor in the other sense. There was also, what was the tin can head party?

41:48Chris Ryan:Count Binface. How's he doing in the by-election today, by the way? I don't know if he's standing, actually. We gave him one more vote that he actually ever received in real life. Oh my God.

42:00Andy Greenwald:That was really kind of you. See, it is a sentimental show. You started it in a very interesting place with Tender in the Tender 1.0. with the Whitney and Jonah storyline while you are also reintroducing Yasmin and Henry's status, while you are also reintroducing Harper and Eric. Could you talk a little bit, Conrad, about why you started there and then how challenging it was to bring us from that point all the way to where Whitney ends up? From inception, we were obsessed with an idea of a cold open,

42:29Konrad Kay:which threw you in with characters that you'd never seen before. And there was this really curious balance to strike where, especially when we're doing iterations of the first few drafts of the episode, and even in the cut, was basically we had this constant push with ourselves, push-pull about how quickly, how many minutes of screen time could we have where we didn't have one of, you know, where we didn't situate the viewer in the universe they already knew. Then there were versions where we had like, you know, maybe 12, 13 minutes even of screen time without Harper or Yasmin or anyone being on screen.

42:57Konrad Kay:To us, that was just thrilling. Like, I mean, I think the idea of, the idea of a new company, new voices, for it to be so front-footed in some ways was just, to us, just felt like the boldest thing to do and like given what we did to the show in season three it felt very natural for the next choice after blowing the precinct up to be the boldest choice we could possibly make so that kind of like really energized us and and we were just to be honest with you we were we were really excited to get max minghela's character whitney sort of stood up and up and on his feet because he's a really he's such a different flavor for the show and i think in introducing him to the show you know andy i've been listening to your your season talk about the show and very fairly critiquing it on some of the, you know, you're very balanced in the way you talk about it.

43:40Konrad Kay:But some of the things you've found slightly challenging with this season, I totally agree. And I've been thinking about it quite a lot, your perspective on it. I think a lot of it boils down to a lot of your, the kind of the core of your critique actually boils down to the simple one for one replacement of Rob with Whitney in terms of screen time, because you take a character who in a way with Harry Lorty by design was in some ways such a soulful character, such an anchor in the character and you replace him with effectively a kind of cipher avatar of capitalism maybe the closest thing to an out-and-out villain or sociopath the show has ever done and so in a way and you marry that to the fact that the show doesn't really have much time to slow down because of the necessitations of a genre plot and like that valence I think has really changed the way the show almost presents itself and I think the pilot was a huge barrier to entry in in that regard but it was the thing that we felt you know me and Mickey is so gut-led and And we're so instinctively gut led.

44:36Konrad Kay:And obviously HBO helped us do the show. But when we're in a room together, we really just, we drive to what we think instinctively feels like the best and boldest food of the show. And then because I think by our nature of being a creative duo, we just push each other a little bit over that line. There's very little fear in what we do. And I think that's just a function of the fact that we egg each other on, I would say.

44:58Andy Greenwald:The way you framed it is so interesting and reminded me of the moment in the finale when Alexander is talking to Sebastian and he's presenting this very old world conservatism and it suddenly sounds liberal compared to what the Southern, you've moved the window of acceptability. You take out Rob and you put in Whitney and then suddenly everyone shifts slightly.

45:18Mickey Down:Well, and it's also like Whitney introduces a new level of like reality to the show because if Whitney can do what he's doing, there are certain things that seem then more plausible. Mickey, I wanted to ask you about Yasmin in relationship to Whitney actually because when I have been going back through the episodes from this season, knowing what I know about Whitney now, the performance takes on a completely different tenor. And I will do so with Yasmin, even though the point where she obviously becomes what she winds up being happens somewhat off screen in that kind of time gap or whenever that happens.

45:54Mickey Down:When did you guys start thinking about where Yasmin would end up? does it predate writing season four? Does it go back to the stuff with her father? And is this something that you had been charting for her for a long time?

46:08Chris Ryan:A little bit of sort of yes. Yes, a little bit of both. I mean, in terms of Yasmin's character, both and, exactly. When we first introduced Yasmin's father as a character and the first scene we wrote for him, which is after Yasmin's having sex with Max and she comes out into the living room and she sees her father and the first thing her father says to her is this kind of comment about her appearance. And we actually thought that was kind of just a sort of weird, slightly inappropriate thing that a father would say about a daughter. He hadn't seen it for a while. And weirdly, the way that Adam Levy played it skewed towards more creepy than just awkward.

46:41Chris Ryan:And suddenly there was this kind of relationship there which felt like it had to be unearthed. And then obviously, you know, in season three, this sort of allusions to real life storytelling or real life events, as we should say, are kind of bold and are kind of explicit. it like you know we've had to talk kind of at length in this kind of like round of exit interviews about gillian maxwell and the influence of her on the story and we've been really clear to say that it is not a wonderful one company in any regard and that it's you know it's we borrow from all parts of the sort of you know we borrow from literature we borrow from the news we borrow from contemporary stuff but we did find the kind of biography of gillian maxwell kind of in her early years and her relationship with Robert Maxwell quite interesting and we thought parts of that biography actually like sort of, almost like Wikipedia entry stuff, like the idea of naming a boat after your daughter, the boat which you then die on, is kind of just interesting and salacious and it felt like it was some stuff that we could shade in with the artist's character.

47:42Chris Ryan:We've never been explicit even in Norisa or even quite honestly with each other about what the nature of their relationship was and why it felt why it was so icky. And I think if we were to tell Marisa that, even as directors, she would not be able to play up the nuance and ambiguity that she plays it with. And so we keep alluding to it, but we never come down too hard on it. But I think even though those sort of biographical elements that we injected into the story in the sort of second and third season, I do think there is a kind of like transactional relationship that Yasmin has with people, which has been there since season one.

48:18Chris Ryan:And there's a kind of attraction to vulnerable people. and the need to exploit and manipulate them that's been there since the season's one. She's dealing with Rob the entire time. There's a power dynamics in her sexual exploits. There's the way she speaks to Venetia in season two. It's all there. And the sort of morass of her character just came together to make us feel like this is the character and a person who is a survivor, is sort of an exercise in rationalization and that I can justify all my stuff because I've been a victim of abuse and that me begetting my trauma on someone else is fine because it was begetting upon me.

48:53Chris Ryan:The idea that she wants to ascend to power, would grab onto people who are in the ascendancy, was also something that felt very conjuring with that kind of behavior. So then we just thought, what is the natural progression of this character? What is the natural progression of someone that is an opportunist, who has experienced trauma, who really looks the other way in terms of the political ideology stuff, who really doesn't care about left or right, who thinks about power, and then also has a kind of backstory which she feels can feed that. And we honestly thought, like, push her towards the most heinous version of that character.

49:26Chris Ryan:The audience is not meant to empathize with the character. They're not meant to empathize with any of the characters in the industry. We write them and present them and the audience is allowed to make that up in their mind. We've said previously, like, they're all Rorschach tests for your own prejudice or for whatever, you know, whatever you feel. My affection for Whitney now is sort of telling me. Exactly, exactly. Look, episode six was us trying to shade in a character who, as Conrad said, was an avatar of capitalism and ambition for the first five episodes. But with the answer, look, Maurice's performance of her is empathetic.

49:56Chris Ryan:I think it's just, it's impossible not to empathize with her in some respect. I think that's the reason we thought we could do this, by the way. I think, like, if we had a very cold actress playing this part, we would never push her to this place.

50:08Konrad Kay:Because it wouldn't feel human. The truth is, also, like, before the season came out, there was this very funny Twitter thing going around about how like someone took one of our comments in bad faith and it was all over twitter like it said industry writers make it up as they go along and like mickey said to me very very finally he was like well isn't that just the definition of writing which obviously it is but equally the best thing you know you guys know is this because you're obsessed with long long form returning tv the best thing about long form tv is you you can write a season diagnose it and then the characters reveal themselves through the writing, right?

50:41So like seasons one and two,

50:44Konrad Kay:we were kind of, you know, building this world, building the characters, trying to understand them via writing them and by watching the actors play them because that would inform how we were writing them. And then by the time we got to the end of season three, you know, everything Mickey said holds. The one thing I'd really zero in on is like we were getting into the room and we can't not write about authoritarianism and capitalism because they're very coterminous and because that's been true throughout history. but feels very current to the time in which we're writing. We basically set ourselves a thing of like, in our world, the ascendant power is authoritarian power, right-wing, techno-feudalism, Stefanovic coming from that world.

51:22Konrad Kay:Who is the most realistic character in the insecurities and the desires of the whole, of the tapestry of people we've created who would most likely start to drift like a moth to the flame of that thing? And it became very clear to us that there was almost an inevitability of Yasmin ending up. you know, being a comms director, which is kind of a skill set from almost season two in the private wealth management for this right wing authoritarian. It was kind of like, and the best thing about the story from my point of view, and I know I can speak for Mickey, is that there was no other story for us to tell.

51:52Konrad Kay:It wasn't like, oh, we have a thousand versions of what we can do with Yasmin. It was like, that was the thing, that was the story that was the creative impulse in us had to follow to this logical conclusion.

52:04Andy Greenwald:One of the things that I know I love, that we love about the show on screen in terms of what you get out of the actors and also off screen in terms of our interactions with you guys and seeing the viral dancing videos that some of you participated in, some of your cast participated in, is the closeness that you guys have with the cast. And when you bring them into the family and how they become part of it, it's resulted in a career redefining performance from Kit Harington, which has just been astonishing this season. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the conversations you have with, we could talk about it with Marisa, we could use Kit as an example, whichever of them loans itself more to it, in terms of building them a character ship pointed in the right direction to get them to the places that they end up over the course of a season.

52:50Andy Greenwald:Because the scripts are long, are dense, the scenes are heavy at times. And yet these actors always seem to have a North Star and a compass that I imagine you're providing them with. specifically a question is about like what do they need did marisa at some point say that she needed a club night with harper do you have to have the conversation about why she needs that how do you keep them on the track that you are designing for them as you go along so uh marisa it is a bit of a cop-out answer andy but we've been living with this character all as a you know

53:21Chris Ryan:as a team for the last like essentially the last seven years from inception to to where we are now and they have just both grown the character but also informed our writing of them. So we lean into the attributes of an actress like Marisa has. I know I spoke about the idea that she's a very empathetic performer. She's very funny. She has heart in her performance. She can make dialogue that feels kind of stiff at points or purple, feel completely naturalistic. Like that is what we write towards. In terms of actual, the sort of journey she goes on this season, I think in the same way that me and Conrad approach all the characters, which is a place of love, she has to almost at least understand what is running or what is motivating Yasmin.

54:10Chris Ryan:I feel like if we start and say that Yasmin ends up sort of running this kind of quite controversial sex ring thing, and that's like and I feel like that sort of going straight to like Zed there would really scare her and I feel like it was a conversation that we had which was an evolving conversation about why she's got there which allowed her to get to play that with any kind of heart I feel like for Kit we joked with Kit at the end of the shoot which is like which is that he had essentially just done everything by the end of the season and again like season three Kit we wrote him as this kind of sort of NBA, sort of failing upwards avatar of a sort of entrenched class system where people from his kind of background can kind of just be on a sort of hamster wheel or conveyor belt towards success.

55:05Chris Ryan:And he played it like that. But then he also played it with an incredible amount of empathy when he was doing stuff about his family life and his relationship with his father. And he played with a lot of humor. And then obviously, our sort of mantra in the show is if someone's good you just give them way more to do so when we brought in for season four we would have said like this is what we want you to do which is kind of everything this is the journey we want you to go on we want you to weirdly be a character who is kind of quite rare in this universe in that you have good intentions whereas a lot of the characters here they're kind of motivated by avarice or self-advancement and they know that even they know they shouldn't be doing it but like kit's character henry as is is kind of he's novel in the fact that actually he wants to do better he wants to as you say be a good person he wants to democratize energy and then he wants to democratize banking yeah and yeah he has this as he's there someone says to him like um perry's character or return talks about noblesse of leach and he has a huge blind spot around that because he doesn't really understand the significance of someone from his background telling people what to do in this kind of pretendistic way.

56:12Chris Ryan:But he wants to be better. And that's the thing we kept telling kids, which is like, you want to be a better person. That's the lost after you.

56:19Konrad Kay:And you've got a soul, which like with Rob leaving our show, he actually weirdly became the guy who we started to, we always have to write a sort of Faustian struggle for someone's soul or their morality.

56:32Mickey Down:And all his interactions with Whitney too, you can just see that soul dying a little bit. And he's just like, I can't believe I'm being confronted by Satan. Like, I'm trying to do the right thing here.

56:41Konrad Kay:The other thing to say about the actors is I think they come to the show because, or at least in Kit's and Max's case, they're hungry for the material as well. Because, you know, you said the kid got to redefine himself. Like, they're so good, but they almost have to turn up like athletes because, I mean, Max said that he was almost like blacking out having to learn how much dialogue we were getting to do. But like, it's their level of dedication to meet the material at the level that they think they need to meet it at. Which means that, especially in Kit's case, I mean, for most of the actors, especially the women, the amount of actual direction we have to do to their performance is pretty...

57:18Konrad Kay:You'd be amazed at how low it was.

57:20Mickey Down:As a fiend for Mojitos, I love the thriller aspect of this season. I know, obviously, there's parallels to the Wirecard story in Germany that you guys drew from. I was curious about whether or not getting into this kind of new territory for you in this show, this thriller, this corporate and international espionage story, whether it felt like going back to the beginning of the punk rock origins of the show in the first place, because you're like, you're learning how to tell a spy story and how to tell an espionage story kind of like on the fly. What were the things that you were surprised to find challenging, things that you found surprisingly easy?

57:56Mickey Down:Tell me a little bit about switching up the tone of the show.

57:59Konrad Kay:I'm haunted by a thing that Andy always said a couple of years ago, which is, like you guys have got Sunday nights on HBO. It's the arena. Like it doesn't matter how successful you are. You might never get this chance again. So like me and Mickey have sort of pinned that to our dartboard and said, well, that's the mantra for every hour. But we kind of treat each hour as an event as we write it. So before we even film it or even begin to edit it, where we rewrite it, we set ourselves a target. We have 55 minutes. How do we make it as impactful as possible? And a lot of that really is zeroing in on what we want the tone of that hour to feel like.

58:33Konrad Kay:But like this season we've had, you know, episode two is this sort of period drama, neo-Gothic marriage story thing. And we pin that to the board and right, that's going to be that episode. Episode six is going to have a voiceover for the first time in the show and it's going to have to do all these things. Sweepy is going to go to Garner in five and it's going to be a bit of a riff on Michael Manzi Insider. We start with that kind of like macro idea of that's what's going to make an event for an hour. And then we sort of whittle that down, obviously into breaking the story. I've got to be honest, I guess it's operated from a place of no fear again, and maybe that sometimes shows, and Mick, you can jump in because I'm waffling, but maybe that sometimes shows in the excesses of what we're doing and some of the imperfections of the season.

59:15Konrad Kay:But I mean, I speak for Mickey, I have no idea, but our approach is always jumping in two-footed.

59:22Chris Ryan:Definitely. It's funny, I can't remember what exactly you said, Andy, in the last podcast, but you said something about the feeling that we should have had the confidence, maybe that was the wrong wording, to basically leave all the sort of, the more, I don't know, like espionage inflected stuff about Russia to season five. But then we're only, you know, we're working off your principle, which is like, we've got Saturday nights on HBO. Like, we've only got one chance to do this. We have no idea if we're ever going to get a season five. So we have to basically burn through all our best ideas. Mother Russia waits for nobody.

59:54Chris Ryan:Come on, man.

59:55Andy Greenwald:Later, I talked myself out of it. I think I genuinely admire this, that everybody is a radical until they're actually in the firing line. You know what I mean? What is it, no atheists in foxholes? Am I just getting my war metaphors mixed up? I'm tracking my own creeping conservatism as I watch you guys be braver and braver. And I'll cop to it. Speaking about going for it, this is as good a segue as any. The returns of Rishi and Eric were not guaranteed, considering where each character was left in season three. I think there was a good sense that we had a feeling they would return both because, as we were saying, you guys are pretty fearless about painting yourselves out of corners you may have painted yourself into, but also because Cigar and Ken have become such close collaborators and are brilliant in these roles.

1:00:41Andy Greenwald:That said, their returns were shocking in the sense of how aborted they felt. You know, I think as in viewing them week to week, I was like, okay, well, this is the launch pad for something larger. And there either wasn't room for it or that my thinking was more conventional, that there would be some sort of redemption arc. So I wondered if you could talk about the ways you considered their returns and how you were able to deploy them with the limited real estate left for them in such a large season.

1:01:09Konrad Kay:The Rishi one was quite particular. I mean, we did something which we saw blew up the grammar of the show by having his wife executed a point-blank range in the finale of season three. I think if we thought we were coming back, we might not have done something so bombastic. That said, when we got into the writers room, we were talking about Rishi's second act. Is it a prison drama like the Jacques Audier movie, A Prophet? Are we following him through some sort of netherworld where he has to repay some debts? And all of it started to feel like we were...

1:01:37Mickey Down:Conrad, don't tease me with a good time. come on you can't just drop a profit and then just be like we didn't do it

1:01:44Konrad Kay:that does sound fucking good but we just the truth is we didn't have the real estate to do something like that and it also felt like a betrayal of the rest of the show to Mickey's earlier point about it being a purely you know a show that has to have a bedrock in finance and trading and all of those all of the things that it started about but equally you know we wanted to there's a weird inevitability when you start to break story in a writer's room where you you I think maybe this is what kind of happened with Eric and Rishi, where you start to... It's not like we think, oh, they have to exit in episodes four and six, but there's a way that the story reveals itself as we're breaking it, which feels like, well, this is the organic end point for these characters.

1:02:24And for us, we thought Rishi...

1:02:27Konrad Kay:I mean, I made this joke to Mickey, but how can we take Rishi to hell? Well, we put loads of coke in front of him and Gare sort of drunk coked up Yorkshireman to start monologuing about the late capitalism, the ills of late capitalism. A lot of people have been in that position probably at an after party and wanted to throw themselves out of a window.

1:02:48Andy Greenwald:That monologue sounded a little Conrad-esque after two pints, I got to say.

1:02:52Konrad Kay:I think we're both running our collective subconscious a little bit too close to the bone on that one. Mick, how do we conceive of Eric versus Rishi?

1:02:59Chris Ryan:I also think, obviously, with the Rishi thing, we wanted to just... I mean, we came on the watch after season three and intellectualize that execution of his wife. And, you know, honestly, again, we didn't know we were going to come back and it was quite difficult to write ourselves out of that particular hole. And as Conrad said, we tried to, you know, we kind of conceptualize all the versions that felt kind of received, it's subtle at him being in prison. And we just thought, what actually happens to someone like that that has been spat out by the system? What do they do? Someone that actually feels like they need money, they need adrenaline.

1:03:33Chris Ryan:And I thought like the only thing I can, you know, he has a drug problem, there is very easy access to large amounts of narcotics now through the internet. How do you actually make money in a very short amount of time using a computer and, you know, kind of maybe a sort of pathological entrepreneurship and you end up being a drug dealer? I thought that's quite interesting. I mean, like he's, but then also we talked about redemption and it's funny you keep, you ask about redemption. Your son, my mother is constantly asking me when the character is going to be redeemed. And we thought a character like that, does he want to be redeemed?

1:04:06Chris Ryan:Is there ever any kind of redemption for him? And we talked about, does he decide to go after Harper? Or does he decide to get a backbone? Or does he decide to make restitution for his wife's murder? And we just thought, isn't it more interesting that this guy has just returned to default back in his transactional ecosystem, and actually hasn't really thought about the fact that he was basically the architect of his wife's death. Because he just blinked to it and he's just flooded his mind to other stuff with dopamine and sex and getting head in a car. And I felt like that was the character we created.

1:04:53Chris Ryan:And I felt like it would have been a bit of a betrayal of him to give him a redemption arc. So we thought that's given the worst possible ending we could. and that's not, you know, Saga is a fucking phenomenal actor. And quite honestly, again, like it was kind of an exercise in we love him, we want to bring him back. We could have easily just left him and said, oh, he went to jail or, you know, he's out of the world. And because of the, you know, the quality of Saga and that we love him so much, we brought him back, which is what we do quite often. Eric, again, we had a conversation with Ken at the end of season three, one of the last days of shooting where he was essentially, I think we're done with this character now.

1:05:31Chris Ryan:At that point, again, we didn't know we were coming back, but it really felt like his conclusion had happened. And then again, we love Ken. We think he's like kind of one of the sort of bedrocks of the show. We always joke that in season one, when we had absolutely no idea what we were doing, we just put the camera on Ken's face and he gave it a prestige HBO quality. And we thought we're going to bring it back. And then we thought, okay, what is stuff we haven't seen before? What if Ken, I mean, the conversation with Ken and he wants to do something completely different. he sent us that Samuel Johnson quote, which he uses in the crossword.

1:06:05Chris Ryan:And we just thought about an arc where he is trying really, really hard to be a better person. He has, as he said, lived the life of leisure, lived the life of, you know, what does he say? He's lived, like, it's all leisure, all business, and he hasn't been able to really square the two together. And practically, we wanted to see him work with Harper. We wanted to see him kind of back on his feet. We wanted to see him successful in the professional capacity. But then again, like all these characters in some ways always revert to the norm. They always, when obstacles are put in front of them, they go back to what is easy.

1:06:44Chris Ryan:And we gave him a very kind of awful and operatic ending, which we were kind of scared. We were like, oh, is he going to push back on this? Is he going to think this is too much for the character? But I think he didn't, you know, he sends us lots of questions about the finance and stuff. he answers lots of questions for the character. That was one of the things he really didn't even question because he thought it was a kind of fitting end to the character.

1:07:03Konrad Kay:He finds himself blackmailed, but what he chooses to do with the blackmail, how he signs the fund over to her, I mean, he doesn't know whether the woman's underage or not when it happens. I always think of it as a kind of last stand when he goes on CNN. I mean, Mickey joked about it being like the Eminem 8 Mile beat, where he basically lays out everything that's wrong with him. But to me, it feels like an ownership of his sins.

1:07:24Andy Greenwald:You guys have been very generous with your time, and we know you've got to get back to season five. So if you'll allow one last question that starts with a character, and then I'd like to leave you a little room to walk us into where you're thinking for season five without giving too much away. The character I wanted to focus on for the last question is Harper. I thought it was really fascinating that Kwabana says, you're like an NPC, because that was a lot of the role she played this season. I was joking with Chris earlier that there's a version of the show where she's also a ghost for episodes at a time, much like Henry's father was.

1:07:53Andy Greenwald:and I thought it was really interesting in terms of your storytelling decision making process and also what it might portend for the future of the show that she is floating above it. She's profiting. She's opaque about her feelings. She's not being honest with anyone and then she sat next to two Nazis and her best friend turns into a sex trafficker and suddenly the sort of high-minded profit overall, she's post-racial, she's post-national, she's post-everything.

1:08:18Mickey Down:World killer.

1:08:19Andy Greenwald:She's, the world catches up with the world killer. And I found that to be a really interesting choice, especially for a character that often doesn't remark on her differences in the world that she's dominating. And I wondered if there's some insight there into where she might be going in the final season and where the show might be going as well.

1:08:35Chris Ryan:Harper has essentially been living in this peer point kind of ecosystem for the last two seasons. She's out of it in the third season, and all she wants to do is get back into it. she gets into the season four, she has a huge amount of success. As you said, Andy, she's basically moved through these rooms, hasn't really had any kind of conversation about her own identity, really only had her full and accelerated the entire time, like lent into the transnational relationships she has and hasn't really thought about the consequences or cost of it at all until really bad things start happening to her, like her colleagues start getting assaulted for her in pursuit of what she's been doing.

1:09:21Chris Ryan:And then she's rich, she's successful, the tender shoulders were. And suddenly she finds herself in a room with the people who she thought were her peers. And she realizes that she hold really damaging and horrible views. And it's like having a bucket of cold water portal. Being like, actually, these are the kind of people that the thing that you have invested your entire life in, that this is the thing that actually ends here. It ends with these kind of people. It ends with Conrad Selleck's sort of coterminous relationship between authoritarianism and capitalism. She has a conversation with Quabiner and I think it kind of unlocks to her that she's been really focusing on the wrong thing.

1:10:01Chris Ryan:I'm not saying that she's going to have a complete 180 around her character. She's not going to lead into every empathetic or connected relationship she has. But she's allowed to start thinking as actually a human being and she's allowed to start to be honest about her own relationship with her own ambition, relationship with other people. It's unlocked something for us. It's unlocked a new part of Harper. And we joked when we started writing season four that the trick of the season would be to take Yasmin, who was this kind of ingenue, sad girl, scared of her own shadow, and turn her into the thing that she's become, which we still think is an inevitable conclusion of her.

1:10:42but also to take Harper

1:10:44Chris Ryan:who was this kind of go-getter obsessed of her own ambition who believed that she lived in a meritocracy realizing that actually the thing, as I said, the thing that she'd been pursuing might not be edifying and actually there is a world where actually a connected relationship is good for you.

1:11:00Konrad Kay:The problem with Harper's arc versus everybody else's arc this season is it's been much quieter. Mahal has played it much more quieter. I think actually just in a very bombastic, operatic, leave it all out there. slightly dense, literary, maybe even overwritten season on some of the characters' part. Her arc has been one of the quieter, more subtle ones to Mickey's point. I think the tent holes of all of the moments Mickey just laid out, her treatment of the first time she shows pastoral care to sweet pea and gets her thrown back in her face, her having to learn how to be a boss, her losing Eric in the way she loses him and then learning to him in the same way.

1:11:39Konrad Kay:Those are elements of the thing that Mickey's talking about, which is like her dark, great white heart, great white shark heart sort of opening and allowing the possibility of light into it at the same time as Yasmin, which was much opener, much more open, at least superficially, becoming a bit more like bitumen black. Like those two, the characters are always in conversation with each other as a kind of yin and yang. While it would be too crude to say we wanted to leave them in like diametrically opposed places, it did feel like, felt like good eight-hour serialized storytelling to take them to a place where things have profoundly changed for both of them.

1:12:15Konrad Kay:And I just think, I think because Yasmin's is effectively so loud and so operatic and so tragic, Kits is so loud and, you know, Whitney's Whitney. I think Harper's is, and Eric obviously exists in this sort of spectacular, almost mob hit kind of way. I just think the Harper story is quieter.

1:12:31Mickey Down:It's still amazing though because she winds up with$2 million. You know what I mean? $2 million, that's more valuable. $2 million. But like it's, to your point, Kyra, It's like the win is almost less significant than the size of the losses that other people experience. So that almost feels less... It doesn't grab the headlines the way that the other characters will coming out of it.

1:12:50Konrad Kay:The morality of it is really important because it's like, if we're doing the final season and we know we're going to write towards an ending, it'd be very weird for the characters and especially the lead character. It's good TV for her to have a film the accelerator the whole time. You know, win all costs, hell be damned. But for her to not engage once she's at the top of the mountain with what that actually literally means to her day-to-day life, her feeling about herself would be really weird. It would lack a kind of interiority that would be very strange. It would feel more like network television than an HBO show.

1:13:20Andy Greenwald:Is it fair to say that that awareness is leading you into season five, that that is a window into where you're thinking? Or is it purely a profit prison drama?

1:13:29Chris Ryan:I think if we were doing 10 seasons of this, I think we'd have to like maybe pause that character evolution. But I think the fact that we've left her where he is, it's kind of telling about what we're going to do next.

1:13:40Mickey Down:Thank you so much for the show. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. We hope we can have you guys on again, maybe to discuss more about season four, but good luck right in season five.

1:13:50Andy Greenwald:Or just your favorite French prison movies because we've all got a list.

1:13:52Mickey Down:And also a French prison movies festival. This is the safe space. Thank you guys. You guys take care. Great to see you guys. Good luck to you guys.

1:13:57Chris Ryan:Anytime. Thank you guys.

1:14:05Thank you.