“Industry” Is a Study in Wasted Youths
At first glance, the HBO financial drama “Industry” would seem to fall neatly in line with the network’s other programming about the wretchedly wealthy. Its first three seasons followed the ups and downs of young, improbably good-looking bankers in a London built almost entirely of glass, brick, and blow, their worst impulses spurred on by a corporate culture of excess. But unlike “Succession” or “The White Lotus,” which fixate on the already élite, “Industry” centers largely on the strivers: people who claw their way upward while knowing full well that they may never be allowed to touch the top rung. Harper (Myha’la), the series’ antiheroine, is a Black American who didn’t finish college; her mentor at Pierpoint & Co., Eric (Ken Leung), is a fellow-Yank of modest origins. Marrying an English rose doesn’t help their associate Rishi (Sagar Radia) in his bid for social advancement—though it does give him plenty of opportunities to crack jokes about avenging the colonization of India. Even Yasmin (Marisa Abela), a spoiled heiress fluent in seven languages, is an arriviste by the standards of those to the manor born. The show recognizes the way its characters are thwarted by Britain’s class system, but it’s more interested in how their grievances fuel preëxisting personality defects, curdling ambition into insatiability.
Harper and Yasmin, who’s emerged as the series’ co-lead, started out among Pierpoint’s newest hires; by the end of Season 3, the firm had been effectively dissolved, its novice traders scattered to the winds. In the show’s fourth season, which premièred last month, the characters’ core flaws have informed their fates. Harper, a lone wolf attuned to others’ weaknesses and not above exploiting them, establishes her own fund devoted to shorting companies—a venture in which, fittingly, she can only succeed if someone else fails. Yasmin, who was ousted from Pierpoint after a tabloid scandal involving her publishing-magnate father threatened to sully the bank by association, has turned to another undependable man for salvation, proposing to an aristocratic failson called Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington). Henry’s family name—and his uncle’s influence on Fleet Street—affords her some protection, but her marriage proves as gruelling as her abandoned career was, requiring her to play Lady Macbeth to a drugged-out depressive.
Each season of “Industry” has moved further and further from the hothouse of the trading floor, and the latest amounts to a gut renovation: now that the show’s creators, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, have blown up Pierpoint, they’ve also shifted their focus more decisively to the corridors of power. The new season, reflecting the current state of affairs in the U.K., finds a feeble Labour government in charge and the far-right Reform Party waiting in the wings. That sense of instability extends to the financial sector, where underregulated fintech startups aim to supplant traditional banks. Whitney (Max Minghella), the C.F.O. of one such startup, Tender, decides that his co-founder doesn’t have what it takes to “mature” the business. When Whitney turns to Yasmin, a “dear friend,” to recruit her husband as Tender’s replacement C.E.O., despite the well-publicized implosion of Henry’s last company, the couple—human embodiments of the Dunning-Kruger effect—are slow to spot the strings that come with the job. And they are not remotely prepared when Harper’s firm puts its full weight behind burying them.
On most prestige shows, a friendship between two women from disparate backgrounds would serve as an emotional anchor, softening both characters. It’s to Down and Kay’s tremendous credit that they resist this trope. Harper and Yasmin, having come up in the finance world together, do have something of a sororal trauma bond, as well as a lingering competitiveness. (Once their paths start to diverge, Harper’s version of supporting Yasmin is offering her a commission while quipping, “Bitch, you know I always wanted you to work for me.”) “Industry,” rather than clinging to an idealized version of the relationship or reducing the pair to clear-cut enemies, anatomizes an altogether different type of attachment—one I’ve never seen depicted before in pop culture. Getting older yields a certain kind of acquaintance: a former friend from childhood or young adulthood whom you may no longer like or even respect, but whom you nonetheless understand profoundly. Your firsthand experience of their formative years, before their identity—or at least their persona—was fixed, might give you a better sense of who they are than people who came onto the scene later will ever have. Periodically keeping tabs on them is a familial imperative. A checking-in conversation can feel like a homecoming; it can also be a reminder of why you’ve mostly stayed out of each other’s lives.
Harper and Yasmin have said goodbye to their spectacularly misspent youths, but their daddy issues—another of the show’s pet themes—are decidedly unresolved. This season, Harper turns thirty, and it’s not long before she reunites with an unhappily retired Eric, who’s constitutionally unsuited to a life of leisure. (“The problem with Heaven on earth,” he tells her, “is nobody wants it when it’s here.”) Bored with parenting his actual children, he slips back into a father-daughter dynamic with a protégée whom he first nicknamed Harpsichord, and whom he proudly re-dubs Harpoon. The relationship, once toxic, is practically heartwarming; so, too, is watching Harper find her footing as a leader in her own right, with a crop of fresh-faced recruits under her care. Yasmin, meanwhile, is still haunted by the sins of her father—a figure reminiscent of Robert Maxwell—yet seemingly doomed to enable the same kinds of offenses. Obsessed with rehabilitating her husband’s “narrative,” and her own, she proves savvy and troublingly cavalier in wielding her newfound connection to a media empire.
Such shifting, amoral alliances are one of “Industry” ’s chief pleasures: from the beginning, characters have seduced and backstabbed one another with abandon. (Yasmin, for her part, has played an alarmingly literal game of Fuck, Marry, Kill.) The whole show crackles with anything-can-happen energy. But, after years as a welcome disruptor in the TV landscape, “Industry” has produced what is perhaps its most conventional season yet—a tale of corporate intrigue in which Harper works to uncover the fraud and extralegal tactics that have allowed Tender to thrive. The righteousness of her crusade means that there’s less of what I think of as the show’s signature effect: a simultaneous awe and nausea at the characters’ Machiavellian maneuvers. The new government-and-media-centric story line is also more familiar and less dynamically dramatized than, say, the third season’s bracing critiques of trendy, performative E.S.G. efforts.
In most respects, though, “Industry” still feels like “Industry.” The series retains its fondness for rapid-fire, near-impenetrable finance jargon and for ostentatious literary quotations—the product, we’re meant to assume, of the characters’ otherwise wasted Oxbridge educations. The synth-heavy soundtrack is back, nodding to the greed-is-good eighties while evoking both an ultra-contemporary cool and an inhuman chill. And, for all the emphasis on the political, the personal remains key, even as the personalities involved have become more deformed. It seems unlikely that Harper’s interests and the public’s will be aligned for long, and her readiness to drop or betray her peers still verges on sociopathic; Yasmin’s growing nihilism pays off with a sublimely bleak dénouement. As ever, the plot hinges on such pathologies. In one of Henry’s more clearheaded moments, he tells his wife, despairingly, “You always make me chase the most egoistic part of myself. Do you know that?” Yasmin smiles tightly, almost impatient at having to explain. “Because without it,” she says, “nothing would fucking happen.” ♦