The coolest thing I am able to say at the kind of parties where people discuss TV is: “I’ve been an Industry guy since the first episode”. Looking back at that pilot, first broadcast in 2020, it feels far away and distant now in the shadow of season three’s outrageously huge finale: five baby-chick graduates all trying their best in their entry-level job interviews, the credits blazing with the searing but baffling-in-hindsight “Directed by: Lena Dunham”, most of the scenes actually being in the office. Go back and watch that episode now, I say at parties that I am fully aware I am being boring at, and it feels like a completely different show – I don’t think there was a single scene in season three when Harper looked at a computer, for instance – but because of how fast and how smartly Industry has evolved, that change doesn’t feel jarring. It started good and has only gotten better and bigger. With HBO renewing for season four before Kit Harington had even got peed on in season three, it can only get more daring and enormous.
This is the season that everyone has caught up with my visionary zeal for the show, and it has been reflected (a sad admission) in my Reddit homepage algorithm. Industry has a fanbase now, a vociferous one, one that makes Yasmin and Rob edits and speculates about what moves Harper will make next and asks questions like, “Quick one, struggling to understand the show: what’s money?”. This is the year Industry has suffered from (but not bowed under the weight of) Succession comparisons, which for my money were slightly more apt in season two than now, seeing as it has evolved so completely into its own thing. But you can squint and see where the line between them might be drawn: like Succession, Industry is on HBO; like Succession, Industry paints ghoulish characters in vivid new colours (this year’s addition of Harington’s Henry Muck was a particularly interesting new texture of eco-when-it-suits-him posh boy: knows exactly what to say in gilded rooms and how to shake hands with tycoons but has a fragile chip in his ego that will never really be therapied away); like Succession, Industry has people whose thirst for success has bled into every aspect of their lives; like Succession, Industry has an incredible sideline in audacious I-can’t-believe-they-typed-that-and-I-can’t-believe-HBO-allowed-it-and-I-can’t-believe-they-convinced-an-actor-to-say-it! dialogue. I’m not allowed to repeat any of my favourite lines but search for the mouthwash comment from the fantastic Rishi-centred episode White Mischief, and you’ll see what I mean.
It’s easy to look at Industry in broad strokes via the headlines it generates: the Yas and Henry piss scene, the “I am a man and I am relentless!” sequence, the exquisite episode seven lift betrayal, the Rishi’s wife bit in the finale. And they are good. But so much of what I love about the show is beneath those layers: how happily the writers, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, paint themselves into corners at the end of each season then paint themselves right back out of them at the start of the next one; the way they can drop a new character in and they immediately start stealing scenes left, right and centre (if the season four de-cornering looks like “entire spin-off season focused on Miriam Petche’s Sweetpea”, I am fine with that); the cinematography and literary references dropped through every episode (there’s a completely unnecessary Denis Johnson namecheck in the finale that I obviously loved); episode seven, Down and Kay’s directorial debut, is spent snatching glances at meetings through windows, overhearing things in corridors, the whole thing feels like you’re being naughty just by knowing it. I don’t really know what money is in a macro sense or how stocks work or, once numbers get too high, what that means. But I love watching these little ghouls bend their entire lives around trying to get at some of it.
There are a lot of great shows on this list, but Industry is the most exciting right now: it feels like it is in the middle of something and flexing with it, and has a racing heartbeat and the teeth-in-your-neck ambition to spend the next two seasons becoming one of the all-time TV greats. Pair that with a phenomenal young cast (Harry Lawtey! Marisa Abela! Myha’la! Cast them in everything!) plus Ken Leung on the form of his life and we’re witnessing something very special. I know you’ve turned the music off and people are starting to leave. I know I’ve ruined the vibe. But I have to tell people how good Industry is! I have to!