The fact that we’re basically on the cusp of global economic armageddon makes this perplexingly thrilling show even more edge-of-your-seat. Industry — the Gen Z financial drama, set in a fictional investment bank in The City — takes us right to the beating heart of British capitalism. And while the characters are fictional (and the drugs and sex probably a bit overstated) the financial situations that Harper, Yasmin et al find themselves in are, if not real, then real-adjacent.
Take, for instance, Jesse Bloom, a new character for season two played by Jay Duplass. He’s a high profile American investor who, we’re told, made billions during Covid after giving an interview to CNBC predicting a crash in the market, which caused stock prices to fall. He bought the stocks up cheap during the slump and made a fortune. It’s a story so close to that of a real-life hedge fund manager that HBO’s lawyer had the writers tweak the script. By all accounts, a global recession is looming, and if there’s any show that’ll give us an insight into why, it’s this one.
Still, I say ‘perplexingly thrilling’ because there are vast swathes of Industry that I simply do not understand. And I’m not talking the odd throwaway line here or there —I mean whole scenes, in which I suspect something pivotal is happening but can’t say what, why or to whom. The financial jargon is very true to life, I’m told, but ultimately it’s impenetrable to plebs like me, who’ve never spent time on a trading floor. “Half a yard, done, four cents!” etc etc. It feels a bit like watching Squid Game without the subtitles — given the panic on each character’s face, someone’s clearly about to suffer… but who? And why?
Nevertheless, it’s a testament to the strength of the storytelling, that despite this sizeable hurdle, season two is still genuinely thrilling to television. Set a year after the ending of season one, refreshingly the show doesn’t shy away from the fact that we’ve all just lived through a pandemic — and each character is grappling with what that means for them. Harper (played with compelling restraint by Myha’la Herrold) is living in a hotel, Yasmin (a mesmerising Marisa Abela) has a drug problem and Rob (Harry Lawtey, althogether more likeable this time around) is sober (but for how long?) — from these starting points, the narrative of greed and consequence unravels.
At its heart, Industry is an exploration of power in its many guises: money and sex, most obviously — but also class, and privilege. My favourite scene of the whole show is when publishing heiress-turned-FX trader Yasmin is getting ready for work — her hedge fund manager paramour (he’s in charge of her family’s money, natch), is reclining on the bed in his pants flicking through a copy of Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class. “This Owen Jones is very readable for a socialist,” drawls the hedgie. It’s a neat, funny, wry observation about the ‘us and them’ attitude of most bankers.
This season we learn more about the family set-ups that spawned this clutch of money-hungry, cocaine-sniffing, power-mad young bankers. It doesn’t necessarily make you like them more — or excuse their bad behaviour — but the joy of the show is that it resists any easy good/bad binaries.
Industry has been likened to many greats — Sopranos and Succession among them — and it is a great show, although, I suspect that much like those others, it’ll take another few seasons to really explore the moral rabbit hole that the premise throws up. No bad thing, I’m excited to see how it matures.
