Many dramas – especially good ones – don’t become major hits overnight. Think of the likes of Game of Thrones or Succession, which needed time to warm up, and some jaw-dropper episodes (namely the Red Wedding and Kendall bumping off a waiter, respectively) to really get going. Industry is one such show – the slow-burn HBO/BBC series that firmly hit its stride in season three. Good news: season four is even better, truly top-tier television that’s surely destined for end-of-year lists, a serious feat when we’re barely a week into January.
Industry is, of course, the one about young investment bankers, the drama that initially drew comparisons with This Life, and the show where our fresh-faced grads were as likely to be hooking up with one another as they were to be stabbing each other in the back. Fast forward to season four and it’s feeling decidedly more dark and debauched, while still held together with pitch-perfect dialogue. Kiernan Shipka – here, vastly closer to Don Draper than to his daughter, Sally, whom she played in Mad Men – Max Minghella, Kal Penn and Charlie Heaton are among the big names who have joined the cast this time around. They meld seamlessly with our existing leads – the mononymous Myha’la, Marisa Abela, Kit Harington – to make something more twisted and sophisticated than viewers may be expecting. Props, too, for Toheeb Jimoh of Ted Lasso for integrating flawlessly; his jaunt over the Atlantic with Miriam Petche as Sweetpea is a treat in particular.
As per, Industry smartly and gamely rips from the headlines: much of season four revolves around a payment provider, Tender, on the verge of becoming a bank. It is, naturally, keen to cut ties with an OnlyFans-esque platform, Siren, as a new online safety bill is mooted in the UK. Cue financial journalist James (Heaton), partying in a club with Tender employee Hayley (Shipka), in a strobe-y scene that hurt my eyes, but which was key to kickstarting the devious game of cat and mouse that followed. Harper (Myha’la) continues to convey so much with just the harried twitch of her jaw as she chews her gum. Having wormed her way out of innumerable seemingly career-ending situations, she’s now running a fund specialising in short-selling, on behalf of financier Otto Mostyn, who – like many of the characters this season – proves himself to be a power-hungry piece of work, with a timely hatred of “woke” culture.
Harper is fuming about being hamstrung at work by Mostyn as she tries to make a buck on Tender, leading to the first great line of the series, after she bemoans being seen as an angry Black woman (her on-off mentor, Eric (Ken Leung), replies: “you ARE an angry Black woman!”) Ex-bankers Mickey Down and Konrad Kay – the double act who write Industry and, this time around, direct many of the episodes – are often credited for their financial expertise. They should also be commended for how well they observe and critique race, class, desire and sexuality, being unafraid to say the unsayable in the pursuit not only of dark humour (and potential sextortion plots) but also of reality. (They remain undefeated at funny background gags and Easter eggs, too, among them the different Enya songs that play at pivotal moments this series.)
There is a stark realness to much of season four. Heaton’s character does potentially perilous investigative work, lest “Paddy Radden Keefe” – that’s the New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe, to the rest of us – get there first. Henry (a career-best Kit Harington) and Yasmin (Marisa Abela) wrangle with the hardships of married life, as Henry tries to rebuild his career after the collapse of his green energy company, Lumi. As for Yasmin, it doesn’t feel like an exaggeration to say that her arc seems to have been inspired by Ghislaine Maxwell this time around. Death, too, hangs in the air at every turn, blatantly foreshadowed and meticulously hinted at, not least around a troubled, post-Priory Rishi (Sagar Radia). All this, and Industry also retains its stylish core – not least when Yasmin is allowed to go wild in the dressing-up box as Marie Antoinette for Henry’s 40th.
Much of Industry remains centred on “rich people problems”, and things that may – in the grand scheme of things – feel trivial. But in digging deeper than it has previously dared into the tortured psyches of its leads, it manages to be more disquieting and more relatable than ever. You might notice that the soundtrack leans 80s this time around, and it doesn’t seem to be an accident: at its core, this series finds a societal rot that has been there for a long time, and draws out all of its horrors anew.
• Industry airs on BBC One on 12 January and will be on iPlayer. In the US it airs on HBO on 11 January. In Australia it will air on Binge.
