Editor’s note: Deadline’s It Starts on the Page features standout drama series scripts in 2026 Emmy contention.

In Season 4 of Industry, leaving the walls of Pierpoint Co. behind, creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay threw audiences into an unnerving financial thriller that expanded the world of their once modest HBO drama series both literally and figuratively.

Inspired by Tony Gilroy’s 2007 directorial debut Michael Clayton, Down and Kay completely transform Industry in its fourth season to introduce new, larger-than-life characters to go toe-to-toe with the original cast in a high-stakes global conspiracy.

Each of the eight episodes relentlessly barrels toward the explosive finale, but the point of no return lands in Episode 6, when every single character finds themselves swept in a scheme that is much more sinister than they’d imagined. Throughout the season, Harper (Myha’la) and Eric (Ken Leung) have been zeroed in on exposing Tender’s massive accounting fraud scheme. Never mind that Yasmin (Marisa Abela) and her new husband Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington) would be caught in the fallout.

In the sixth episode, titled “Dear Henry,” SternTao is closing in on Tender, ready to publicly declare the company’s fraudulent behavior after Sweetpea (Miriam Petche) and Kwabena (Toheeb Jimoh) find evidence in Accra. Meanwhile, Tender is forging ahead with its planned U.S. expansion, but there’s trouble in paradise as Yasmin’s faith in Whitney (Max Minghella) is starting to waver. Henry is still all in on Tender and its CFO, for now, hanging on to those last shreds of hope that he hasn’t once again let his naïveté get the best of him.

Below is the script for “Dear Henry” — featuring scenes not in the final cut — with an introduction from Down and Kay in which they describe how, while writing Episode 6, they felt like they’d “somehow landed in that hallowed space where the beats had an internal logic and inevitability in how they’d unspool.” They also explain the use of voiceover and the Network reference in the episode.

One of the great things about television is obviously the length of the form and the serialization of the story. If you begin to lay track correctly in hour one then by the time you get to hour six — with some careful planning, a little luck and a sh*t load of will — you might just land on a series of back to back heater scenes: consequence, payoff, consequence, payoff. We felt as we were writing “Dear Henry” that we’d somehow landed in that hallowed space where the beats had an internal logic and inevitability in how they’d unspool. It would be trite to say they wrote themselves, but they practically demanded of us that they unfold this way. It felt urgent on the page, we wrote it super fast and we were excited as it came out — all good signs. Five hours of place setting of Tender Vs SternCo is done. Infantry is in position. Battle commences.

Now in Season 4 of our show, we felt we should continue to find ways to surprise ourselves and the audience. We’d never used Voice Over before. It allows for a sort of summative omniscience that can refract, emphasize or subvert certain scenes, and we really enjoyed carefully placing each piece in the script and cut. We felt by Episode 6 it was high time we got under the skin of the season’s main enigma: Whitney Halberstram (played at a beautifully haunting remove by Max Minghella.) It was important to us that we didn’t give the audience a key to his consciousness, but rather a performance of his consciousness. That is where the device of the confessional letter came in. You think you’re hearing an inner monologue — a window on his soul — but really it’s dense, pretentious, supercilious — an overwrought performance of intellectual prowess. Whitney’s deceit and the construction of his identity partly hinges on his verbal dexterity: he hides behind language. Eric correctly diagnoses this in the episode: “I’m falling into his trap. More and more words.” We wanted the viewer to think they’re getting honest testimony but it’s just another of Whitney’s tricks.

Harper calls Whitney a “construction.” He is made up of stuff he’s observed and read and his felicity with language is part of the mask of competence that gets people to believe he’s more capable — and from higher stock — than he really is. It was important for us to demonstrate that in this episode, which is why we put him on the back foot with the knife between his teeth — a good jumping off point for any screenplay — and why we had his story hinge on two hyper-verbal performances that he needed to “win.” First with Tony Day at breakfast, second with Eric Tao on CNN. It felt like a really fun, revelatory reversal to us to have the shadowy, string-puller Whitney be forced front and center and for the audience to realize that there was a shadier string-puller above him. That seems to be the rule of our universe after four seasons: there’s always a higher kingdom, there’s always someone more powerful. 

We were excited to hand this script over to our brilliant collaborators and we were right to be. Luke Snellin directed with ferocious love and ambition and it was edited very sharply by Simon Smith. The cast explode onto screen and have never been better. It moves through its set pieces with relentless intensity but somehow every new crescendo of plot and emotion seems additive, while still finding time for less bombastic grace notes like Henry and Whitney’s come-down on the embankment at dawn, Harper and Whitney’s nocturnal phone call (serial killer finally calls the lead investigator trope) and Eric and Harper’s bureaucratic goodbye. We were very conscious of writing Eric’s exit and wanted to give the character a compromised heroic moment: his head-to-head with Whitney on CNN was something we had pinned to the writer’s room wall for some time. Everyone loves Network and people laying bare their soul down the barrel of a camera, that was our small tribute to the trope. Ken Leung is a master of his craft. Nathan Micay wrote some huge new cues which we’d return to in later episodes. The score for Harper’s Alpha Conference speech is a booming highlight.

“Dear Henry” now feels to us like a high point of Industry. It grabs your throat, your gut and your heart and it’s hard to tell which one it’s squeezing hardest.

Konrad Kay and Mickey Down

Below is the script.

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