Five years ago in these pages, I dismissed HBO’s Industry as an oversexed and often inscrutable take on the lives of London’s investment bankers. Three seasons and 32 episodes later, the show is indisputably one of the best dramas on TV. If, as co-creator Konrad Kay recently told the New Yorker, the series’s pilot was “the second-least-watched show” in HBO history, then the story of that growth involves much executive patience. But there is another angle, too. Kay and writing partner Mickey Down have always been evocative dialogists and plotters. The difference now is that they have learned which direction to point it.
The show’s fourth and latest outing is anchored by characters Harper Stern (Myha’la) and Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), two ensemblists who have emerged as the production’s most compelling figures. In the first season, the pair were callow recruits at Pierpoint, a fictional trading firm in the vein of Goldman Sachs or Rothschild. Now, entering their 30s, the two women are on such widely divergent paths that one struggles to imagine them sharing an Uber, never mind a desk.
For Harper, an American striver in love with risk, the new season commences with yet another gamble. Having reconnected with sometime boss and frenemy Eric Tao (Ken Leung), our heroine launches a fund of her own dedicated to “shorts,” the speculative practice by which traders identify and profit from failing assets. Yasmin, conversely, has settled down to what she assumes will be a sure thing: marriage to the fabulously wealthy Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington) and life as a society hostess, fixer, and all-purpose aide-de-camp.
Among the narrative problems Kay and Down must solve this season is how to fling their leads together in plausible ways. So frequently have the two women betrayed and exploited each other that further entanglements risk straining belief. Recall, for instance, a 2024 episode in which Harper manipulates a bereaved Yasmin into revealing proprietary information. Or an arc, two seasons before that, in which Yasmin toys with and discards a young man whom Harper sincerely wants. These are soapy elements, to be sure, as is the show’s excessive — and at times preposterous — bedroom frankness. Nevertheless, under Kay and Down’s steady pen, they add up to something significant. Viewers grasp not only the ambitions driving the two women apart but the insecurities repeatedly connecting them.
That magnetism is helped along in the newest episodes by a clever bit of narrative engineering. Adrift after the loss of his parliamentary seat, Sir Henry accepts a leadership role with Tender, a payment-processing app specializing in illicit transactions (e.g., gambling and pornography). Yet Tender just happens to be one of the companies that Harper intends to target. For her fund to rise, Tender must fall. In a rule-bound world, this dynamic would occasion no interpersonal conflict at all. Yasmin would work on her husband’s behalf, and Harper would cheer quietly against her. In Industry’s universe, however, no such quaintness obtains. What ought to be a straightforward question of market value is a devious game of legal and political deceit.
Kay and Down have cited as a season-four influence the 2007 Tony Gilroy thriller Michael Clayton, in which George Clooney’s character discovers criminal misbehavior within his own firm. I would add to the list Showtime’s Billions, another drama dedicated to the notion that cultural elites simply have no scruples to ignore. By the new season’s third episode, the broad outlines of a scheme are apparent. Helped by a journalist (Stranger Things’s Charlie Heaton) who may well have his own skin in the game, Harper will not just observe but actively bring about Tender’s demise. For their part, Yasmin and Henry will rely on the self-interestedness of parliamentarians to loosen regulation. Sure, the app in question is a blight on society, but what does that matter when there’s a Whitehall rival to be quashed?
Industry’s cynicism might be tedious were it not so smartly composed. Happily, Kay and Down’s is the rare program in which up-to-the-minute plot points engender authentic reflection rather than mere rubber-necking regard. Set during the current Labour government’s first 100 days, the show’s latest episodes unfold at a time in which “the wealth divide between North and South Kensington is now wider than North and South Korea,” to quote a minor character adapting a recent TikTok meme. Yet it is also a moment in which, borrowing from real life, the currency of wokeness has all but collapsed. “Apparently Vogue have a photographer here,” an unidentified voice remarks at the edge of a scene. “Quick, hide all the rich white women before they do something brave and inclusive.”
TV: A HALF-CENTURY OF UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS
Industry has long cracked that kind of joke. One would need a heart of stone to hold back a chuckle. Beneath the one-liners, however, runs a rich vein of analysis insisting that identity politics has always been one more market advantage. The numbers shift, and suddenly we all tumble in the other direction. In Season 1, for example, Harper rejects a chance to destroy Eric’s career over a trumped-up allegation, rightly intuiting that his enemies desire money, not female solidarity. In the new season, anti-wokeness has become its own overweening force. “I hired you as a face,” a white superior tells the black Harper, with obvious relish. These developments matter in part because we have learned to care about the characters. Industry’s casting and acting are top-notch. But they work, too, by revealing what even the Left, having read their Karl Marx, must recognize deep inside. Our moral contortions, righteous though they may seem, are as often as not raw exercises in the accumulation of power.
Industry is not for everyone. It is certainly the last show in the world to be watched while folding the laundry or catching up on one’s texts. Instead, the series is a rare thing in our knee-jerk, rate-or-die TV landscape: a tawdry melodrama given space to evolve into an exceptionally complicated tour de force. Watch it with the attention it deserves and be rewarded.
Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.