Bullying, backstabbing and betrayal: Is Industry the new Succession?
By Debi Enker
The setting is a gleaming glass tower in London’s central business district, but it would be hard to find a darker workplace than the hellhole that is Pierpoint & Co. The fictional investment bank is the bleak and confronting base for the drama Industry (Binge, Foxtel Now), which is currently into its third season.
An enterprise perpetually in the throes of frantic activity, it’s the caustic and possibly vengeful creation of writer-producers Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, both escapees from the rough-and-tumble of the finance industry. And the company is like an urban jungle, riddled with substance abuse and staffed by people cracking under the stress of trying to survive. Down and Kay portray a toxic culture in which the urgency is unrelenting: there’s always a deal to be made, an investor to attract or appease, an IPO to navigate. The clock’s always ticking and the fear of failure is ever-present.
At Pierpoint, people dress in smart suits or silk shirts and pencil skirts, and treat each other horribly. Everyone is struggling to hold on to their jobs and claw their way up the ladder in a place where nothing is secure and everyone is expendable. Bullying, bluffing, backstabbing and betrayal are routine. Relationships are transactional. The way in which characters talk to each other can cut like a knife and the language is profane.
It would be hard to find a darker workplace: Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) and Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey) in Industry, season 3.Credit: Simon Ridgway
The first season of the series, which is mostly shot in Wales, opens with the arrival of a clutch of keen recruits. Leading the pack is the often-inscrutable Harper Stern (Myha’la Herrold), a black American expat who lies about her qualifications in order to secure a position. Alongside her are Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), a multilingual British-Lebanese heiress accustomed to a jetset lifestyle, and Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey), whose Oxbridge graduate appearance conceals humbler origins. In the pilot episode, an indication of the nature of the organisation that they’re entering comes when another of the new hires commits suicide in the toilets.
Industry is not a series inclined to subtlety. Everything is writ large: the brutal environment, the billion-dollar stakes, the excesses of the characters’ lives. As the series follows the recruits’ ups and downs – literally and figuratively, as there’s a lot of coke-snorting, boozing and sex – their brave new world is revealed as one that operates with a lot of jargon. It has its own acronym-filled language, which can be baffling to the uninitiated. But understanding precisely what’s going on isn’t really necessary, and not understanding isn’t prohibitive because what the show banks on is confecting an addictive sense of urgency. Viewers just need to recognise that something important is at stake, the deadline is imminent, and the characters are battling to defuse the latest threat, whatever the hell it is.
While all of that’s in play, issues of race and class are woven through the drama. Denizens of the English upper class are awful, although the ambassadors of new money aren’t any better. Everywhere, though, people like Harper and Robert are outsiders.
At the outset, the series effectively introduces its key characters and establishes a framework and tone. But, despite the frenetic activity at the trading desks, in bedrooms, boardrooms, mansions, swish restaurants, pubs and clubs, little has changed since. Industry is oddly static.
Early in the third season, Harper, sporting a radical haircut to signal a new chapter, is employed by a different company and separated from her mentor, sometime accomplice and sometime tormenter, Eric Tao (Ken Leung). Her bosses at FutureDawn are women, but the company is as much a nest of vipers as Pierpoint.
Nepo-baby Yasmin, who’s been playing an increasingly prominent role in the series, still suffers from impostor syndrome as she struggles to impress Eric and deals with fallout from a family scandal. Robert’s again rocked by a problematic personal relationship. And Eric, having briefly lost his mojo, is trying to pump himself up with mantras about male power while curtly dispensing declarations that are supposed to sound wise.
Robert (Lawtey) and Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington) in Industry, season 3.
As in the second season, there’s an unpredictable titan for the Pierpoint minions to manage. Then it was Jesse Bloom (Jay Duplass), a quixotic billionaire who made his fortune on the back of the misfortune of the pandemic. Now it’s high-profile addition Kit Harington (Game of Thrones’ Jon Snow) as a wealthy, well-born green-tech pioneer who’s navigating his company’s IPO and who the producers manage to have shirtless by the second episode. The creative team also appear to be having some juvenile fun with the character names: Harington is Sir Henry Muck, and a new staffer at Pierpoint is a sleek and gossipy blonde influencer called Sweetpea Golightly (Miriam Petche).
Initially made on a comparatively low budget and lacking big names in its cast, Industry started quietly, drawing a dedicated fan base but failing to set the TV world on fire. But things have changed and HBO needs a buzzier hit and, perhaps lacking other options, has turned to Industry. The budget now runs to luxury yachts, private jets and conferences in Gstaad. In the US, boosted by the kind of promotion that didn’t accompany the earlier seasons, the series has been programmed in the showcase Sunday night slot previously occupied by mega-hits such as Game of Thrones and Succession.
HBO is a formerly esteemed but currently embattled enterprise. For decades synonymous with prestige productions, it was famed as a powerhouse that went its own merry, impressively creative way, and viewers, acclaim and awards followed. But things have changed. In the wake of the writers’ strike, but also as a consequence of budget cuts following its absorption into Warner Bros. Discovery, the slate looks thin. It’s even selling off licences to prized series (such as Sex and the City to Netflix), a money-making move that would previously have been unthinkable.
And it’s desperately attempting to replicate past successes. Yet unlike some of the company’s highly regarded offerings – standouts such as The Sopranos and The Wire – early episodes in the new season of Industry suggest that it will be moving characters around like chess pieces and essentially doing what it’s done before. Just like the staff at Pierpoint worrying that they might not have what it takes to survive in that jungle, the indications are that Industry may not have what it needs to restore HBO’s tarnished reputation.
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