We made it. With just days left in Phase I voting, this week marks the last issue of The Envelope, and the last edition of this letter from the editor, until we return with a crop of newly minted Emmy nominees in August. |
Until then, may you have a summer as magical as a German soccer fan’s road trip through the American South — and enjoy reading the below highlights from our coverage. |
Cover story: ‘Industry’ |
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(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times) |
How do “Industry” stars Myha’la and Marisa Abela want the series to end? Let’s just say they are as unsentimental about their characters as series creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay. |
“I want there to be a huge statue of Harper Stern in front of J.P. Morgan,” Myha’la says of her hard-charging trader. “And a bird s— on her arm.” |
“In her mouth,” interjects Abela, who plays Harper’s No. 1 frenemy Yasmin Kara-Hanani. |
After the laughter ringing through the room subsides, though, Abela does allow for a moment of reverence — for the HBO drama if not for the disreputable people who populate it. “I don’t know if I need Yasmin to be happy at the end of it,” the actor says, reflecting on her character’s emergence as a Ghislaine Maxwell type in the Season 4 finale. “I know I want it to feel worthy of everything that has come before... What I love about the show is that [the writers] don’t often backtrack. You commit to something and then you have to live with the f— fallout. Which is savage.” |
Read more of our conversation in this week’s cover story. |
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Writers Roundtable |
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(Christina House / Los Angeles Times) |
Though he joined The Envelope’s 2026 Emmy Writers Roundtable to discuss the return of another beloved comedy, “The Comeback,” we couldn’t resist asking Michael Patrick King about the intense fan reactions to his “Sex and the City” revival “And Just Like That...” |
“What happened was, it was really well made, but it wasn’t their Carrie,” he said. “Even though you stand behind it, you go, ‘Wow, that’s a surprise. I thought that they would be interested in 57-year-old women who still hadn’t figured everything out. And instead they wanted them to be 35 and still allowed to be lost.’” |
For more juicy tidbits from the minds of of TV’s top writers, be sure to check out the full conversation, which also included Megan Gallagher (“All Her Fault”), Jonathan Glatzer (“The Audacity”), Andrew Guest (“Wonder Man”), Bruce Miller (“The Testaments”) and Sonja Warfield (“The Gilded Age”). |
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How Connor Hines won over Ryan Murphy |
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Writer Connor Hines, who translated the real-life relationship between JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette into FX’s major hit “Love Story.” (Evan Mulling / For The Times) |
While our On Writing series of screenwriter essays are always revealing — about the inspiration behind a series, the process of adaptation or the making of a major plot turn, to name just a few — I don’t remember one as candid about the art of the pitch as Connor Hines’. In this week’s issue, the writer behind “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette” explains how he prepared to present his vision for the new anthology’s first season to one of TV’s most powerful producers, Ryan Murphy. As it turns out, landing the meeting is not the (only) hard part. |
“I spent roughly three months in the trenches with [producers] Brad [Simpson] and Nina [Jacobson], deepening and refining my presentation [to Murphy] — one that I’d recite in the shower, on runs, at Trader Joe’s, while I drove,” Hines writes. “It was a crash course in storytelling, producing, and understanding the alchemy that propelled so many of Ryan’s shows into the zeitgeist.” |
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More stories from our June 16 issue |
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