Industry airs Sunday nights on HBO and streams on HBO Max.
Those of us who got in on the ground floor with Industry have been saying this from the beginning: You gotta watch Industry. As its audience has grown from its early days being criminally underwatched, so too has the HBO series. The drama, created by former bankers Mickey Downs and Konrad Kay, has matured into a surefooted, full-throttled, and wincingly sex- and drug-fuelled account of power brokering that has seeped out from the trading floors of financial firms to fintech startup-land, the media, and government. Even though the scope of Season 4 is wider, the storytelling is at its most incisive and bloat-free, and the score is reliably as ‘80s synth-poppy as ever. Really, if you aren’t watching Industry by now, I’m imploring you: You gotta watch Industry.
After three seasons of following a freshman class at the investment banking firm Pierpoint and their often antagonistic seniors, Season 4 finds most everyone has moved on, relegating the company that was sold off to an Egyptian sovereign fund at the end of Season 3 to a footnote. Further unburdening itself from the Pierpoint walls works especially well as Industry’s characters find themselves in new stages of their lives and careers that could only have happened had they left. In this hard reset, they’ve graduated into new positions of power but must deal with the fallout from the choices they had made while they worked there. With Robert Spearing escaping to find a new life courting money for a medicinal mushroom startup in Silicon Valley (which sadly means no Harry Lawtley this season), Harper Stern (Myha’la) and Yasmin Hanani (Marisa Abela) now take center stage.
At the season’s outset, Harper finally gets to run a fund. She’s gone from a scrappy floor analyst with bold ideas that others largely balk at (until they end up raking in cash) to someone who’s now known for making daring gambles with her signature shorts. She’s dressing for the part with devastatingly well-tailored power suits and bespoke silver earring stacks. And yet after being tapped by the old moneyed benefactor Otto Mostyn (Roger Barclay), she still has friction between wanting to execute her bold vision and Mostyn’s racist intentions to flaunt her as the progressive face of the firm while changing nothing. It’s not long until she finds common ground with her old boss, Eric Tao (the fantastic Ken Leung), who’s been living aimlessly in a semi-forced retirement, his family life in shambles. Yasmin has married Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington) to pull her out of the looming embezzlement and assault charges left behind by her dead father. She’s protected from that shame publicly within the arms of British tabloid loyalty and doing her utmost hosting and managing seating charts of elite networking events. But her marriage is flailing, putting in an astronomical amount of emotional work gassing up an unappreciative Henry to pull him out of another hole of depression.
The two frenemies’ courses largely run parallel throughout the season, which means their shared screen time is more limited than past seasons but crackles even more with the tribulations – it’s a lot – they’ve swallowed this season. Both Myha’la and Abela turn in performances with fresh depth for their characters. Harper is still the icy Harper, freshly 30 and shredding a birthday card from her mother, but she’s no longer a lone wolf. As a people manager and business partner, she shows seemingly genuine interest in the wellbeing of those around her, letting in a new softness and vulnerability – as long as they’re helping her succeed. But ultimately she can’t give up saying the most devastatingly cruel thing as the last word in a confrontation.
Yasmin’s desperation to carve out a real sphere of influence for herself flips between public confidence and crowd-working extroversion to private insecurity that her life is being held together by sticks and glue. Harrington gives yet another great performance as the rich failson who has everything but can’t escape the curse of existential dread. Many of the best scenes of the season are between Harrington and Abela duking out their marital strife like coked-up renditions of That One Scene from Anatomy of a Fall. Overall, Industry is clear: Money and power beget nothing but access to money and power. Staving off the fear of losing all that is far more crucial than achieving even a sliver of true happiness because even if the characters did they would find another way to self destruct.
Though, again, there’s no Lawton (or Sarah Goldberg, sadly, since Harper jumped ship from Leviathan Alpha), the old guard, new additions, and expanded footprints make up for the losses. Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia), who blew up a cushy life through crippling gambling debts and is now scrounging at rock bottom, is that face of self-obliteration. Kiernan Shipka doesn’t hold back as Haley Clay, opening the season premiere in a club and getting far too intimate with Charlie Heaton’s finance blogger Jim Dycker. Shipka plays it with exactly the cutthroat confidence Industry requires. Miriam Petche’s Sweetpea Golightly, forever an all-time TV character name, gets more space to develop, highlighting yet another woman who Pierpoint mistreated as an idiot punchline can actually, of course, very well hold her own. My favorite new cast member is probably Ted Lasso’s Toheeb Jimoh as Kwabena Bannerman, the joke-cracking Normal Guy proxy the show needs in a sea of borderline sociopaths. Jimoh’s presence is especially needed to counterbalance a new one of those in the mix: Max Minghella’s Whitney Halberstram.
Halberstram is the CFO of the fintech startup Tender that’s attempting a rebrand into a vague one-stop banking app. He delivers prosaically cringe lines that sound like malapropisms from movies with such poise and arrogance that immediately makes him suspicious, especially as a counterpoint to Kal Penn’s straight-shooting Tender CEO Jonah Atterbury. It doesn’t take long to figure out that’s exactly the point – “Why does everything from your life sound like a bad novel?” Henry asks in a later episode, having been sucked into his orbit via Yasmin and the trigger of the Online Safety Bill – and begets something far more chillingly sinister about his motives.
If shows like Succession and Veep are about how stupid rooms of power can be, Industry is about the evils within these same spaces. That’s not to say that Industry isn’t often still laugh-out-loud funny. It’s just that the approach is so vastly different. Kay, Downs, and the writing team let their characters be unabashedly awful people. In contrast, the viewers, as it often is in reality, are the ones reeling from their beliefs and left holding the bag of shit. Industry is not a show for everyone. It’s overwhelmingly cynical and sometimes difficult to watch, not just because of the ethical void but because almost no one seems to be able to make a decision that positively benefits them, or society, beyond padding their own bank accounts. If there’s anything that detracts from the show’s effectiveness it’s that it kind of can’t afford to be subtle. But the stress of it all, compounded by dense and fast-moving dialogue, is also what makes it so compelling.
In the era of TV seasons with single-digit episode counts, Industry has used up every scrap of its eight episodes with incredible finesse. Several episodes still play around with form and classic tropes: There’s a ghost story, the most stressful “Dear John” you’ll ever see, a wild international goose chase hunting down the truth behind Tender. And then there are the wild juxtapositions, like the unforgettable cut to Yasmin slurping (and burping) down an oyster right as she’s going down on another woman. Season 4 is both bigger – with more insight into the web of politics and business, and journalism – and somehow tighter at the same time. Of course, the show is still laden with plenty of financial jargon, but by and large what’s at stake at the core of the story is far more intelligible for laypeople and dummies like me. Even with HBO’s exciting 2026 slate of solid series – even right now, we’ve got Season 2 of The Pitt and the Game of Thrones prequel spin-off A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms – Season 4 positions Industry to jockey for the top of the pile.
