In “Industry’s” Season 3, Episode 4 “White Mischief” an “Uncut Gems”-esque ride into the inner world of fan favorite Rishi (Sagar Radia), the hyper masculine Pierpoint trader with a penchant for uncomfortable workplace banter, adds another indelible image to the show’s pantheon of them. While peeing and watching an OnlyFans video (likely that of his coworker Sweetpea) with his baby strapped to his torso, Christmas music lilts in the background, as a drop of blood from Rishi’s nose hits his baby’s cheek.
Creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay originally wanted this scene to be the opening of the episode, an image that’s going to go down in “Industry” history, but HBO told them that couldn’t be the first scene, which they ended up agreeing worked better. “That scene started off as a series of images. We were like, ‘What if we find Rishi in this scummy toilet?’ He’s got his baby. He is watching [OnlyFans]. He’s bleeding on the baby’s head. ‘What is going on in Rishi’s life that all these things are happening at once?,’” Down explained to IndieWire.
Rather surprisingly, “Industry,” the buzzy finance drama about a group of twentysomethings working at Pierpoint & Co., an investment bank in London, might be one of the only shows currently airing on television that consistently has a holiday episode every season. And each of their holiday episodes is a crucial tipping point for the rest of the season with both reverberations up to the final episode and scenes you’ll never be able to get out of your head. Case in point: Season 1’s “Nutcracker” gives us the end of Greg’s (Ben Lloyd-Hughes) arc when he gets incredibly inebriated and runs smack dab into a glass door, many times. It also gave the now infamous scene of Robert (Harry Lawtey) eating his own cum off a mirror when he finally has a physical sexual encounter with his object of desire Yasmin (Marisa Abela). Season 2’s “Kitchen Season,” is a family affair where we finally get to meet Robert’s father, Harper’s (Myha’la) estranged brother, and Yasmin begins to plumb the depths of her father’s infidelities.
Holiday episodes used to be pretty standard fare, especially when network television with 22-episode runs was king. But streaming has changed the television landscape, and now fans are lucky to get a 10-episode season, so holiday episodes have gotten fewer because of the fat trimming of episodes. Down and Kay cite “The Office” U.K.’s Christmas special, “Extras,” “The Royal Family,” “EastEnders,” and “Mad Men” all as having Christmas episodes that they are fans of and frequently watch around the holidays. One of the reasons “Industry” does a holiday episode every season, simply put, is because the guys love the holidays. “There’s a small, quite childish part in us as well, which enjoys the production, recreating it, you know what I mean? We normally shoot in June and then having to put up all these decorations feels a little bit like play and feels quite fun,” Kay said.
The pair also know just how great narratively the holidays can be for storytelling both within the workplace and outside it.
“It’s a time brimming with emotions and it can be very sad,” Kay said. “It can also be very uplifting and there’s great music and all that stuff. It’s great for a TV show or film, but also the phenomenon of a Christmas party is very particular to a workplace and obviously Season 1 was really a workplace drama. Not that Season 2 or 3 isn’t, but Season 1 was really a workplace drama and it felt like doing a Christmas episode and how people behave at Christmas and how it can bring up certain things and it can be quite destructive. It felt like it was a great place for exploration.”
Having their annual holiday episode always adds so much to “Industry’s” storytelling but initially when Downs and Kay wanted to do them, especially since they wouldn’t air in December, they got some pushback. “Some of our producers on the show had some, not the HBO [producers], but some of our other co-producers, our executive producers had some pushback on doing a Christmas episode because they felt like releasing a Christmas episode when it’s not Christmas felt very incongruous. Most Christmas episodes are network and they’re usually released at Christmas. They reflect what everyone’s feeling, whereas to release a Christmas episode in August feels a little bit weird and it throws you a little bit. But I love that,” Downs laughed. Kay jumps in by mentioning that “Die Hard” and “Mad Men’s” Christmas episode both came out in July and August, respectively.
One of the best things about “Industry’s” holiday episodes is just how important they’ve become to the narrative of each season — relationships get more complex and people come and go. Having Rishi as the main focus of this season’s Christmas episode and finally getting to see more into Rishi’s inner world (Rishi Hive is eating well) is expanding the view of the man who seemingly only exists on the Pierpoint trading floor.
Downs and Kay know about the fan love for Rishi and have wanted to do a standalone episode for him since Season 2 and knew it would be on deck for Season 3, but the Christmas element came later. “We were like four episodes into the season, ‘Oh, this could be the Christmas episode. Let’s just put that on top as an extra layer to all the stuff we’re all going to do,’” Downs said. “It just crystallizes everything that the episode’s about. It’s about his relationship with his community, his relationship with family, his relationship with his work. There are moments in it that feel like a Christmas miracle and there’s moments that everything is going to shit. It just enabled us to just turn the dial up on everything.”
Throughout the episode we get to see Rishi’s home life and his marriage to Diana (Brittany Ashworth), whose no-nonsense demeanor makes her a welcome addition. They thought a lot about how Rishi’s home life affects who he is when he comes into work everyday, a place where he feels like The Man. Kay explained, “We should see his home life and we should see that there is a level of whiteness there and upper class whiteness, which even though he maybe doesn’t think of himself as a sort of British Asian guy made good, he thinks he belongs in those circles.Maybe there’s a very small microaggression way that they otherize him and he internalizes that and then takes that into work.”
Getting to explore Rishi at work and his relationship with money and subsequent looming debt was another way for Downs and Kay to explore the idea of performance and identity — something that really is at the heart of the show. “We map them [the characters] out, but scene to scene, we don’t want them to behave the same way because in real life, people code switch all the time and people change their behavior all the time. We have a kind of quite two dimensional laddish character in Rishi, a very funny one, but pretty two-dimensional. How can we give him a hundred dimensions in an hour and say, this is the way this guy is. It’s a kind of prequel episode to Rishi. It fills in the gaps of everything you’ve [previously] seen,” Kay said.
Their holiday episodes also include a ton of small Easter eggs that point to where the season will go next. You can see that with the progression of Rob and Yasmin’s relationship in Season 1, you certainly can see the reverberations of Yasmin’s revelations about her father even in Season 3, and if you look closely enough at the Pierpoint holiday culture from Season 1 to 3 it’s changed dramatically. That’s the other reason why having Rishi as the main focus of this season’s Christmas episode is such an important storyline for the season because it’s another way of exploring the ever-changing world of Pierpoint for guys like him and Eric (Ken Leung) who are beginning to see what being a “company man” actually means.
“He literally says that in Episode 4 as well,” Downs continued. “He’s brought into the idea of a Pierpoint person and he’s been totally institutionalized by Pierpoint. His whole entire personality has been brought up living on a training board for the last 15 years to the point where actually he doesn’t remember who he was before. All that machismo, all that aggression, all that misogyny, all stuff that he thought he had to have to survive. What he’s saying really is ‘If I don’t act like this I dunno who I am.’ He says, ‘As long as I’m making money, I’m free.’ Which is his way of saying, ‘As long as I give myself over to Pierpoint and the institution and I make money for it, then I can do what the fuck I want and I’m allowed to be this person.’”
“White Mischief” is another instantly classic “Industry” episode, and goes into the classic television holiday episode canon as these types of episodes continue to dwindle. Thankfully, we have Downs and Kay holding on to the tradition for as long as the series runs. As Downs reiterated, “I love that we do a Christmas episode every year. It’s become a hallmark of the show in some respects. It’s because we love Christmas, we love the texture, we love the season, and we love what putting that on screen looks like.”
“Industry” is streaming now on Max.
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