Rob grows out his hair for that coda, for that pitch.
Mickey Down: The fuckboi Gen Z haircut.
Exactly. Was that the Gen Z Don Draper meme?
Mickey Down: [laughs] He does look like that.
Speaking of Mad Men and The Sopranos againâwere there scenes or moments or specific references from those two shows that you baked into this season, or is it a general sense that you guys are just very familiar with those shows, know how they work, know how lines sound that kind of pervades the writing of it? Iâm thinking in particular of Robâs trip, for example, which reminded me of a dream sequence from The Sopranos.
Mickey Down: Those episodes are my favorite episodes of The Sopranos. Theyâre obviously very contentious and polarizing because people absolutely fucking hate them. But I love them. âJoin the Clubâ [The Sopranos Season 6] is my favorite episode of The Sopranos. I think that The Sopranos and Mad Men, I just jump back and forth which one I prefer and The Sopranos is probably the best, one of the best pieces of art ever, and and takes the biscuit, I think, because it just, firstly, precedes Mad Men, so Mad Men stands on the shoulders of it. And also Mad Men does this as well, but The Sopranos takes so much care over its secondary characters to make them three dimensional and to build inner lives for them. And thatâs something I think we try and do in Industry. But every single character has to feel like thereâs a whole hinterland beyond.
Konrad Kay: You can follow them.
Mickey Down: Yeah, you can follow them. We can do a Rishi episode of anyone in the show and they have to feel interesting. They canât just be there for plot, they canât be caricatures, they canât just jump in and deliver deus ex machina stuff and walk off. They need to be fully fresh characters and I think thatâs the thing that Mad Men and Sopranos did the best. Also, theyâre dramas that are just relentlessly funny all the time, especially The Sopranos. The Sopranos is funnier than any comedy, even though itâs the most dramatic show thatâs ever been on TV.
Konrad Kay: Thereâs a feeling you want to conjure, which those shows conjure, which is like when they really, what that expression you like touching the third rail or whatever. Thereâs a bit where those things just take fucking flight, right? And âJoin the Clubâ is a great example. âJoin the Club,â the last three minutes of that, the last three minutes of âSignal 30â [Mad Men Season 5], youâre just like, itâs the best show of all time operating at its absolute peak. And so I think going back to Mickeyâs point about cuts to black, I do think the feeling you are left with on the cut to black is the feeling that you remember about the episode. So Yasminâs confession to Rob, or Rishi outside the pavilion, the needle drop in that, I think you walk away from that and it puts something into your body that the rest of the episode just doesnât do. And itâs something that lingers. The end of âJoin the Clubâ is something I think about all the fucking time. Always the music, the drop, every single shot choice in it. Yeah, I think itâs perfect. So itâs a long-winded way of saying we think long and hard about that, that feeling that we want the viewer to leave the episode with, which is a musical thing as much as anything really, I guess.
