‘Industry’ Review: Season 4 Is a Remarkable Reboot That Will Blind You with Its Brilliance

1 day ago 2

“Industry” begins with a group of relatively idealistic finance grads hellbent on righting the wrongs of their unethical, inequitable predecessors. In Season 1, Harper (Myha’la), especially, aims to change the lewd, abusive, and self-serving culture of high finance, starting with her first employer, Pierpoint & Co. — where a fellow new hire dies from an overdose within a week of arriving.

Five years later (roughly), much has changed, and “Industry” Season 4 — in its trademarked blend of effusive candor — doesn’t stutter while assessing our regression. When Harper accuses her boss of hiring her as a “puppet in blackface,” the old, white, rich, newly anointed member of British Parliament replies, “That woke shit no longer moves the needle in this new world.”

But what is this new world he speaks of? From a bird’s eye view, “Industry” Season 4 is a transformative moment — an ambitious semi-reboot from creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay that successfully sets the stage for fascinating future installments. The surviving alumni (so to speak) reflect that evolution. With Pierpoint sold and stripped for parts, the original grads have graduated again; this time, to the open market, where fresh and familiar fortune hunters loom as obstacles or emerge as assets. Only in the moments after stepping out into a blinding sun, our few remaining protagonists are either stalled or starting over, with little to show for it either way.

Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey), Petra Koenig (Sarah Goldberg), and Bill Adler (Trevor White) — among many more — are gone. Eric (Ken Leung) is retired, although it doesn’t suit him. Yasmin (Marisa Abela) is playing trad wife for Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington), which satisfies neither of them. Rishe (Sagar Radia) is off the wagon and nearly down for the count (and who can blame him, following the nightmarish spiral that began with one of Season 3’s best episodes). Harper is, well, being Harper. She’s got her own team at James Ashford’s (Tom Stourton) management firm, but she’s hemmed in by his oversight. Maybe, she thinks, the freedom she seeks could stem from an old friend.

Even with Eric in her corner (hooray!) and two feet on the ground, this new world is difficult to navigate. Directions lurk in the wealth-cloaked hotels and clubs Harper & Co. call home, which only emphasizes the confusion facing those without the same access (aka 99 percent of us), but finding them is a Sisyphean endeavor that requires an all-or-nothing attitude; a certain type of desperation, determination, and courage. It’s a fraught place to live, let alone thrive, and Harper can’t feel the former without the latter.

Still, the overarching reason why the world isn’t the same is because it increasingly lacks a shared reality. Disinformation rules the day, an issue “Industry” is primed to unpack considering fewer spaces feel less truthful, less tangible, less real than the world of high finance — while still carrying immense, globe-tilting consequences.

Kal Penn and Max Minghella in 'Industry' Season 4

Enter Whit Halberstram (Max Minghella), Jay Jonah Atterbury (Kal Penn), and their company, Tender. The CFO and CEO, respectively, are best friends who built their company on payment processing software and grew it by agreeing to work with businesses their competition refused to touch. Their top client peddles in direct-to-consumer porn. But Whit wants to go legit. He wants to be not just a bank, but a “bank killer.” To do so means cutting ties with the disreputable agencies that got them here, and Jonah won’t do it. “Sometimes the next thing is just to continue being very good at the thing we’re fucking doing,” he tells Whit, which may as well be his epitaph.

The status quo doesn’t work for Whit, just like it doesn’t work for Harper. Neither are happy making modest gains, and neither are happy playing from someone else’s playbook. When they meet, halfway through the Season 4 premiere, there’s an instant connection. An understanding. It’s like they’re looking in a mirror, but they don’t necessarily see themselves, all of themselves, in the reflection.

Whit is the driving force of “Industry” Season 4, a powerful blend of Minghella’s tenacious performance and the character’s unnerving ingenuity. Alongside newcomers like Jim Dycker (Charlie Heaton), a financial journalist investigating Tender, and Haley Clay (Kiernan Shipka), Whit’s tough but pliable assistant, as well as expanded roles for Sweetpea (Miriam Petche) and Sir Henry (Episode 2 offers some of Harington’s best work to date), the new season never lets you feel like anyone is missing — which shocked me, given how much I grew to love Robert in particular.

Still, Season 4’s sly brilliance is in how it acknowledges the surreality of These Times™️ without getting lost in the process of fabricating their own version of it, forsaking the show’s verisimilitude, or lessening its demented entertainment value. Since a slow start in Season 1, the co-creators have excelled at pushing the envelope. They don’t save good ideas for later, they put them all out there every season. Anyone who’s survived to 2026 knows the upper class’ fictitious fantasies still carry real, wretched consequences for the rest of us, but Season 4 plays out those ongoing scenarios to the nth degree, while condensing them into an appreciable narrative arc.

At the center of which are characters who, for all their moral failures and unimaginable wealth, remain painfully human. Harper and Eric recognize the absent emotional responses expected from them by everyone else. They even want to feel them, some of the time, but they can’t — not while they’re irrevocably tied to a profession, to a system, that not only operates without mercy, but detaches people from their humanity. And guess what? That system is called capitalism, and you and I are part of it, too. Empathizing with Harper and Eric, Sweetpea and Yasmin, Whit and Haley, is only natural. But identifying with them when they’re at their lowest, when they’re staring into someone else’s eyes and begging to feel more than what they do, that’s when “Industry” holds the third rail in both hands, and you can’t help but be drawn in by its twisted charge.

“It’s really funny how honest communication can feel like a fucking exorcism,” Harper says in the premiere. Watching “Industry” isn’t far removed. You may not always like what you see, you may not always know what they’re saying, and you may not always like how you feel. But in the end, the season’s honest appraisal of their new world and our persisting one is so clear it’ll send you soaring.