Last month, the third season of HBO’s Industry reached its finale. The show self-describes as “an insider’s view of the black box of high finance by following a group of young bankers as they forge their identities within the pressure cooker environment and  sex and drug-fueled blitz of international bank Pierpoint & Co’s London Office”. Despite show runners tying up several of the season’s loose ends – Rishi’s penchant for playing fast and loose leads to his wife’s murder, Yasmin and Henry enter into a marriage of convenience after Rob buying a scratch card gives her the ick and Eric is collateral in the Al-Mir’aj merger – we ultimately feel as conflicted and complicated about finance as we did at the series’ start, albeit conflicted and complicated in new ways. With the third season at its end and a fourth season greenlit, it seems a good time to take stock, so to speak, and ask how Industry manages to feel ‘new’ and particularly appealing amidst a sea of other corporate dramas.  

Like its Apple TV counterpart – Ben Stiller’s Severance – Industry explores the great societal revaluation of work and office culture which only intensified post pandemic. Beyond these dealings with the Zeitgeist however, Industry’s ultimate triumph is its portrayal of the ethics of capitalism itself. The power of the market to transform rapidly, twist into new, exciting, and terrifying forms, whilst also staying the same, preserving the underlying systems and structures which keep those at the top where they are. In a world which promises and delivers paradigm-shifting change every day, Industry offers a prescient and discomforting reminder that while everything is changing, it isn’t really. The illusion of change is capitalism’s other, more shadowy, currency. Industry revels in how the market- and the people and politics it governs- offer a surface level conversion which only seeks to conceal a doubling down, a reinforcing of old ideas and habits. The rich, despite their glaring misgivings, just get richer.

Critics have hailed Industry as the spiritual successor to corporate culture dramas. For its workplace setting, it has been compared to Billions and Mad Men; for its Leftist satire it has been likened to White Lotus and Succession. It even occupied the same Sunday night slot as the latter – American TV’s most coveted hour. Ostensibly, Industry departs from Succession’s depiction of dynastic wealth. Where Jesse Armstrong’s imagined media and entertainment conglomerate, Waystar RoyCo, is evocative of the Gilded Age’s patrimonial giants of industry, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay’s fictional investment bank, Pierpoint & Co, boasts alleged meritocracy. “I think mediocrity is too well hidden by parents who hire private tutors. I am here on my own”, Harper Stern confidently delivers during her interview in the pilot episode, “I think this is the closest thing to a meritocracy there is and I only ever want to be judged on the strength of my abilities”. Where Waystar RoyCo’s hiring process is nepotistic to the nth degree; prospective Pierpoint & Co employees must endure interviews, performance assessments and RIFs (alongside surviving less PC initiations) before landing a full time position. “Just make yourselves indispensable” is the recommendation made by the bank’s President in the first episode. Although, as Charles Hanani’s unsavoury reproach of his daughter in Season Two reveals, meritocracy will always be runner up to nepotism. “Maybe ask yourself how someone with such average grades from such an average university ended up in Pierpoint on a desk you didn’t apply to”, he chides his daughter. Ultimately, Waystar RoyCo and Pierpoint & Co are more similar than they are different – they both do the bidding of the highest bidder. 

Within that same episode, however, Pierpoint & Co’s facade of fairness and safeguarding is revealed to be just that – a facade. After a graduate dies from a heart attack induced by stimulants and overworking, Pierpoint & Co issues an unemotional statement. “Hari’s death is an unexpected tragedy. The next twenty four hours and the way we respond to this are defining. Do not speak to the press. I’d rather you do not speak to anyone outside of the office”. It is more PR strategy than eulogy. The response bears a striking resemblance to Logan Roy’s death in Episode Three, Season Four of Succession. The patriarch’s body is still warm while his advisors compose the death announcement, inches from his corpse. Succession and Industry’s corporate cultures are shown to be largely the same, yet in Industry, this damning depiction of capitalism’s indifference to human life takes place in the pilot, not the show’s fourth season. It makes no equivocations about capitalism’s inherent callousness. In Industry, apathy is a feature of finance, not a bug. 

At the same time, Industry concedes to Western capitalism’s masochistic allure. This corporate world is at once an object of romance and repulsion, a dichotomy embedded in the series by composer Nathan Micay’s score. In Season One, Micay was loyal to synth arpeggios, whose euphoric effect matched the newcomers’ initial enthusiasm. Drums feature more heavily as the glamour of Pierpoint & Co begins to fade, but Micay’s heady, electronic sound still dominates. In Season Two, mesmeric synths play as Harper desperately convinces Jesse Bloom to buy the Rican IPO position. The same again when Rishi’s overzealous risk makes a remarkable $18 million profit in ‘White Mischief’. There’s a seductive magnetism to the traders’ high risk, high reward work: greed is good at Pierpoint & Co. Micay’s score positions these do-or-die moments as the most nirvanic for both character and viewer. In a show saturated with substance abuse, Industry’s greatest highs are from the relentless pursuit of capital. 

Just as Industry’s characters are addicted to making money, we are addicted to watching them do it. Admitting to this fascination several years ago might have occasioned an onslaught of allegations –  gauche, a sell out, neoliberal – but it appears that wealth and finance are, once again, aspirational. The “quiet luxury” trend and popularity of think pieces like Kate Lloyd’s ‘“Trust Fund, 6’5, Blue Eyes” or Otherwise, Men in Finance Are Apparently Hot Again” and Christine Emba’s ‘Who Wants a ‘Man in Finance?’ are evidence of our re-emboldened attraction to wealth. Ironically, the same soullessness that was interrogated in the late 80s and 90s in American Psycho, Fight Club and Wall Street is now desirable. If going commercial is what it takes to have financial stability, then many Gen Z-ers are willing to oblige. Yet Industry refuses to satisfy an insatiable appetite for wealth porn. In actuality, the show seems to suggest that this appetite is wholly unattainable and underwhelming. All the six figure bonuses and corporate-sponsored shoots in the world cannot reconcile the fact that Pierpoint & Co is a demoralising, depressing place to work. 

In this way it’s unsurprising how en vogue Industry is among anti-capitalists. Those typically averse to any workplace that mandates Patagonia gilets and Patek Philippes suspend their preconceived judgements and comprise a sizable percentage of the series’ fans. Perhaps cynically, however, Industry doesn’t give life to the idea that a better alternative exists. Fixing a broken system from the inside is shown to be a myth. The reformist hopefuls – chiefly Daria Greenock and Venetia Berens – are incongruent with Pierpoint’s direction. Their consciences are hindrances, not assets, and they ultimately leave the company. Meanwhile Harper, whom many mistook as a potential agent for good, sees out Season Three by propositioning the corrupt Otto Mostyn with an all-shorts fund that would operate through “a combination of forensic accounting and corporate espionage”. 

Nor does Industry seem to buy into the concept of socially conscious capitalism. Season Three’s Lumi plotline taps into ESG and green energy – topics at the top of today’s financial agenda. Given that at the end of 2023, there were almost $3 trillion in assets in ESG and sustainability-labelled funds, Pierpoint’s venture is credible. Amidst the Lumi IPO, terms like “impact investing”, “democratisation of energy” and “ethical funds” are thrown around like virtue signalling buzzwords, with little regard for their definitions. Harper describes ESGs as “a utopian opiate for morons who believe in a better world” which, although incredibly misanthropic, isn’t a totally off base reading of FutureDawn Partners. Industry interprets ESGs as more akin to a marketing strategy than a set of guiding principles – altruism is never preferred unless it can be monetised. 

Ultimately – as Ken Leung is wont to remind us – Pierpoint is only the sum of its employees. And these ‘Pierpoint people’ similarly embody the capitalist phenomenon that change is encouraged insofar that it doesn’t disturb core tenets of profit and ownership. At the show’s beginning, Kenny Kilbane was a misogynistic, inappropriate supervisor that equal parts lusted after and resented Yasmin for having zero interest in him. He belittled her at every turn and leaned on his alcohol problems as a crutch. At the start of this season we are introduced to a new Kenny. He is now in ‘the program’ and replete with such smarmy platitudes as ‘The wife said she’ll do chicken à la Eric this week if you wanna drop by and celebrate.’ It’s a jarring turn for his colleagues and for viewers. Kenny apologises to Yasmin for his behaviour and offers his sober, and sobering, guidance to an increasingly wiry Eric. But the beauty of Kenny’s transformation is that it isn’t a transformation at all. In Season One he used his superiority to belittle and degrade those below him, platforming himself as ‘bigger than’ and looking down on those under his supervision. In Season Three he has only changed the platform, once more using his alcohol issues, his sobriety, to belittle and degrade those he still sees as beneath him. In a similar vein, Yasmin and Rob’s ‘will they won’t they’ relationship finally plays out in a touching episode on the East coast. Seeming at last to draw together, their relationship is cut short. A pairing that promised to transcend the show’s rigid class structures and hierarchies gives way to those same structures as Yasmin tactically engages herself to the aptly named Sir Henry Muck, using his media connections to dispel an incoming smear campaign. Harper too continues to espouse and practise a cut-throat philosophy of malpractice and betrayal and in doing so is perhaps the character most clearly aligned with the brutality of corporate capitalism itself. Industry’s masterstroke is in setting up characters whose changes never betray their fundamental natures; their actions never fail to shock and surprise whilst also delivering clear reinforcements of their destructive patterns of behaviour. Their actions mirror the deceitful world of finance in which they operate, promising change and delivering sameness.

This theme of moving forward whilst abiding by core principles bears an important warning for the show’s creators heading into the fourth season. In lots of ways, the season three finale offered a cathartic close to much of the show’s cast. However, its success may have condemned it to draw on needlessly. In a much maligned 1977 episode of Happy Days, Henri Winkler’s ‘Fonz’ jumps over a live shark on water skis. The moment marked a pivot in the show, a point at which the core content had been exhausted and new discordant ideas relying on exaggeration took the lead. Since then, the phrase ‘jumping the shark’ has become idiomatic for this moment of overextension, upping the stakes too many times without the drama and writing to back it up. It’s the kind of maximalist television making which infected the most recent season of Peaky Blinders, with Tommy Shelby – now the most successful mafioso in the world – making direct calls to Winston Churchill and dodging assassination attempts from Hitler himself. 

Industry’s third season similarly saw it extend beyond the realm of private finance and into the murky underworld of politics and media which puppeteer global affairs. As its fourth season looms, the show now runs the risk of making itself too big to be believable, of betraying that fundamental sameness which underpins its core message about capitalism itself. Sure enough though, Industry will persist in its negotiation with finance’s most existential credo – can capitalism and its players deliver good or are they eternally, inherently damned?