And so they graduated in a moment when banking wasn’t just a reasonable thing to do—it was the only thing to do. Down’s brother-in-law went to Oxford a half-decade later, Down says, and the plates had already shifted. “No one was going into finance. No one was going into consulting. No one into law.” Of course some were, but the flood, then, was start-ups.
What today?
“Content creation, I guess?” Kay says. “Being your own brand and monetizing that. I find it an unimaginable life.”
They have a laugh about the number of social media influencers at Oxford now.
“I watch them when I’m hungover,” Kay concedes. “I find it really nostalgic.”
In this way, maybe the narrative to date about Down and Kay has been exactly backwards. Industry isn’t really the incredible story of two bankers who somehow become makers of television. It’s really more the incredible story of how two budding television makers were somehow allowed to become bankers.
“I reckon I was the last of the cohorts of people who were getting hired with a fucking humanities degree to work at Morgan Stanley,” Kay says, still marveling. “Because they just stopped doing that cold.”
“Our friend’s an MD at Goldman Sachs now,” Down says, “and I was having dinner with him, and he was like: I would never hire—I wouldn’t even interview—someone who did English.”
“They want quants, physicists, mathematicians,” Kay says. “Which makes fucking sense! I couldn’t do basic arithmetic.”
“Instead of hiring theologians!” Down says.
“I wrote a good email,” Kay says. “That’s the one thing I’ll say.”
After the critical success of season one, Down and Kay were granted another round. They saw it as an opportunity to correct what they considered to be the naïve formlessness of the first season. It’s not uncommon to hear novelists flog their previous books, but it’s less common to hear TV or film creators actively malign their earlier work. Hollywood is a confidence game. Everyone has to pretend to know—and to have always known—exactly what they’re doing.
“But I look back on the first season,” Down says, “and I think: How did anyone follow what was going on? How did you even know what these characters were doing? The adage for the show is: ‘You don’t have to understand finance to enjoy it.’ But we have a sort of sense understanding of that world. If you don’t have that, I think you’d really be lost.”
“For sure,” Kay says. “I think the show had a bit of an identity crisis of just what it was, what HBO thought it was, what we thought it was. The actors are so young that we cast that it couldn’t help but feel YA.”
“It couldn’t be doing stuff that felt like it had stakes beyond the stakes of mixing up the lunch order and pissing off your boss,” Down says.
But what if that was why it worked for people? It wasn’t overdetermined or overexplained. The world was messy and confusing, but the stakes were familiar and incredibly universal. How to avoid fucking up at work in order to turn your very first job out of school into the next job. How to get the attention of the person two desks over. How to make it through the interminable acreage of a hangover at the office. A snatch of conversation. A high-stakes trade. A look from a coworker. A snyth-filled overture that serves the background. The soundscape of the show was like pushing play on Spotify to drown out the sounds of an open floor plan. It felt honest and real. A hang. A vibe. The show connected, I think, because it didn’t have answers to all the standard development questions that usually stop a raw statement of a new live-wire TV show like this one in its tracks before it gets the chance to reach people on their laptops.
