There’s a lot of talk about growth on Industry, the hit HBO/BBC drama concerning the ruthless world of London finance. Characters wax poetic and soothingly incoherent (to the layperson) about stocks and shorts, asset values and private funds. Charismatic entrepreneurs peddle the latest groundbreaking green energy company or democratized bank or, to quote one particularly foul-mouthed character in a show full of scoundrels, “the Paypal of bukkake”. All espouse and consecrate the profit motive.
Naturally, there’s a lot of hot air; in the show’s caustic nexus of business, politics and global media – not so much a fun-house mirror as a high-budget, impressionistic rendering of five minutes scrolling X – your worth is not in dollars or pounds but in narrative confidence. “We don’t need proof,” says one short-seller out for the kill, “because we finally have a good story to tell”. Cooked books can be explained as “simply a misalignment between the velocity of my vision and the velocity of regulation”, according to the slippery fintech entrepreneur Whitney Halberstram, played with reptilian cool by Max Minghella, in the fourth season’s most recent episode. The gap in between is “where smart people have always made money”.
It’s also where Industry, co-created, written and largely directed by former financiers Konrad Kay and Mickey Down, finds itself in its frustrating fourth season, an improbable hit which nervily shed its former governing structure in favor of unruly and ambitious growth. Improbable, in that for years, the show was a hidden jewel on HBO, second-class in popularity though beloved by its niche audience; I got hooked on season one’s verité depiction of a cutthroat recent graduate program at a fictional London investment bank and have been hawking it like a Pierpoint & Co day trader ever since, bullish on its pleasurable soundbath of financial argot and distinct portrait of late-millennial workism.
Unlikely, too, in that Kay and Down essentially torched their show’s conceit in the third season, betting hard-earned cult loyalty on voracious audience appetite. Pierpoint shut down, for reasons I can barely begin to understand (financial acumen has, blessedly, never been the point), thus stripping the show of its beloved central setting. Formerly unknown ensemble stars such as David Jonsson and Harry Lawtey departed, while new regulars like Kit Harington, playing Sir Henry Muck, a well-meaning but catastrophically entitled aristocrat-cum-entrepreneur, were upgraded to series regulars, thus inverting the show’s signature bottom-up perspective – a portrait of the mega-wealthy painted by the striving junior employees – back toward the top. To flesh out their cross-section of wealth and power in the UK, Kay and Down hired alums of bigger shows like Mad Men (Kiernan Shipka, playing a shifty executive assistant) and Stranger Things (Charlie Heaton, as an aggravatingly unethical journalist).
As a longtime fan, I greeted this expansion with wariness. The third season finale, which swanned about Muck’s Downton Abbey-esque estate and saw its central frenemies – Myha’la’s sharkish investor Harper Stern, and Marisa Abela’s equally Machiavellian heiress Yasmin Kara-Hanani – sell their remaining shreds of humanity for a windfall (a billionaire fund and aristocratic marriage, respectively), treaded dangerously close to pure provocation and a deadening fixation on the ultra-rich. Industry has never lacked for industry-best performances, but the velocity of the vision seemed to far outpace Kay and Down’s ability to ground it. Faced with an Emerald Fennell-like privileging of vibes over anything so coherent as character, I missed the contained but no less baroque power games of the trading floor, the relatively quotidian but no less consequential compromises of giving one’s youth to a plutocratic institution. The capitalist mantra of “grow or die” seemed like an unfortunate mantle to take on.
But take on they did. The fourth season is, perhaps just like the global financial elite, an often groundless fever dream of excess, wealth and technocratic bluster. Yas and Harper, long graduated from demeaning coffee runs for the trading floor, are comfortably ensconced in the halls of power and sparring with a ludicrous Russian doll of big bads up to and including the Russians themselves. (It’s as vague as described.) Sex, drugs and power games have always been a part of Industry’s DNA – the first three seasons near singlehandedly rejuvenated kink on TV – but the dalliances this season have more than a whiff of self-satisfaction, as if delighting in HBO’s limits on pure provocation; adrift in a sea of extremity, a mid-season threesome between Yas, Henry and Hayley merely shocks, without titillating surprise.
Hallmarks of the old show remain, namely the sparkling frenmity between Yas and Harper, and the fascinatingly inarticulable bond between Harper and her mentor Eric Tao (Ken Leung), a thorny, platonic soulmate-ship in the TV hall of fame with Mad Men’s Don Draper and Peggy Olson. At least once an episode, such as when Eric finally vocalized filial pride in Harper while also professionally breaking up with her, I was pierced by the show’s trademark arrow of sublime stress, and slid from my couch to the floor. But on the sprawling whole, from the halls of Parliament to private jets to shell companies in Accra, the show’s formerly meticulous stakes have never been more inferior to its vibe of depraved, sweaty chaos and pervasive doom. Watching it was never un-stimulating, often entertaining and totally exhausting. It felt, I suppose, like being alive in 2026.
Perhaps that’s why it’s never been more popular. The fourth season, which concludes on Sunday, is by far its most acclaimed, averaging 1.7m viewers per episode – not Game of Thrones numbers, but well within hit range – and earning it a fifth and final season. Viewers have responded positively to both Industry’s narrative of elite bluster and infectious amorality, as well as to its meta-narrative of ambition: a formerly underestimated cult favorite, now with the ambition and resources to be, more or less, the new Succession, HBO former crown jewel of mega-wealth tragedy.
The comparison is obvious, and inevitably overdone, though still apt: if Succession was, as I argued, the defining show of the first Trump presidency – a brilliantly warped mirror of our toxic cartoon times – then Industry feels true to the second, when everything got somehow worse. Kay and Down are too savvy to entangle with US politics – Eric waving to a distant, red-hatted man on a luxe golf course in the premiere is plenty – and dabble just enough in the UK’s, basing a regulatory plotline on the 2024 Labour sweep. But its pitch-black view of power, its operating logic of unrelenting self-interest and its sacrifice of specificity and continuity for spectacle and scale, feel very of the moment. I’m still not sure how much I mean that as a compliment.
The final scene of the penultimate episode, at least, finds us back in familiar territory: Harper and Yasmin at a bar, together. Over four seasons, their dynamic has been at turns venomous, tender, codependent and above all covetous. They are a world away from the program evaluations, sexual harassment and shared men of season one. They have so thoroughly betrayed each other, so many times, that rapprochement should be impossible; nevertheless, they’re all each other has. Still the one person with whom they can be truly honest, just now against a backdrop of international scandal, financial collapse and possible ruin. “How the fuck did we get here?” Yasmin says wistfully. For a second maybe she, too, wishes to go back.
#Growing #pains #Industry #shown #bigger #isnt #Television
