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There’s a lot of talk about narrative and messaging in Season 4 of HBO’s “Industry.” “In America, your story begins when you start telling it,” proclaims one aspiring titan of finance. “Listeners tune in to the belief of the teller,” a nervous CEO is told mid-pep talk. “We don’t need proof,” a trader says of their most audacious play yet, “because we finally have a good story to tell.”
Within “Industry,” such statements are used to interrogate the line between masters of the universe who bend fate to their will and outright frauds. Antiheroine Harper Stern (Myha’la) is arguably the latter, having parlayed a fake college transcript into a position atop her very own fund. But Harper may have met her match, or at least a mirror, in Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella), another American who’s attempting to reinvent themselves in London’s money market. Whitney is the co-founder and CFO of Tender, a payment processor known for supporting gray-market industries like gambling and pornography that’s trying to evolve into a legitimate bank. Harper is running a shorts-only operation, betting against companies she sees as overvalued and (hopefully) making money in the process. When Harper sets her sights on Tender, she ignites a war that gives the season its heart-pounding momentum.
Zoom out, however, and you can see why “Industry” creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay are so concerned with external perception. At the end of Season 3, the former Oxford classmates — whose brief stints in banking inspired the show — effectively burned their initial setup to the ground. “Industry” began with a quartet of new graduates, including Harper and pampered publishing heiress Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), getting hired as grunt-work analysts at the fictional Pierpoint & Co. Slowly and then all at once, this shared setting started to fracture. Harper got fired for the aforementioned deception. Ensemble members like David Jonsson and Harry Lawtey left to pursue other opportunities, and thus their characters did as well. Yasmin exited finance altogether, embracing her destiny as the socialite bride-to-be of blue-blooded aristocrat Henry Muck (Kit Harington). And to cap it all off, Pierpoint itself collapsed after an ill-advised pivot into so-called ethical investing. The trading floor that saw so much of the series’s action is no longer in operation.
Down and Kay could’ve called it right there, leaving “Industry” a tight, compressed yarn about the compromises of early adulthood. Instead, they opted to forge ahead, in part because Season 3 was the first to be a bona fide hit rather than a cult favorite of critics like myself. The downfall of Pierpoint has afforded the pair, who direct half of the new season in addition to showrunning, that most exciting and terrifying of prospects: a blank slate. The resulting vacuum creates the potential for wildly divergent paths in the meta arc of the show. One is that “Industry” rises from the ashes to become bigger and more ambitious than ever, joining the upper tier of HBO’s roster. The other is that, without its distinct angle and grounding ballast, “Industry” tips over into grandiosity, never quite establishing a sound basis for moving past such a natural endpoint.
Over eight episodes, Season 4 hews much closer to the latter end of this spectrum than the former. The transition is not, nor would it likely ever be, seamless; about once an episode, especially the early ones, there’s a moment that made me worry “Industry” had jumped the shark into pure provocation. But as the Tender plot — which Down and Kay have said was inspired by “Michael Clayton,” an influence that grows increasingly more apparent — gets going, the season tightens and accelerates. And “Industry” continues to drill down on Harper and Yasmin’s relationship, a dynamic Season 3 identified as the heart of the show by elevating Abela to effective co-lead. She and Myha’la are better than ever in Season 4 as both their characters start to understand their seeming happy endings didn’t afford them as much freedom as they thought.
It’s true that the loss of a bottom-up perspective makes “Industry” less distinct on the page from analogs like “Succession” or “Billions.” In fact, “Industry” positively revels in its characters’ newfound status; the premiere sees a comfortably retired Eric Tao (Ken Leung) share a golf course with a distant, red-capped figure we’re meant to understand is Donald J. Trump, while Harper goes to visit her benefactor Otto Mostyn (Roger Barclay) in Parliament, where he’s recently joined the House of Lords. Once upwardly mobile strivers, these people are now firmly ensconced in the halls of power — an ideal opportunity for them to reenact the abuses they used to suffer from above.
That’s the real difference-maker: The audience didn’t meet Harper and Yasmin at the top. We know exactly what it’s taken and all they’ve endured to get where they are, from the strong implication that Yasmin’s father sexually abused her to Harper’s estrangement from her mother and twin brother. So when Harper realizes Otto’s backing comes with more strings than he’d led her to believe, or Yasmin has to do the heavy lifting when Henry’s loss of a safe parliamentary seat sends him into a tailspin of depression, we feel their disappointments as acutely as their triumphs. They’re the bridge that takes “Industry” from Pierpoint into its wider, if not necessarily brighter, future.
This transition nonetheless necessitates an infusion of new blood, especially from outside the world of finance. At Tender, Whitney clashes with his more hedonistic co-founder Jonah (Kal Penn) and bosses around his assistant Haley (Kiernan Shipka). Harper is tipped off to Tender’s shady dealings by reporter Jim Dycker (Charlie Heaton), widening a foothold in the world of journalism previously established by Henry’s tabloid baron uncle Alexander (Andrew Havill). Henry’s election defeat reflects the real-life Labour wave of 2024, introducing fresh faces like business minister Lisa (Chloe Pirrie) and MP Jenny (Amy James-Kelly) for Tender to lobby as it navigates regulatory hurdles. What was once a show about business is now a cross-section of the overlapping institutions that make up the status quo, and how much disruptors like Harper and Whitney can — or can’t — change them.
Alumni of shows like “Mad Men,” “Stranger Things” and “Dept. Q” are a sign of “Industry’s” increased sway, though none ever threaten to steal the show from Harper and Yasmin’s electric, resentment-laden frenmity. (Yasmin may no longer have anything as tawdry as “a job,” but her new role as a behind-the-scenes connector of the rich and influential keeps her in Harper’s orbit.) But for those who stick around, a standout can work their way into the show’s core with surprising speed. It can be hard to remember Sweetpea Golightly (Miriam Petche), the Pierpoint intern who paid her way through university with OnlyFans nudes, was introduced only last season. Now doing research for Harper, whose adamant defense of Sweetpea’s erstwhile gig reveals a soft side to the ruthless Machiavellian, she’s by far the easiest ensemble member to root for. Though with this crowd, that’s not a high bar.
The widening scope makes it more difficult for “Industry” to maintain a consistent baseline. Often, Down and Kay play this to their advantage; a West African interlude quite literally takes the show to new places, while a spotlight on Yasmin’s domestic disappointment swaps Nathan Micay’s electronic score for “Barry Lyndon”-like strings. At other times, the sex and drugs that have been part of the “Industry” DNA from the start begin to feel more discordant. The show continues to up the ante of everyone’s after-hours activities, even as they mature and have more to lose. Keeping everyone together, or even on the same continent, requires some mild contortions: a move to New York Harper floated in the Season 3 finale clearly did not come to pass, while a diminished Rishi (Sagar Radia) continues to hang around even after his life has completely collapsed.
But stepping back to consider the sheer difficulty of what “Industry” is attempting puts these growing pains in perspective. Season 3 was the culmination of several years of pent-up tension. Season 4 is building something, if not entirely new, then without much of the scaffolding that once gave “Industry” a consistent structure. It’s an effort so commendable in principle and enjoyable in practice that a little leeway is the least “Industry” can ask. And by moving this far beyond Pierpoint, the show has proven it can, and should, keep going further still.
“Industry” Season 4 will premiere on HBO and HBO Max on Jan. 11 at 9 p.m. ET, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Sundays.
English (US) ·