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Industry returned with a fast-paced premiere Sunday night, deftly assembling the pieces for the fourth season of HBO‘s financial drama, which creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay have described as a “corporate thriller.”
The first episode sets its stakes around the passage of the UK’s Online Safety Act, which has come into effect over the last year and created a new duty of care for online platforms, like payment processors, when it comes to their association with illegal or ethically dubious content. Enter Tender, a splashy new payment processing company that makes a chunk of its revenue working with gambling and porn sites — particularly one called Siren. That is, at least, when audiences meet CEO and co-founder Jay Jonah Atterbury (Kal Penn) and his co-founding partner and Tender’s CFO Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella) at the beginning of the episode.
Harper Stern (Myha’la) is also entangled in the debate over the ethics of porn sites thanks to her latest gig managing a short-only fund at Mosytn Asset Management. She wants to gamble on the prospect of Siren’s failure as the government aggressively pursues measures to curtail services like it, but the higher ups aren’t thrilled to be engaging in an already risky trade with such a controversial company. With Rishi’s (Sagar Radia) help, she’s able to make certain that Siren is going to take a direct hit after new Junior Minister Jennifer Bevan (Amy James-Kelly) name drops the company during a hearing, though that success is not enough to keep her from getting a slap on the wrist. Harper eventually approaches Eric (Ken Leung) to start a new management firm with her.
As for Yasmin (Marisa Abela), she’s soaking up her new title as a Lady, having married Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington). At least in the first episode, her connections seem to be a bit of a through-line as she’s responsible for getting all the other main players in the same room via one of her soirées. She’s trying to get Henry a new gig at Tender and make nice with Bevan in the hopes of maintaining an amicable relationship between the young government official and Henry’s tabloid-owning uncle.
Down and Kay have become quite fond of pulling the rug out from underneath their audience, and true to form, Season 4 begins to shift gears pretty quickly. As the story progresses, Whitney stakes a hostile takeover of the company and cuts ties with Siren in an effort to clean up Tender’s image so that it will be considered a legitimate buyer for a small bank — and hopefully the UK government won’t bat an eye at the obvious regulatory issues in such a move. Meanwhile, Harper and Eric begin to set their sights on a much bigger short than Siren.
“The porn site [regulation] was the jumping off point to a wider story about the payment processor Tender, but it really was sort of our bait and switch, which we did in Season 3…” Down tells Deadline. “It was a way to bring payment processing together with politics and together with the hedge fund that Harper was working on.”
In the interview below, creators and showrunners Mickey Down and Konrad Kay discuss how the Season 4 premiere sets things in motion and tease what’s to come in the latest installment of the HBO financial drama.
DEADLINE: What intrigued you about this main storyline for Season 4, and particularly the entry point in the premiere with the porn site regulation?
MICKEY DOWN: The porn site [regulation] was the jumping off point to a wider story about the payment processor Tender, but it really was sort of our bait and switch, which we did in Season 3 with [the green energy company] Lumi and then the short on Pierpoint, where you present the season as one thing, and you shift quite quickly to something else. It was a way of introducing Harper in her new role at Mostyn Asset Management and immediately showing the audience that she lacked the autonomy that she thought she was going to get the end of Season 3. She wanted to do a short on a company that was using inside information, which is something that she talked about doing in Season 3.
Weirdly, the conversation around age verification and the puritanism of porn now that’s going on felt very relevant, and actually it only really blew up when we were in the post process. Obviously the Online Safety Act and age verification in the UK was kind of becoming a question at the end of the Conservative government, but it only really became this sort of big cultural touch point when it came into effect this year, and suddenly people were talking about it, and it was sort of re-energizing that conversation. I’m happy the show is coming at the same time as that happening. Yeah, it was a way to bring payment processing together with politics and together with the hedge fund that Harper was working on. It felt like it was good jumping off point.
DEADLINE: You say in the logline for this season that Harper and Yasmin’s friendship begins to “warp” under the pressures they’re dealing with this season. First, we don’t really see too much of Yas in the premiere. What can you say about where she’s at when we meet her this season?
KONRAD KAY: Well, we have a real deep dive into her and Henry’s marriage in Episode 2, which we felt deserved the real estate of a full hour. So we wanted to just paint a picture. She was a big, central point of Season 3, so we thought, in a way, seeing the edges of her life in the first episode and presenting a tease of what might be going on with her through a scene with her former wedding planner where she’s organizing a dinner and then seeing her in a very powerful regalia be at the center of a networking event, teased a little bit about what her new status was without getting too hard into what happened between her and Henry between seasons. I know there was a lot of talk about whether we’d get to see her wedding on screen. I guess you’ll have to tune into Episode 2 to see if we either fulfill that brief or let people down.
I feel like Harper and Yasmin’s axis is the central axis to the show. I mean, we talked about this as kind of a platonic love story, toxic shipping. The internet seemed to be obsessed with what’s going to happen between them, which is kind of nice. I feel like they said some pretty unforgivable things to each other in Season 3, but the ability to hurt each other with their tongues like that is probably a sign that they really know each other and have some sort of intimate relationship. We were conscious — a bit like the Eric and Harper relationship — of not having them on screen enough, frankly, in Season 3. The idea of putting these really charismatic actors back in a room together, and as often as possible, became more of a spine in Season 4 than it was in Season 3.
DEADLINE: Going off of that, like you said, they did say some pretty unforgivable things to each other in Season 3. What would it mean for that relationship to warp even further than it already has?
DOWN: Actually, I think at the end of Season 3, there’s a kind of understanding. When she calls her and Yasmin’s walking around that grand home that she now occupies, and she invites Harper to her wedding, and Harper says, ‘Who are you going to seat me next to?’ because she’s already thinking about her next big short. And Yasmin says, ‘You’re only gonna come to my wedding if I seat you next to someone important?’ Harper says ‘Why else would I come?’ That’s kind of like a cutesy exploration of their relationship, which is that it’s like half transaction and half friendship, and that’s kind of where it goes. This season really is about pitting them against each other in a professional sense, and whether their friendship can endure that. That’s where we get to at the end. It’s like, by the end of the season, they get to — I’m actually not going to ruin it, but it’s about whether they can endure a professional battle, because that’s what the season is. It really is about of Harper being on one side of a transactional trade and Yasmin being on the other, and their interests being totally misaligned and what that looks like for their relationship, personally.
DEADLINE: We see just a little tease of Henry right at the end of the episode. Like you say, there’s more to come, and I don’t want to give away what I’ve already seen from the rest of the season, but I think Kit Harington is doing some great work in later episodes. What did you like about working with him in Season 3 that maybe influenced Henry’s trajectory in Season 4?
KAY: Well, I mean, when you work with — I always use a sports analogy, and Mickey’s probably bored of hearing me say it — if you’re any kind of sports team, when you see a player do something you like, [you think] ‘How quickly can we get in the ball?’ We have these real talents in the show. Ken Leung from the off, and obviously the women are now just amazing and big stars in their own right. We knew Kit from [Game of] Thrones. We knew him from other things, but, it sounds a bit reductive, and not to denigrate his previous work, but we didn’t really know we could throw this much at him, and he could just blast himself into the stratosphere. I feel like, Season 3, we put a lot of comic stuff on his back and but then when we got into Episode 8, there was that scene of the engagement with Yasmin, and his acting in that scene, I think that’s one of the strongest scenes ever in the show. He’s bearing his soul to her. I was like, ‘F*ck.’ I’ve gotta be honest. Just speaking for myself and not for Mickey, I just did not know he had that in him from what I’d seen in previous work. Then in Season 4, we strapped so much emotional baggage to that character and gave him the great tragic arc of the season in some way. We gave it in microcosm in [Episode] 2 and then we expanded it over eight hours, and just every beat, blackly comic, the despair, the pride, the arrogance, the little boy in him, the god complex. It was all there all the time in all of his performance. I mean, he’s a lovely guy, huge credit to the show, completely egoless, wonderful to work with, and we’re super proud of his work in it.
DEADLINE: Do you think that Harper and Eric are actually hearing each other in the conversation they have at the end, when they decide to work together?
DOWN: I think there was actually a moment of misconnection in that conversation, which actually came out of the way we edited it, because what we actually wrote and shot was a little bit more of a connective moment, and they actually went under the hood of each other a little bit more. They were both vulnerable with each other, and actually what ended up [in the episode] was what the show does well, which is a moment of misconnection, because Eric is becoming quite emotional. In that scene, he’s about to say something to the effect of when you’re younger, you have all these ideas and know where to put them. When you’re older, you have nothing. Then Harper jumps in and undermines the sentiment by saying ‘money’ and, actually, what he was going to probably going to say is advice, you know, paternal advice. That’s what he’s striving to give her for the rest of the season, because he wants to have a relationship with her, because he realizes he can’t have relationship with his children for reasons that he outlines in Episode 5. So you have to have [that] in Harper, and he really wants that, but she’s not quite ready for it. That’s kind of the tragedy of the first few episodes, and it’s too little too late by the time they actually have that connection.
DEADLINE: I am enjoying both Charlie Heaton and Kiernan Shipka as additions to the cast this season. The premiere opens with Jim stalking Hayley to get information about Tender. What made you want to kick off the season like that, with characters we’ve not met yet?
KAY: We just thought it was very cool, given the way Season 3 ends, to have a very hard reset at the start, just as bold as we could possibly do to [introduce], I mean, weirdly, probably two of the most famous actors in the show now, playing characters totally divorced from what you know them from. I mean, they couldn’t be more diametrically opposed to the characters that made their careers. We wanted to do this stalker sequence, where you think you’re watching one thing and it has a bit of a kind of weird, sexual threat to it, but then it turns out to be something different. Those rug pull narrative runs are something that me and Mickey have become very fond of in the show. Just when you think you expect the character to go a certain way, they go a different way. I think that’s a kind of staple for the show, and we wanted to do something deeply cinematic. We started Season 3 on a boat. That was cool, but we wanted to do something to set out the stall of the show that felt like London, that felt like the sex of the show, the club of the show, the intrigue of the show, grabbed you by the throat and kind of didn’t let go and set the tone for the whole season. And just being narratively brave. I mean, four seasons in, we kind of felt like we needed to do a proper clearing of our throat, otherwise it was a bit of a waste of our time.
DEADLINE: To that point, in some ways the show is very different than when it began but in other ways it has completely retained its ethos. What’s been your philosophy in regards to evolving as you’ve continued with the show over the course of four seasons?
DOWN: Yeah, I’m happy you think it’s retained its core ethos, because the show has evolved substantially, season on season. It started as something very, very different. It was this slice of life show set in London about people entering the workplace for the first time, and it reflected mine and Konrad’s experience. It reflected what we wanted to write about the time, which was this sort of authentically rendered trading floor, and then [dramatize what it looks like] when you show working that environment, and that was what the show was. At its core, it was still a relationship drama, but it had the trappings of a workplace drama. I think what we realized is that the show really is about a kind of operating system that exists within these people, and how, actually, that operating system can be applied to any environment. The show is called Industry. It’s not The Industry. It can be about any industry. It can be about, really, any industry within a capitalist superstructure.
How Yasmin is and her attitude to ambition, and how Harper is in her attitude to ambition — that stuff and what drives them, that all exists in seasons 1, 2, 3 and 4. The show is now about how money affects politics and media, or the sort of quid pro quo nature or mechanism by which those two things scratch each other’s back, the transactional relationship between those spheres of influence. It’s still at its very center about these women’s attitudes of success and power, and how they’re willing to do it, and what they’re willing to sacrifice to achieve it. That’s always going to be the core of the show. We can send them to Africa, we can send them to Vienna, we can send them to Switzerland, we can send them everywhere, and it will still always be about Yasmin and Harper’s attitude to their inhibition and each other’s and their friendship.
English (US) ·