Editor’s note: Deadline’s It Starts on the Page (Drama) features 10 standout drama series scripts in 2025 Emmy contention.
HBO’s Industry, colloquially considered a cunning younger sibling of sorts to the network’s Emmy juggernaut Succession, began as a word-of-mouth underdog that is now poised to hit the Emmys as a hot prospect with its third season. The finance drama, created by lapsed investment bankers Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, details the vertiginous rise and dizzying crash of the high-stakes trading world of the prestigious firm Pierpoint and its power-hungry upstarts.
The crop of young bankers — Harper (Myha’la), Yasmin (Marisa Abela) and Rob (Harry Lawtey) — aren’t the only lot to have raised their capital: Season 3 has upped the ante not only in its world-building but also in its awards showing, garnering a Critics Choice nomination for Best Drama Series and a first major win with Abela clinching Leading Actress this month at the BAFTA TV Awards.
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Below, Down and Kay share the screenplay for Episode 304, titled “White Mischief,” which was written by the duo and directed by Zoé Wittock. It’s among the first episodes to go off-script, so to speak, dedicating its entire runtime to exploring the self-destructive exploits of Rishi (Sagar Radia), an associate at Pierpoint with a troubling gambling problem whose debts loom over his marriage, professional stability and bodily safety. (Spoiler alert: The loan sharks eventually come to collect, leading to an explosive and tragic finale.)
In their intro, Down and Kay reveal the Season 2 scene that inspired “White Mischief,” explain why the script was “screenwriting 101 on steroids” and list the most fun lines they came up for it.
There was a sequence at the end of Episode 2 of Season 2 — Harper executing a big trade for her client Jesse Bloom — where we felt we captured a certain level of hyper-engaging anxiety and watchability. When we went into the Season 3 writers room, we set ourselves a challenge: could we write a full hour of TV that sustained that level of tension? An episode where you felt the stakes in your gut and routinely had to watch through your fingers.
We felt like Rishi was the perfect fit for the challenge. We knew Sagar Radia was charismatic and magnetic enough to carry it and we felt like Rishi was fast-talking and unpredictable enough to sustain the kinetic momentum the episode would need. Rishi was in some ways the show’s secret weapon: a retrograde philosopher-king capable of saying just about anything. But could he be more than just a vehicle for caustic, bawdy lines and pitch-black humour?
Our thinking for the episode was simple: peel back the layers of his character while throwing as many obstacles at him as possible. Never let him off the hook. If we can turn the screw on him, do it. Try and show how lost he is in the maze of his profession and the maze of his self. Basic screenwriting 101 really — on steroids.
Despite all the helter-skelter plot pyrotechnics, we wanted to also try and find smaller, quieter grace notes — windows into his soul. The demarcation between the professional and the personal has always been at forefront of our thinking when writing the show. With this episode we wanted to show how indivisible they were: how what was expected of him at the office forged him and bled into his marriage. The performative nature of a kind of turbo masculinity, British-Asian class and racial anxiety, the interchangeability of financial markets and the roulette wheel, the modern office as a site of the culture wars — all of this and more swirled around as we discussed the scenes.
The episode was incredibly fun to write — how could an episode with lines like “how does a veal calf suck c*ck?” and “fate is shaving her c*nt just for me,” not be? Zoé Wittock did a great job getting a powerhouse, nuanced performance out of Sagar. We are obsessive when it comes to our cut-to-black moments and Wu-Tang dropping over Rishi’s battered face as he steps back onto the hamster wheel of his own self-destruction felt particularly potent to us. Think the technical term for it is: good sh*t.
Mickey Down and Konrad Kay
Read the screenplay below.
: Read ‘Industry’ Episode 304 Script “White Mischief” With Foreword By Mickey Down & Konrad Kay){kind=link}