Summary
Industry reinvents itself in Season 4, becoming a broader, more ambitious show, but it’s a gamble that pays off in its finest, most depraved outing yet.
For its first couple of seasons, Industry kind of flew under the radar, being as it was the less popular of HBO’s audacious shows about morally bankrupt monsters trying to secure wealth and status. That changed a little bit with the third season, where it found more mainstream appeal for the trading floors of the fictional Pierpoint & Co. But savvy viewers will recall that the ending of that season dissolved Pierpoint and, with it, the show’s status quo. Season 4 is what has emerged from the ashes, familiar but different, and boasting a few ungainly new appendages.
The reinvention is bold and takes several episodes to orient itself, with a widening focus on new players and the old ones repositioned in different spaces on the board. It isn’t quite a tale of two halves, since those opening episodes are still really good, but it’s worth mentioning early that the tightest, most effective, and most audacious storytelling comes later on. That storytelling is, after all, what all these changes were made to justify.
Because Industry could have ended – should have, arguably, given it had run its course as a cautionary tale about the lure of wealth and status to the young and ambitious. Those who weren’t cut out for the world of high-stakes finance found the door, and those who were made their way to where they thought they wanted to be. Harper Stern (Myha’la) got her own fund. Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) abandoned the potential of an earnest life with Robert – who isn’t in this season at all – to instead become the socialite fiancée of haunted aristocrat Henry Muck (Kit Harrington). Eric Tao (Ken Leung) retired. This seemed, to many, like a natural endpoint.
But not quite. In Season 4, Industry shifts away from finance specifically and begins to interrogate its role in a wider status quo, the symbiotic relationship between money, politics, and media that keeps contemporary culture the just-right shade of blue in an ever-tight stranglehold. Characters who were once young enough not to know any better are now old enough to have realised their bad decisions are who they are. And so their presumed endings have become mere beginnings.
A lot of the shape of this season comes from Harper’s war with Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella), the CFO of Tender, a payment processor that made its name supporting gray-market industries – read: pornography and gambling – but now has designs on an evolution that’ll upset the established banking industry. Harper is deeply dissatisfied as the diversity hire – his words – of Otto Mostyn (Roger Barclay), who bankrolled her shorts-only fund to keep her onside but now, as a newly anointed member of the House of Lords, has decided he’s too untouchable to play nice. Through another new character, a journalist named Jim (Charlie Heaton), Harper is tipped off about Tender’s unscrupulous activities and decides that the juice is worth the squeeze. And she recruits a partner in her endeavours, though saying who might constitute a minor spoiler, so I won’t bother.
This is the big, macro plot of the season, then, but it lives and dies in its on-going relationships. Harper and Yasmin’s best-frenemy dynamic gets a ton of welcome focus, capitalising on all the great character work – especially for Yasmin – done in Season 3. Harper and Eric continue to have an intriguing mentor-mentee vibe that occasionally borders on the creepy and sinister. Rishi (Sagar Radia) is still around, though his life has imploded and he has become a depressed plaything of his betters. All of these mainstay storylines are arguably better in Season 4 than they have ever been.
This said, there’s plenty of fresh meat wrapped up in the Tender storyline, which is, in itself, intimately tied to the new Labour government and proposed plans for “online safety” that are feeling slightly Orwellian. Jonah (Kal Penn), Tender’s CEO, is the kind of hedonist livewire this show specialises in, and Whitney’s assistant Haley (Kiernan Shipka) actually provides our introduction to the season. Business minister Lisa (Chloe Pirrie) and MP Jenny (Amy James-Kelly) represent the new government – top tip: whenever you hear a regional accent, it’s someone in the Labour Party – and the aforementioned Jim Dycker (Heaton) provides not only a non-tabloid journalistic angle but also a helpful analogue to the missing Robert, the lack of whose audience-adjacent POV is sometimes deeply felt.
With Pierpoint gone, there isn’t a clear nucleus around which Industry Season 4 revolves. This is sometimes to its detriment, since in terms of tone and pace it can be all over the place, sometimes trying to up the ante – usually in the form of extracurricular activities – in a way that can feel a bit forced. But the upside of its wider scope is that it eventually coalesces into a nailbiting ride that is among the very finest of HBO’s already top-tier offerings, which is high praise I don’t give out lightly. This show has always been good, but here it flirts with true greatness. And, like its characters, it probably won’t be satisfied with even that.
