But his career was just beginning.

Schur is one of the most prolific creators and showrunners in TV history. After leaving SNL, he joined Daniels on the American adaptation of the British series The Office, then worked with Daniels again to co-create Parks and Recreation. From there Schur co-created Brooklyn Nine-Nine with Dan Goor, and went on to create The Good Place and co-create Rutherford Falls.

He returns today with Season 2 of Netflix’s A Man on the Inside, which he created based on the documentary The Mole Agent. It re-teams him with The Good Place star Ted Danson, who plays a widowed professor,. In Season 1 he went undercover in a nursing home to investigate theft, and this season he’ll go undercover at a university. Season 2 will also pair Danson with his real-life wife Mary Steenburgen, both of whom Schur honored at the Emmys in September.

Schur has also served as an executive producer of Master of None and Hacks, and his many other credits include co-writing the devastating “Nosedive” episode of Black Mirror. He’s currently working on the upcoming series Dig with Parks star Amy Poehler.

But Schur is also prolific when not working in television. For 12 years, he has co-hosted The PosCast, a podcast mostly about baseball that tends to drift into other subjects as well. And he’s behind the Ken Tremendous social handle, where he wittily bounces from observations on baseball to television to politics. One recent day — following Jimmy Kimmel being pulled from the airwaves at the behest of the Trump Administration — he wrote succinctly: “I’m a single issue voter, and my issue is ‘the government shouldn’t be fascist.’”

How sharp is he? So sharp that when, during our interview, we struggled to remember the word referring to the love words, he quickly suggested: “logophilia?”

But when we pressed him on how he became so productive, he stressed pragmatism, not preternatural recall. 

And gave a lot of the credit to his many collaborators.

Mike Schur on SNL and Weekend Update

MovieMaker: Not everyone who’s a writer on SNL goes on to create or co-create so many shows. How did you become a showrunner, many times over?

Mike Schur: There are sort of two big jumps, I would say. The first was at SNL. Weekend Update is its own little mini show within a show. It’s a 10-minute chunk of the show that requires its own little staff.

After I’d been there for a couple of years, my friend Rob Carlock had been running it with Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon anchoring, and he left to go write for Friends, and I remember thinking, “Who’s gonna take that job? That seems hard.” And then SNL producer Mike Shoemaker was like, “Hey, we want you to take over Update.” And I was like, “I don’t know how to do that. What are you talking about?”

He said, “It’s easy — you’ve got a couple writers, you write a bunch of jokes, and you go through the jokes, you pick the best jokes, choose graphics, you do this, you do that. Yeah, it’ll be fun.” It was an early lesson in the fact that sometimes it seems like, “Wow, the people who are running that or doing that job must really know what they’re doing” — and no, they don’t. They were just there at the moment that they needed someone, and they stepped in. 

MovieMaker: This was at the start of the 2001-2002 season.

Mike Schur: Two weeks before the first show, 9/11 happened. … And I kept thinking, “Well, surely someone will say, ‘We shouldn’t leave it in this dude’s hands.’” But they said, “This is your thing. Figure it out.” Tina and Jimmy had been doing it for a year already, and they were already very beloved. And Mike Shoemaker was always around, and other people were around to help. But it just became clear that I had to grow up very quickly and figure out how to kind of command a little platoon unit.

MovieMaker: And you were 25. 

Mike Schur: Again, I need to emphasize this: I did not do this alone. There were three full-time writers. There was a co-producer named Scott Weinstein, who was great. Mike Shoemaker was around. Obviously, Tina is herself an incredible producer. This was a big team effort, but I did think: “If I don’t kind of grow up a little bit right now, I’m in trouble.” 

So that was a big leap from just being a guy who wrote sketches to a person who had some actual responsibility, and doing that job for three years, I think, really prepared me for show running in general. 

Show running is infinitely more complicated than producing Weekend Update. But for Weekend Update, you had to call edits of things, and you had to make quick decisions, and you had to be very decisive. And you had to scramble a little bit between dress and air to make sure that things went well. And you had to manage talent, and you had to do all of the things that you have to do as a show runner — on a small scale, but you had to do them all. So that was the first step. 

Mike Schur on The Office and Learning From Greg Daniels

MovieMaker: What was the second? 

Mike Schur: The second step was, I left SNL and went to work for The Office, and Greg Daniels, who had adapted The Office, was not just a show runner, but he was a teacher. He was a professor. 

I had met with hundreds of people – executives and producers and show runners and people who had written pilots — and when I met with Greg, I sent my agent an email that said, “I don’t think adapting The Office for American television is a good idea at all, but if that guy hires me, I’m going to take the job, because I feel like he’s going to teach me how to write.” 

If you’re trying to make the jump from New York late night to L.A. primetime, you need a mentor. You need an instructor. You need a sensei. And Greg was just so thoughtful and scientific in the way that he approached the job. I just had this feeling: “I need a person like that to tell me how to write.” Forget showrunning at that point — I just wanted to be learn how to write. 

Working for him is like taking a PhD-level class in writing for TV. I often took notes during the day, as if I were in a class. 

MovieMaker: Do you remember any specific eye-opening moments?

Mike Schur: Someone would pitch something, and Greg wouldn’t just say “No,” or, “I don’t think so, let’s keep pitching.” He would say, “I don’t think that will work, and here’s why.” And then he would explain. And sometimes it could be frustrating. But if you tuned in, it was incredibly eye-opening, because you weren’t just getting rejected. You were learning why you were getting rejected. I found it wonderful. 

MovieMaker: It seems like you’re writing constantly.

Mike Schur:For better or worse, my approach to this has always been, if I think something sounds fun or interesting or challenging, I say yes, and if it doesn’t, I say no. And there have been times that meant that there was only one thing I was working on, and there were times when that meant there were five things. And it’s important to note that I’ve rarely done them alone. Most of the things I’ve done have been in collaboration with other people, which makes it more fun. I loved the the SNL world, and The Office was very much like that, too. 

Most of the things that I’ve done have been with a lot of other people involved. If you just look at my IMDb page, it looks like I somehow have 40 hours in the day, but really that’s because most of those things are being done largely by other people, and I’m playing some role in them: I’m overseeing or producing or advising or being a consigliere in some way, but the hard work is being done by other people.

Like Hacks: Jen Statsky had worked with me on The Good Place and on Parks and Rec, and she and Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello, who created that show, came to me after The Good Place wrapped and said, “We have this idea,” and pitched it to me. It was fully formed and vibrant and real and three-dimensional in every way that you could ever hope a show could be. 

My joke since then — when people ask what I do on Hacks — is that my number-one job was giving them directions to Warner Bros. so they could pitch it. That’s a show that I am so proud to be associated with, but not a show I’m actively working on every day at all. That’s their show, and my role has been to advise when they want me to, and to give them notes when they want me to, and otherwise to stay the hell out of their way.

Mike Schur on A Man on the Inside, Ted Danson, and Demographics

MovieMaker: One thing you always used to hear is that networks and streamers want younger audiences, but you decided to build A Man on the Inside around a Ted Danson character who’s a retiree. Why did you want to do something so potentially risky?

Mike Schur:One, I love Ted, and if I could write for Ted for the rest of my life, I’d be perfectly happy. Two, I thought the movie that it was based on, The Mole Agent, the documentary, was just a lovely movie that really struck a chord with me. I’m also turning 50 in a couple months, and my generation, our generation, is now facing all of these issues with our parents, and we’re going to be in their position in another 20 or 25 years, right? 

So it’s all in front of us, and we can see it coming, both with our own parents and then our own lives. 

And I just thought it was tapping into something very fundamental and true about the human experience, and when I’m trying to figure out what I want to write next, I don’t get much past that: “Is this something that’s interesting and real and true?” 

But then also, you know that old adage of “Oh, the 18 to 49 demo, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah” — that’s gone now. That was based on advertisers. Now it’s based on subscribers. 

There’s a whole lot of people over the age of 65 who have Netflix subscriptions, and they’re going to want to see stuff that they like. Netflix’s whole attitude is, “We’ve got to appeal to everybody.” They’re trying to make everyone in the world want a Netflix subscription. 

Also, I don’t know anyone of any age who doesn’t like Ted Danson and doesn’t like watching him act. 

A Man on The Inside Season 2 arrives on Netflix on November 20. 

Main image: Executive producer and director Mike Schur, left, with actor Sam Huntington on the set of A Man on the Inside. Photos by Colleen E. Hayes/Netflix © 2025

AMOTI_204_Unit_00202RC.jpg: Ted Danson’s character, Charles Nieuwendyk, goes undercover in academia in Season 2 of Mike Schur’s A Man on the Inside

AMOTI_204_Unit_00706RC.jpg: A Man on the Inside. (L to R) Lilah Richcreek Estrada, who plays private investigator Julie Kovalenko, with Danson. 

Working at a newspaper internship, she decided that “the news is not interested in the humanity of us. They didn’t care about the stories I thought were real news and should be included. I was leaning more toward feature-type of writing.”

She pivoted to advertising, but after a friend invited her to an Organization of Black Screenwriters meeting hosted by producer Gus Blackmon, she found her “heart’s desire.” She talked her way into a screenwriting class and wrote her first script, a romantic project called Limits, about a girl in college.

“I went to class and my whole life changed,” she says. “I wrote a script and I fell in love. I had endless energy. I didn’t need to eat. I was in love, and I wanted to be in that world. My whole life changed.”

After graduating, she turned down an advertising job to work as an assistant manager at the Gap in Chicago. The retailer’s management program taught her the skills she’d need to eventually run her own show. She also frequented comedy clubs, where she befriended Mark Adkins, Sinbad’s brother and manager.

“Eventually I knew I had to be in L.A. I couldn’t be John Hughes off the bat and stay in Chicago,” she recalls. She packed up and called Adkins, who was launching The Sinbad Show. He had one job opening left, for a production assistant. Brock Akil jumped at the chance, and wound up meeting writers like Ralph Farquhar and Michael Weithorn, as well as renowned dancer/director/actor Debbie Allen.

“The Sinbad Show was my breakthrough. I got to meet all these writers in that community and be a part of that community, and that’s why I moved along,” she says.

“I was talented with my script, but before they saw my script they saw me. I was on time. I was helpful. Vibes and bringing that energy and spirit and knowing people’s names was my job. All of it matters.”

Through her connections with Farquhar and Weithorn, Brock Akil became a writing trainee on their show South Central in 1994. Two years later, Farquhar enlisted her for the writing staff on Moesha. She was 25 years old.

“And I have not looked back,” she says. “Ralph had a lovely way of rejecting my pitches when I would not give up. He would say, ‘Hey Mara, heard you, love it. But how about you save that for your pilot?’ I started going home and writing down all the things that I was saving for my pilot.”

In 2000, Brock Akil realized her dream of creating and running her own show with the launch of Girlfriends, which ran for eight seasons. Six years later, she also created the nine-season spinoff The Game. 

“If you look at TV, you’d think everybody has a murder mystery and everybody’s gonna be in the car chase. That’s not how my life rolls,” she says. 

“My pen wants to figure out how to craft people’s real biggest dramas that still entertain and tell a story that is riveting, captivating, funny, emotional, and how the majority of us are actually experiencing life.”

Also Read: Cobra Kai Showrunners Wax On About Its Beginning and End

In 2013, Brock Akil continued that approach with the four-season run of Being Mary Jane, starring Gabrielle Union as a talk show host balancing her personal and work lives. Five years later, the creative got even more personal with the 10-episode series Love Is, which was inspired by her real-life marriage to writer and producing partner Salim Akil. The project explored love between a modern power couple in Black Hollywood in the 1990s.

These days, the real-life couple works together under Akil Productions, but they continue to pursue their own writing projects. As Akil ventures more into art and different mediums of expression, Brock Akil remains interested in relationships and stories around the nuances of love and characters. She’s also passionate about teaching other writers through her residency program, The Writers’ Colony. 

“I’m telling my stories and I have this urgency to stay focused on me and follow my heart. To do that, I have to build out more community and more relationships,” she says. “I’m also really excited about The Writers’ Colony, and I want to build that. Salim and I were just over here, the two of us making things together beautifully and I love that era, but you have to keep building out and I’m excited to be in this era, too.”

Mara Brock Akil on Adapting the Judy Blume Novel Forever

What’s on the creative’s heart in this era is her children, and she’s been thinking a lot about the world they’re growing up in. 

And so, under an overall deal with Netflix she struck in 2020, she’s adapted Judy Blume’s 1975 novel Forever, which has been frequently banned in schools and libraries for its depictions of teen love. 

Notably, the first project she executive produced for Netflix, 2023’s Stamped from the Beginning, was based on Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. A version of the book aimed at young readers was No. 2 on the American Library Association’s list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2020.

“I was never really an IP person — I love original stories. I do think you’ll see that in Forever. But my first entries into IP, and I’m going for all the banned books,” she laughs. “It’s funny. I love it. It tickles me that the banned book is now going to go global.”

In adapting Forever, Brock Akil focused on the novel’s essence rather than exact plot points, and added modern teen challenges like social media. In depicting how Keisha (Lovie Simone) and Justin (Michael Cooper Jr.) fall for each other, Brock Akil collaborated with Blume to remain focused on the book’s initial intent and spirit. 

“Judy wrote Forever for her daughter in a lot of ways. For young women, it was a pivotal time of agency where the birth control pill was out there and they could think about protecting their future and exploring healthy sex and love,” she says. 

“Here I am as a Black mother in the 2020s and I want to see my son have agency as a young Black boy. And now that he’s interested in girls, not become America’s No. 1 threat. Where is his future in the ability to explore his love life and sexuality without being off the bat a criminal? That me and my husband have to talk to our son about rape before he understands love is very harsh, but you’ve got to protect them while they’re also out there trying to figure out who they are.”

Brock Akil says that just as Blume was making space for young girls to see themselves as full human beings and not in service to men, Forever makes space for Black teenagers in a society that isn’t always welcoming.

“How can we be in service to our own lives?” she asks. “I was a journalist. I’m observing the truth, this lived experience, and I want to tell it through fiction. My specificity, my heart’s desire, my musing, is my window into universal storytelling.”

Forever is streaming on Netflix beginning Thursday.

Main image: Mara Brock Akil. Photo by Elizabeth Morris / Netflix

He had met one of the other showrunners, Hayden Schlossberg, in high school, and the other, Josh Heald, in college. All three were New Jersey boys who had been captivated since the age of six by the story of Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio), a Jersey kid who moves with his mom to Los Angeles and learns martial arts with the help of Mr. Miyago (Pat Morita). Daniel’s new skills help him stand up to the bullying Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) and his toadies at the Cobra Kai dojo.

Netflix begins airing the final Cobra Kai episodes today, ending a breathtaking six-season run that has included Daniel and Johnny facing off, becoming friends, and fighting to save their oft-threatened alliance. To mark the occasion, we talked with Hurwitz, Schlossberg and Heald about the decades-long origin story of one of the most successful and beloved shows on Netflix — and reinvigorating the Karate Kid universe. 

By the time they had crane-kicked their way through the doors to the franchise, there was never any question that they would lead Cobra Kai. But they did a lot of work to get there.

Cobra Kai  Origins

Hurwitz and Schlossberg had started writing together in college, and got enough traction from their first spec script, an R-rated comedy called Filthy, to move to Hollywood after graduation. It was the early 2000s, and Heald was living in San Francisco, working as a management consultant, and occasionally visiting his friends Hurwitz and Schlossberg. 

“There was a lot of eating burgers and staying up late and talking about comedy. And that really fit where I wanted to be at 22, 23 years old, more than making financial models for some large computer chip company,” says Heald.

So he moved south, to the West Hollywood area, around the corner from Hurwitz and Schossberg. He got a job doing coverage for different studios, while working on his own pilots. Hurwitz and Schlossberg, meanwhile, broke through big with their script for 2004’s Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.

Also Read: Cobra Kai Star Ralph Macchio's Karate Kid Confessions

Around that same time, as Hurwitz remembers it, they happened to watch a new DVD release of The Karate Kid.

“We would write by day, hang out at night,” Hurwitz recalls. “And we were watching the 20th Anniversary Edition DVD for Karate Kid, and in the special features, Billy Zabka was talking about his approach to Johnny Lawrence. And in his mind, he was not the villain of the movie. He was just another teenager. He was just another kid going through high school. He had a girl that he was in love with. He was going to try to make it work. And then this guy came to town and sort of got in the way of his plans.”

As they gained more clout in the industry, the three never let go of the idea that Johnny might not be such a bad guy. 

Hurwitz and Schlossberg were invited to direct their script for the Harold and Kumar sequel, 2008’s Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, and went on to write and direct the 2012 American Pie sequel American Reunion. Heald, meanwhile, broke out as a co-writer of the ‘80s nostalgia masterwork Hot Tub Time Machine, released in 2010, and writer of the 2015 sequel Hot Tub Time Machine 2. (The first of the films featured Zabka.) Hurwitz, Schlossberg and Heald also collaborated on a competitive–eating script that added to their industry heat.

It was finally time to seek justice for Johnny Lawrence.

“We kind of all came up for air at the same time as streaming started to become a big thing. And we started seeing billboards for Stranger Things, which was this big ‘80s nostalgia play that was doing well, and Fuller House, which had billboards with Kimmy Gibbler on them,” recalls Hurwitz.

Gibbler, of course, is the best friend of D.J. on Full House. 

“We were like, ‘If Kimmy Gibbler could be on a billboard, then Billy Zabka and Ralph Macchio could be on billboards,’” Hurwitz adds.

The trio had initially imagined a new Karate Kid movie about a grown-up Daniel and Johnny, but soon saw the possibility of a series. Looking back at the original Karate Kid and the two sequels with Macchio, they found a lot to explore.

“There were these father-son relationships, found family, bullying, the underdog story, overcoming adversity, being the new kid, fish out of water — all these universal themes that were not tied to 1984,” says Heald. “They were themes that kids and adults still go through. So we started thinking, ‘What’s different about the present day?’ And that led us down the path of bullying that takes on different forms. Now you have cyber bullying. It’s not just, ‘Meet me outside at the flagpole at 12.’”

Legacy

But before they went too far with their idea, they set out to figure out who controlled the rights to The Karate Kid. They got in touch with Will and Jada Pinkett Smith’s team, since they were among the producers of the fifth Karate Kid film, the 2010 iteration starring their son, Jaden Smith, and action icon Jackie Chan, who takes on the mentor role filled by Mr. Miyagi in the original trilogy. 

Soon they connected with Caleeb Pinkett, Pinkett Smith’s brother and an actor-producer, who would become an executive producer on Cobra Kai. They also got the blessing of the estate of Jerry Weintraub, producer of all five Karate Kid films — including the fourth in the series, 1994’s The Next Karate Kid, starring Hilary Swank. And they befriended Robert Mark Kamen, who wrote all the Karate Kid films except the fourth.

They also went to Sony, which had released the films. 

“They said, ‘Go get those two guys, because this whole thing seems to hinge on Ralph and Billy,’” Heald recalls.

He was friends with Zabka by this point, thanks to their Hot Tub Time Machine connection. But Macchio, he says, “was a tougher nut to crack.”

 “We had to make that relationship, and we had to earn his trust,” Heald says. “This was a franchise that he’s forever tied to. You see him on the street, and he looks like Daniel LaRusso. And we were strangers. We’re not complete outsiders to the industry,  obviously. He knew our work. But it’s one thing to know Harold & Kumar and Hot Tub Time Machine. It’s another thing to say those guys are now going to take the mantle of steering the Karate Kid franchise.”

In a series of meetings, starting with a four-hour lunch in New York City, they stressed to Macchio that “what’s important to us is not writing gross-out or R-rated or extreme comedy. What’s important to us is writing story. … We’re character focused. We’re story focused,” Heald says. “And this is a franchise that’s the most meaningful franchise to the three of us.”

By now, there was no question that the three of them would be the showrunners of Cobra Kai.

“We were in the right part of our careers, and we had a clear vision that we really wanted to see on the screen, that came through from those earliest pitches and from the earliest scripts, that made it undeniable,” says Heald. “The studio asked very early on, ‘Oh, who’s going to show run this?’ We said, ‘We are.’ They said, ‘Yeah, that makes sense.’”

“The main reason why we’re showrunners is because we don’t want there to be some other person that has creative authority above us,” Schlossberg explains. “We’re OK if there’s people that have financial concerns above us, but when it comes to what’s going to be on the screen, what the story is, and all of that, that’s something that, coming into Cobra Kai, we had experience with already.”

Their position has required both creative and business acumen: Cobra Kai aired on YouTube for its first two seasons, then moved to Netflix for its third when YouTube backed away from original programming. On Netflix, the show exploded in popularity. 

Also Read: In Blue Beetle, Xolo Maridueña and Ángel Manuel Soto Tell a Magical Realist Superhero Story

One key decision, early on, was not to coast on nostalgia. The showrunners took inspiration from the acclaimed dramas that came out in the years before they created Cobra Kai, including Breaking Bad and Friday Night Lights. Cobra Kai has had some fairly intense plotlines involving school violence, serious injuries, and even a POW camp. 

But it never loses a sense of fun.

“The joke for us is that we’re taking Johnny Lawrence, who was just like this asshole from the ’80s, and we’re gonna make you really invested in his story. Part of the comedy is the fact that you cry when watching the show, because you’re so invested in what happened to Johnny Lawrence and his life right now,” says Hurwitz. 

“It was the first time that we wrote anything that the goal wasn’t the joke,” adds Schlossberg. “There was never a scene in Harold & Kumar or Hot Tub Time Machine where we weren’t ending a scene with a button — everything was like, ‘How do you make an audience laugh as much as possible?’ 

“And immediately, from the very first script of Cobra Kai, we were like, ‘That’s not what this show is. There’s a meta comedy going on here. The comedy is that this is a soap opera.’”

The Karate Kid Saga Continues

The Karate Kid saga will continue long after Cobra Kai ends this year. Hurwitz, Schlossberg and Heald are collaborating on a Mr. Miyagi origin story with Kamen, and a separate project, Karate Kid: Legends, will pair Macchio and Jackie Chan.  

They are revisiting other ‘80s IP as well: The showrunners are producing a Ferris Bueller’s Day Off spinoff, Sam and Victor’s Day Off, about the valets seen briefly joyriding in Bueller. And Cobra Kai probably won’t be their last show: They recently signed a deal with Sony Pictures Television.

The final Cobra Kai episodes are now streaming on Netflix.

Main image: (L to R) Cobra Kai executive producers Hayden Schlossberg, Josh Heald and Jon Hurwitz. Photo credit: Curtis Bonds Baker/Netflix © 2024

“We were ostensibly at a very, very good university, but we didn’t do much work,” Down tells MovieMaker. “We did watch a lot of films and I guess cultivated a shared taste, which was very helpful down the line.” 

After school, both went into finance.  By the time Kay's position at his job was made redundant — “the best  thing that ever happened to me,” he says — Down had left finance to work at a talent agency, and made a short film that caught NBC’s attention and earned him an agent. 

“At that point, he was like, ‘Well, why  don’t we write together?’” Kay recalls.  “So we spent a weekend together and wrote a very bad banking drama that had a little bit of what ended up in Industry, but really just was just to see if  we could write together — and we didn’t  want to tear each other’s head off.” 

Soon, they made the 2014 feature film Gregor, which they funded through a Kickstarter campaign. It included a YouTube video of them pretending to pitch the idea to HBO — which, years later, became the home of Industry.

Also Read: On Industry, Gen Z Trades on the End of the World

Gregor got attention at UK festivals, and they began to get small television gigs. After more than 100 general meetings, they were hired by TV production company Bad Wolf to write a movie. Bad Wolf CEO and co-founder Jane Tranter, the former head of fiction at BBC and an executive producer on HBO’s media conglomerate drama Succession, suggested they write about banking.  

“We were like, ‘Oh, it’s gonna be really hackneyed and boring. Everybody knows what finance is like on screen.’  And then she was like, ‘But you’ve got to write it with the kind of wide-eyed impressionism of first-year graduates,  because that’s where you guys were. So write it from the bottom-up rather than the top-down. Maybe there’s a show in there,” Kay recalls. 

She was right. 

More About Industry From Konrad Kay and Mickey Down

In 2016, HBO gave them a two-script deal for Industry, and they spent the next few years developing it. They  finally got the series green lit in January  2019. Premiering in 2020 to much acclaim, it stars Myha’la, Marisa Abela, and Harry Lawtey as a group of  recent grads competing at the fictional London investment bank, Pierpoint. 

Down and Kay are the first to admit  that their journey to running their own show would be difficult, if not impossible, to pull off today. 

“We were very inexperienced. I would throw our hands up and say that,” Down adds. “We did a lot of drafts of the first couple episodes. We had to figure out how to essentially write eight hours of story without having done it before.”

“Let’s put it this way,” adds Kay. “There was more of an appetite for experimentation at that exact point. …  I don’t mind saying this now because we’ve cut our teeth a little bit more and we’ve learned and we’ve professionalized ourselves as writers. But we were really under qualified in that first season. And that, in a way, I think actually shows in the work in quite an interesting way.”

Industry Season 3 premieres August 11 on HBO.

Main Image: (L-R) Konrad Kay and Mickey Down behind the scenes of Industry courtesy of HBO, photo by Nick Strasburg

A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer 2024 print issue of MovieMaker Magazine.