Industry is entering its untouchable phase

Watch enough of Industry, HBO’s hedonistic, dark-souled, capitalist-critiquing financial drama, and you can start to feel unmoored from reality. There’s the heavy amount of technical jargon in the script, which can render whole scenes like watching a foreign movie with the subtitles switched off; the claustrophobic atmosphere of life on the trading floor, with viewers rarely accessing the other side of the glass skyscrapers the characters tap into at 7 a.m. each day. And then there are the time frames involved in everything that happens in an average episode: Characters arrive at work early, leave their desks in what appears to be the middle of the night, and still find time to get high or carry out an ill-advised affair. Ultimately, the best way to watch Industry is to stop trying to keep up and just let the whole thing overwhelm you.

Industry’s main characters, a group of new hires at the London branch of a major investment bank called Pierpoint, fight for survival in the cutthroat and supremely competitive world of high finance. Harper (Myha’la) is ruthless and smarter than her peers, she has to be as she lied on her application and doesn’t have the qualifications to open a Robinhood account. Robert (Harry Lawtey) is an outsider, a working-class Londoner who must assimilate in a world where deals are done between classmates from Britain’s most elite boarding schools. Finally, there is Yasmin (Marisa Abela), a beneficiary of such nepotism and largely unfit for the job. She engages in a relationship with Robert that’s as much about her leveraging the power missing from her job as it is about companionship.

All of them dream of making big money, for clients and themselves, and are prepared to put both their bodies and ethics on the line to make it happen. There is encouragement to do so from their higher ups, with only the faintest suggestion that Pierpoint has an HR department. Early in the pilot a manager notices that one of their fellow newbies hasn’t left the office for 48 hours and pulls him over. “I don’t want to know where you’ve been sleeping, but, optically, I need you to walk out of the office, tap your card out, do whatever, and then come back,” she tells him. By the end of the episode he is found dead in a toilet cubicle.

Industry is dramatic and gripping while, frighteningly, being rooted firmly in reality by writers Konrad Kay and Mickey Down. Prior to becoming screenwriters both Kay and Down worked in investment banking and admit to having been “chewed up and spat out” by the industry. “The show was a little bit of revenge and a cathartic exercise for us,” Kay told Vanity Fair in 2022.

What started as an airing of grievances has developed into one of the sharpest and most essential shows on TV. Industry returns for its third season this week and it feels like a true step up in storytelling and character development. Like Succession, the show it is most often compared to, Industry is growing more confident and gripping with each season. For those who haven’t already, now is the time to jump on board.

There is a sense that HBO knows this. This is the first time Industry has aired in their prestigious Sunday night slot and the budgets have grown accordingly. For a show obsessed with the motivations of the super rich Industry has never been flashy, partly a product of its humble beginnings as well as a reflection of the no frills approach billionaires often take towards spending. However, this time out things feel a little flashier and more opulent. The series sets its stall out with a party scene on a yacht in a rare display of people enjoying their wealth for a series more accustomed to power plays and tactical manipulation played out by men in neutral colored fleeces and gilets.

The new season begins with Pierpoint managing an IPO for Henry Muck (Kit Harrington)’s green energy startup, Lumi. The boardroom is excited about “the green shift” and terms including “impact investment” and “ESG” are bandied around with glee. Industry liberally pulls from such hollow trends in the real world, with GameStop and crypto both making their way into the second season alongside Bill Ackman–adjacent billionaire Jesse Bloom, whose hypersensitivity to his public image ran concurrent with an urge to take financial advantage of the U.K. health-care system.

Marisa Abela’s as Yasmin is a highlight of season three. Her performance colored with shades of quick-wittedness and daddy’s girl vulnerability, as if life is against her and her six-figure salary. She becomes a target of tabloid intrusion after her father skips town and cuts her out of her trust fund, with Yasmin soon attracting the attention of Henry Muck. In one particularly revealing scene, she visits Muck at home and meets his uncle, who just happens to be the publisher of the very newspaper that has been hounding her.

All three of Industry’s main characters, have, to varying degrees, been hollowed out by their experiences and become overpaid and burned-out shells. Their ambition is no longer an illuminating force but a bloody weapon of survival. “Am I cursed?” Robert asks at one point in the S3 opener, and with good reason. It’s a question everyone in Industry could ask at some point, as they navigate a rigged game built on promises of riches and glory for those with enough merit. If you squint, their board almost looks like ours.