In Season 3, Episode 4 of Industry , “White Mischief,” an “Uncut Gems”-style ride into the inner world of fan favorite Rishi (Sagar Radia), a hypermasculine Pierpoint salesman with a penchant for uncomfortable workplace jokes, adds another unforgettable image to the show’s pantheon: While he pees and watches an OnlyFans video (presumably of his coworker Sweetpea) with a baby strapped to his torso, Christmas music blares in the background and a drop of blood from Rishi’s nose hits the baby’s cheek.

Creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay originally wanted the scene to be the opening of the episode, an image that would go down in “Industry” history, but HBO told them it couldn’t be the first scene, which they ultimately decided was better. “That scene started out as a series of images. We were like, ‘What if we find Rishi in this snotty toilet?’ She has her kid. She’s watching (OnlyFans). She’s bleeding on the kid’s head. ‘What’s going on in Rishi’s life that all of these things are happening at once?’” Down explained to IndieWire.

Surprisingly enough, “Industry,” a high-profile financial drama about a group of twentysomethings working at Pierpoint & Co., a London investment bank, may be one of the few shows currently on TV that consistently has a Christmas episode every season. And each of their Christmas episodes is a key turning point for the rest of the season, both with echoes all the way to the final episode and scenes you’ll never be able to get out of your head. Case in point, Season 1’s “The Nutcracker,” which gave us the end of Greg’s (Ben Lloyd-Hughes) storyline when he’s incredibly drunk and repeatedly runs into a glass door. It also gave us the now-infamous scene of Robert (Harry Lawtey) eating his own cum off the mirror when he finally has physical sexual contact with the object of his desire, Yasmin (Marisa Abela). Season 2’s “Kitchen Season” is a family affair, where we finally meet Robert’s father, Harper’s (Myha’la) ex-brother, and Yasmin begins to explore the truth about her father’s infidelity.

Christmas episodes used to be pretty standard fare, especially when network television was king with 22-episode series. But streaming has changed the TV landscape, and now fans are lucky if they get a 10-episode season, so Christmas episodes have become less frequent due to a lot of episode cutting. Down and Kay cite The Office UK’s holiday special, Extras, The Royal Family, EastEnders and Mad Men as all of which have holiday episodes that they’re fans of and watch often around the holidays. One reason Industry does a Christmas episode every season is simply because the guys love the holidays. “There’s also a little, quite childish part of us that likes the production, the reenactment, you know what I mean? We usually shoot in June, and then putting up all those decorations seems like a bit of fun and it’s fun,” Kay said.

The couple also knows what a great storytelling topic the holidays can be, both in and out of the workplace.

“It’s an emotional time and it can be very sad,” Kay said. “It can also be very uplifting, and there’s great music and all that. It’s a great setting for a TV show or a movie, but the holiday party phenomenon is very specific to the workplace, and obviously Season 1 was really a workplace drama. Not that Season 2 or 3 weren’t, but Season 1 was really a workplace drama and it felt like we were doing a holiday episode and how people behave at Christmas and how that can raise certain issues and can be quite disruptive. It felt like a great place to explore.”

Having an annual holiday episode always adds to the story of “Industry,” but initially when Downs and Kay wanted to do one, especially since it wasn’t supposed to air in December, they ran into some resistance. “Some of our producers on the show had some resistance, not HBO (the producers), but some of our other co-producers, our executive producers had some resistance to doing a holiday episode because they felt that releasing a holiday episode when it’s not Christmas felt very disjointed. Most holiday episodes are network episodes and they usually release on Christmas. They reflect what everyone is feeling, whereas releasing a holiday episode in August feels a little weird and it confuses you a little bit. But I love it,” Downs laughs. Kay interjects, mentioning that the “Die Hard” and “Mad Men” holiday episodes aired in July and August, respectively.

One of the best things about the Industry holiday episodes is how central they’ve become to the narrative of each season — relationships become more complex, and people come and go. Putting Rishi as the focus of this season’s holiday episode, and finally seeing more of Rishi’s inner world (Rishi Hive eats well) broadens the perspective of a man who seemingly exists only on the Pierpoint trading floor.

Downs and Kay know the fans’ love for Rishi and wanted to do a standalone episode for him since Season 2 and knew he would be in the works for Season 3, but the holiday element came later. “We were four episodes into the season, like, ‘Oh, this could be a holiday episode. Let’s just add this as an extra layer to all the things we’re all going to be doing,’” Downs said. “It just crystallizes everything the episode is about. It’s about his relationship with his community, his relationship with his family, his relationship with his job. There are moments in it that feel like a Christmas miracle, and there are moments where everything goes to hell. It just allowed us to really ramp it up.”

Throughout the episode we get a glimpse into Rishi’s home life and his marriage to Diana (Brittany Ashworth), whose down-to-earth demeanor makes her a welcome addition. They thought a lot about how Rishi’s home life affects who he is when he comes to work every day, a place where he feels like The Man. Kay explained: “We should see his home life and we should see that there’s a level of whiteness and upper-class whiteness there, where, while he may not think of himself as a certain kind of British Asian, he’s good, he thinks he belongs in those circles. Maybe there’s a very small microaggression where he’s being queer, and he internalizes that and then carries that over to work.”

Being able to explore Rishi at work and his relationship with money and later debt was another way for Downs and Kay to explore the idea of ​​performance and identity — something that really underpins the show. “We map them (the characters), but scene by 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 pretty two-dimensional, boyish character in Rishi, very funny but pretty two-dimensional. How can we give him a hundred dimensions in an hour and say what this guy is like? It’s kind of a prequel episode to Rishi. It fills in the gaps in everything you’ve seen (before),” Kay said.

Their holiday episodes also have a ton of little tidbits that hint at where the next season will be. You can see that as Rob and Yasmin’s relationship develops in Season 1, you can definitely see echoes of Yasmin’s revelations about her father even in Season 3, and if you look closely enough at Pierpoint’s holiday culture from Season 1 to Season 3, it changes dramatically. That’s the second reason why having Rishi as the focus of this holiday episode of the season is such an important storyline for the season, because it’s another way to explore the ever-changing world of Pierpoint for guys like him and Eric (Ken Leung), who are starting to understand what it really means to be a “company man.”

“He literally says that in episode 4 as well,” Downs continued. “He’s been introduced to the idea of ​​the Pierpoint persona and he’s been completely institutionalized by Pierpoint. His whole persona has been nurtured in training over the last 15 years to the point where he doesn’t really remember who he was before. All this macho, all this aggression, all this misogyny, all these things that he thought he had to have to survive. What he’s really saying is, ‘If I don’t act like this, I don’t know who I am.’ He’s saying, ‘As long as I’m making money, I’m free.’ It’s his way of saying, ‘As long as I’m giving myself to Pierpoint and the institution and making money off of it, I can do whatever the fuck I want and I’m allowed to be that person.’”

“White Mischief” is another classic “Industry” episode that’s entering the canon of classic holiday TV episodes, as these types of episodes continue to disappear. Thankfully, we have Downs and Kay to keep the tradition going for as long as the show has been around. As Downs reiterated, “I love that we do a holiday episode every year. It’s kind of become a signature of the show. It’s because we love Christmas, we love the texture, we love the season, and we love how it looks on screen.”

“Industry” is now available to watch on the Max platform.