Industry Is Operating at Optimal Bleakness

A few elements of Industry’s exemplary fourth season that will certainly get talked about: a character donning a gigantic strap-on dildo and admiring themselves in the mirror; a glory hole that’s used to orgasmic completion; a couple of characters who resemble, not just slightly, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell; a smash cut from a woman going down on another to slurping an oyster. More than ever before, Industry is a high-low phantasmagoria of decadence, amorality, and vice set in the pressure cooker of international finance. That’s the series’ constant, and Industry remains as subtle as a buzzsaw in giving viewers what they expect from a Sunday-night HBO drama.

But the most compelling aspect of these eight episodes, set a year after Industry sold off the Pierpoint bank that once employed most of its characters and scattered them to London’s various elite cloisters, is the sense that money has never really been the point of the show. The series’ focus on the machinations of asset management and wealth hoarding — banks, investment funds, start-ups, the stock market, all the ways people with resources find ways to deny them to others — remains firmly in place. And that’s because the characters who once thought they could change the system of capitalism to make it more ethical, thoughtful, or equitable have given up the fight. With that surrender looming overhead, Industry fascinatingly deconstructs who people become once they fail to disrupt, fail to make a name for themselves, and fail to overthrow the systems they know are suppressing them. As a portrait of what it looks like to buckle under society’s insatiable desire for more, not just more cash but more happiness, more power, and more life, Industry is operating at optimal bleakness and maximal watchability. The dialogue is dense and poignant, the performances are as layered as Russian dolls, the cynicism is so high that it’s practically in orbit, and the series’ ensemble is more fucked up than ever as they stagger toward the illusory oasis of self-fulfillment they think will finally fix their broken insides. Everyone’s unbelievably wealthy and everyone is miserable, and it makes for Industry’s best season yet.

Season premiere “PayPal of Bukkake” plots where everyone is after the Egyptian sovereign-wealth fund Al-Mi’raj bought Pierpoint and stripped it for parts. Harper (Myha’la) is frustrated with her work at Mostyn Asset Management and feels micromanaged and underestimated. Rishi (Sagar Radia) has become like one of 1984’s unpeople, a hollowed-out shell of a man disconnected from his family and nearly all his former co-workers. Eric (Ken Leung) is retired, with millions in the bank and a young girlfriend on his arm, and bored. Yasmin (Marisa Abela) is married to Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington) and enjoying life as a lord’s wife but struggling to find individual purpose. They’re all stagnating separately, until two things bring them together: the Online Safety Bill that is working its way through the British government and would severely impact the extremely profitable porn industry, and Tender, a fintech company that serves as the payment processor for a number of content-creation platforms that specialize in sex work. Tender’s co-founder Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella) has big dreams for his company to eventually serve as a “private banker in your pocket” and a “one-stop shop” for savings and investments, and as the season progresses, Harper, Eric, Yasmin, Henry, and other familiar faces from Industry’s past seasons get pulled into Whitney’s desire.

Every whiplash-paced season of Industry has used the wipeout of an institution to reflect whatever existential abyss lurks in the hearts of the series’ ambitious, reckless, endlessly self-destructive characters, and when the show premiered in 2020, it was primarily compared to Succession for its thriller vibe and recurring backstabbing. At this point, though, Industry is most recognizable as a descendent of Mad Men, and not just because Kiernan Shipka has joined the cast as Whitney’s party-girl personal assistant, Hailey. Co-creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay are honoring Matthew Weiner’s willingness to chart the tendrils of characters’ childhood traumas onto the present, and map how a statement like “Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened” is as delusional as it is empowering. Just as Mad Men blew up its ad agency over and over again to test how its characters could adapt to unexpected circumstances and demands, so too does Industry plop its ensemble into new situations to let those characters pretzel themselves when faced with challenges like pesky questions from journalists and accountability inquiries from government regulators. The season’s biggest swings, like an early flashback episode and a narration-heavy late episode, work so well because of how finely textured these characters’s inner conflicts are: Yasmin and Henry’s shared concern that they’ll end up like their fathers, Harper’s discomfort with her peers for overvaluing companies for their own profit, Eric’s regrets over his failed marriage.

Maybe this all sounds like a bummer. It sort of is! We don’t live in a time when financial successes benefit everyone. We live in a time when U.S. prices could soon hit all-time highs, some of the most craven people in the world are unfathomably wealthy, news publications owned by billionaires are praising acts of war that break international law because they could make American companies money, and entire groups of workers could be replaced by AI constructions that can also, if someone wants, undress women and children without their consent. Industry stumbles a bit this season when it gets too on the nose, like a sight gag involving Donald Trump faffing about on a golf course and a moment when a character we already know to be evil revels in his ability to now use slurs in public. More often than not, though, Industry feels like it’s operating a Fresnel lens to magnify all the squalor and suppression to which we’ve become accustomed, and ask us what, exactly, we think we could do differently than the fallen heroes who are its protagonists. There’s pessimism there but also an enforced self-reflection. Once we sympathize with Eric and Harper for wanting their own names on a door, or with Henry for wanting to prove himself as more than just a failson, or with Whitney for wanting to expand access to “wealth management” so that investing isn’t only for the one percent, Industry reminds us that we, too, are caving to capitalism because, just like Industry’s characters, we’re too unimaginative or scared or selfish to imagine a future outside of it.

One of Industry’s best tricks, and a particular highlight of this season, is to present conversations where it feels like the two characters involved are speaking about entirely different things — their relationships with their families, their frustrations with work, their ideas for how to subvert the status quo — and to then narrow the scope of their statements until really what they’re each talking about is their deep loneliness. Their revelations are oppositional marbles careering around a pinball machine until, finally, they fall in line and inhabit the same desolate space. Harper and Eric do it, Yasmin and Henry do it, and Whitney and his business partner, Jonah (Kal Penn), do it. And in each scene where someone peels away a layer of artifice and admits their vulnerability, Industry emphasizes that maybe these characters aren’t always virtuous or ethical, but they’re human, and their bad decisions need to be understood just as much as their good ones. All the financial work is, as another show likes to say, mysterious and important. (Can someone please explain to me how a “margin call” works?) But it’s also so much ephemera, weight that these characters jettison as they sprint simultaneously toward their next payday and their emotional rock bottoms, and wonder how to make moral choices in a world this messed up. “Sometimes the next thing is just to continue being very good at the thing we’re fucking doing, okay?” proclaims Jonah early in the season. Industry is already there.