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“Industry,” a tale of Gen Z bankers and a chaotic tech founder, has become an heir to “Succession” just as HBO and its corporate parent could use a breakthrough hit. Plus, what else to watch this fall.

Konrad Kay and Mickey Down were out at a party near the end of 2023 when they received word from HBO that their show, “Industry,” would move from its home on Monday evenings to the television industry’s premier time slot: 9 p.m. on Sunday, a position HBO had previously given to the likes of “Succession,” “Game of Thrones” and “The Sopranos.”

At that point, they had already finished filming the third season of the London-set show, which centers on a trio of young, attractive bankers striving to find professional success and something resembling personal contentment in the cutthroat world of finance. The career-redefining call that the pair received mid-party seemed like a scene out of “Industry.”

“They’d seen the first couple of episodes of the [season],” Down, 35, recounted earlier this month shortly after the third season’s debut. “They were really impressed with how it leveled up.”

This show of faith in the series—which had developed a cult fan base but had yet to achieve the monster ratings or awards-ceremony hauls of other HBO fare—has signaled the potential anointment of “Industry” as the water-cooler show (or, uh, the TikTok For You Page show) of the moment. “Me and Mickey grew up watching HBO, so all of our favorite shows are ‘Sopranos,’ all this stuff,” said Kay, 36. “Obviously to be in that legacy is very fun for us. But from just a practical point of view, we were very excited that more people were going to see it.” Down added, “I think someone’s always thinking, ‘What’s on HBO on Sundays at nine?’”

Nothing HBO has put on Sunday nights since “Succession” has captured the cultural zeitgeist quite like the Roy family was able to. That has created a cultural vacuum—and a corporate challenge. The network’s decision to anoint “Industry” as its surprise heir to “Succession” is a reflection of a fractured moment in the media industry and underscores how topsy-turvy the past few years have been for HBO and its corporate parent, Warner Bros. Discovery. Both could really use the type of hit “Industry” seems to be growing into, and if the show continues on its trajectory, it might go a decent way toward assuring viewers and investors alike that HBO—a Warner Bros. Discovery crown jewel—hasn’t lost its magic.

Kay and Down both noted the handful of factors that may have contributed to the decision of HBO brass, including the slowdown caused by last year’s Hollywood writers’ strike. That didn’t affect production of “Industry,” which is filmed in the U.K. with a local production company, but it slowed down work on HBO’s U.S.-based productions.

“Some part of it was a function of the fact that there were two strikes and there were a lot of things that just had to pause,” Down said. “So I think it was a mixture of the fact that there was availability and the fact that they were really happy with the season.” Another draw may have been that this season features two high-profile guest stars: “Game of Thrones” veteran Kit Harington as Henry Muck, posh CEO of a green tech company, and “Barry” alum Sarah Goldberg playing Petra Koenig, a steely portfolio manager. (Come to think of it, Harrington enters the fray as a now-familiar prestige TV archetype: the eccentric tech billionaire who arrives to cause some chaos, à la Alexander Skarsgård and Adrien Brody on “Succession” and Jon Hamm from Apple TV+’s “The Morning Show.”)

HBO’s bet has paid off so far. While the first two seasons of the show—released in 2020 and 2022, respectively—earned the show its fair share of admirers (particularly among the “very online” cohort), this third season has debuted to its strongest ratings yet in the new time slot. Per The Wrap, the third-season premiere on August 11 saw a 60% increase in viewership from the season two premiere; and the show achieved an audience record in its third episode, with 370,000 “cross-platform viewers.”

Though the show features its fair share of finance-world jargon and conference-room maneuvering, there are also ample servings of sex, drugs and (friendly-ish) name-calling. Subsequently, the show has received a marketer’s dream of a shorthand as “Euphoria” meets “Succession,” a labeling the pair responds to with something of a shrug. “It’s cute,” Down said. “It feels like an easy way of categorizing it. If it helps people find the show, then that’s fine.” Kay added, “It’s good marketing in the sense that they’re both HBO shows and both big smash hits. So it makes total sense.”

“Industry” has won fans like Matthew Ball, a Makers Fund venture partner, who has come to appreciate its similiarites to "Succession, which include its “high-stakes corporate drama, protégé versus titan tit for tats and globe-hopping retreats,” he said.

Down and Kay—who dress with the chic panache of TikTok menswear influencers—were best friends at Oxford University and both went on to land banking jobs, including a three-year spin at Morgan Stanley for Kay.

After moving on from that gig, Down wrote a handful of plays, and then went into TV and film work. Kay eventually joined him, and they started working on “Industry,” basing the fictional bank, Pierpoint, in the show on their own trading-floor experiences.

Kay and Down describe themselves as “terminally online,” which is not surprising given the extremely on-point references and cultural touch points woven into the scripts. “I have a very well-curated Twitter feed, if I say so myself—that’s where I get all my news,” Kay said, also citing The New Yorker, Graydon Carter’s “Air Mail” newsletter, The Atlantic and culture newsletter “Dirt” as his go-to media outlets.

Both Kay and Down regularly repost “Industry”-related memes and screen grabs. And while most showrunners and other creatives publicly act as if they never so much as glance at the comments, the duo is very open about the fact that they scour the online reaction to the show.

Kay explained that scanning Reddit can sometimes help him discern what aspects of the show are landing with the audience, and he often finds it “constructive and not destructive” to keep up with the conversation. “Obviously me and Mickey are obsessed with the details of the show,” Kay said. “So I like it when a joke that I think only me and Mickey are going to get, there’s some guy on Reddit who has pulled that line out and it’s got 30 upvotes. I f*cking love that.”

The third season’s central focus concerns the arc of Harrington’s Muck, who works with Pierpoint on his energy company’s IPO to somewhat mixed success (the real-life volatility of the IPO market is entertainingly reflected). The pair asked themselves what kind of individual would be leading a company like this in the U.K. and started to shape Harrington’s character, who frequents members’ clubs and attends Burning Man–style psilocybin circles (and whose uncle owns a tabloid, of course). In the end, Harrington ends up resembling a mashup of Kendall Roy, Elon Musk and, say, Jack Dorsey.

“Let’s just make this character feel like he’s the most entitled character we’ve seen but with a sense of altruism, which is genuine and isn’t totally insincere,” Down said of their initial crafting of Muck. When they cast Harrington in the role, they infused the portrayal with the actor’s sense of humor. “Let’s make this character a little bit bumbling, flying by the seat of his pants constantly, very educated, with this illustrious background, but—” and Down switched into the Muck character’s wobbly speech cadence here: “‘Obviously I’m in this position, but also I can’t quite believe I’m in this position where I’m in charge of a thousand people and two billion pounds of revenue.’”

Despite the similarity of Muck’s last name to that of a certain Tesla founder, the duo dismissed a suggestion that Elon may have inspired the character. “It was more a composite of people we know,” Down explained. “And a composite of an idea of what a tech founder in the U.K. would be.”

When Harrington’s character finds himself at a low point, he looks for meaning outside himself. “A lot of those people turn to psychedelics…to try to reach a higher plane,” Down observed. “I know that’s a reflection of how lots of people in Silicon Valley feel, but it’s also a reflection of how young people who have a lot of success in the U.K. and Europe feel.”

The duo is also directing for the first time this season and helmed the season’s final two episodes together. “That’s a privilege that HBO gave us,” Down said, describing how much they enjoyed sitting in the directors’ chairs. “I think we know its DNA well enough [now] that we can be quite precise about the way that we direct stuff.” Kay added, “We knew exactly what we needed to get out of those performances. We’re very fast. We’re focused.” (Surely that’s music to an HBO executive’s ears.)

While the show hasn’t been officially picked up for a fourth season, Kay and Down grin when asked if they’ve started devising a story for more “Industry.” “We’ve thought about it a lot,” Kay said. “We’ve pitched it to HBO. We’ll see if there’s any appetite to do it.”

And, yes, they recognize the pressure they’re under with the shift to Sunday evenings. “The good thing about Sundays at nine is if we get to do more shit,” Kay said, “it’s going to really keep us f*cking honest.”