When Industry debuted on HBO way back in 2020, I gave it a test drive. My immediate thoughts were clear. I knew it was a well-made show, and while most of the actors weren’t immediately familiar, it was obvious that they were talented. The show’s energy is kinetic. You can sail through an episode and be genuinely surprised when the hour is over. While the show centers around three rookie traders, Harper (played by Myha’la), Yasmin (Marisa Abela), and Robert (Harry Lawtey), Industry is a true ensemble show, with a sizable cast. There’s also a lot of financial jargon, befitting a series about investment bankers trading stocks and securities at a high level.
Before becoming an entertainment writer, I worked in banking at JPMorgan Chase. I may not have been an investment banker myself, but I did partially oversee their work. However tangential I may have been, and at a much lower level than the traders at the fictional London investment bank Pierpoint, depicted in the show, I have some fluency with banking terminology. Even so, Industry is not a pedantic program. Due to its pace, the large cast, and its unwillingness to explain every financial instrument it is referring to, a viewer can get overwhelmed. Including me.
So, I dropped out of Industry and told myself I’d come back to it. Five years later, I finally did. During the slow TV period around the holidays, I found myself longing for a new show when none were debuting. “Let’s try Industry again,” I said to myself. The second effort held, and over a three-week period, I gave away significant time and sleep as I burned through each compelling episode. The quality and ferocity of Industry is so palpable that I felt embarrassed at my sloth. Industry is one of those shows that has a solid following but is seldom discussed during awards season.
That should change.
There isn’t another show currently airing like Industry. It is unapologetic in every respect. The characters are not likable in any conventional sense. While they certainly display moments of humanity, they are primarily transactional. Having worked in banking myself, the stress, duplicity, and strident nature of the characters rang true to me. These are “work hard/play hard” people who are cutthroat dealers when it comes to their own advancement. “You want a friend, get a dog,” Harry Truman once said of life in politics. One could say the same of bankers.
No character on the show espouses the series’ code of conduct more than Harper. Hailing from a broken U.S. home and diminutive in physical stature, Harper is nevertheless a full-on shark. Sure, her desire to locate her estranged brother and moments of compassion towards Yasmin and Harry are notable, but they are also fleeting. Harper is a high-grade grifter. She falsifies her education to gain employment at Pierpoint, and then proceeds to double-cross every peer, mentor, and client in a ruthless effort to gain something more than advancement, something less tangible.
Harper’s troubled background and her subsequent behavior remind me of a quote spoken by Juliette Binoche in the great Louis Malle moral drama, Damage: “Damaged people are dangerous. They know how to survive.” Harper is a survivor who wears her damage just below the surface, and sometimes right on top. Myha’la’s performance is perfectly pitched to meet her character, where she lives: on the edge.
In contrast, Marisa Abela’s Yasmin comes from a wealthy family led by her father, a scurrilous man who wants to control his daughter through cutting wordplay and, at times, abject humiliation. Yasmin may not be quite as relentless as Harper, but she, too, is damaged goods. There is a part of her that fears she’s too mediocre, that she is merely a legacy hire at Pierpoint. Her insecurities manifest themselves through rash decisions, brazen sexuality (to be fair, there’s a lot of brazen sexuality on this show), and treating men the way her father treats her. Abela gives a remarkably complex performance as an insecure woman who doesn’t believe in her own talents and therefore will often take the path of least resistance.
That path leads her to continually run over the smitten Robert for the first three seasons. Yasmin pulls Robert Forward, gets him to perpetually debase himself, and then pushes him away. Harry Lawtey’s performance as Robert comes with a high degree of difficulty. Robert is the most conventionally “good” character on the show, but is given over to moments of substance abuse, debauchery, and behavior that he seems to know deep down will only lead to hurt.
The Harper/Yasmin/Robert trifecta has been the engine of Industry’s first three seasons. These are the people whose stories we follow. That being said, I would be remiss not to mention the great work of Ken Leung as an experienced trader and mentor who runs afoul of Harper, Sagar Radia as a self-destructive price setter, David Jonsson (during seasons one and two) as a fellow rookie with a unique set of ideals, and recurring titans of industry played by Jay Duplass and Kit Harrington (who is a long, long way from Jon Snow).
After blazing a trail through the first three seasons, I was set up perfectly for season four’s debut on January 11. The first episode picks up about a year after the dynamic close of season three. Harper and Yasmin are at another set of crossroads that leads them back to each other and their frenemy status, while Robert has moved on. Pierpoint is no more. New foils are introduced, led by Kal Penn’s sloppy CEO of a PayPal-like company and his partner, a deceptive, Machiavellian Max Minghella. While it’s still early, Minghella’s character may well be the villain in a show made up of untrustworthy sorts. It’s not too great a leap to connect Minghella to the upended tech-bro wannabe he played in The Social Network. Minghella’s aristocratically named Whitney Halberstam could be seen as the person his jilted-by-Zuckerberg Social Network character went on to become: soft-spoken but resentful, outwardly polite but inwardly depraved, and unwilling to ever let anyone shaft him again.
I suppose it’s a fair question to ask why anyone would want to spend time with such duplicitous people. My answer is that a character need not be likable, just interesting. All of Industry’s characters are interesting. For all their bluster and double-dealing, they are exceedingly vulnerable, distressed, and human. They have chosen a culture of chasing money through striking deals that press up against the guardrails of legality and then tumble over them. The boldness of the writing, the command of the performances, and the drive of the filmmaking all make for persuasive entertainment.
But more than that, Industry is not an overly exaggerated depiction of reality that reveals the nature of the one percent and those who would aspire to become them. It is a daring and revealing show. The world that we live in is seemingly run by a very few people who are seldom held to account for their ethical, moral, and legal transgressions. Industry is a knowing look into the abyss. One that, if peered into just long enough, can’t be turned away from.
